Topic: Martin Armstrong Discussion - page 294. (Read 647062 times)

As previously stated by Vokain, a very relevant question is:
Quote "Looking back, was it better or worse to tie your time and money with Armstrong?"   The answer for me personally is that financially it was worth the effort.

Looking forward I would add:

Does anybody here believe that we are not heading into a very serious economic situation sometime in the fairly near future?

Does anybody here not believe that huge economies such as Japan and particularly Europe are in very serious and more imminent trouble and are likely to crash before the US does?

Does anybody here not believe that, if the above statement is true, much of the big money fleeing Europe, Japan etc will end up moving into the US?

Does anybody here believe that it is not in their best interests to try to protect themselves by following where the big money is going and/or getting some of their investments off the grid etc?

The above questions, I believe, reflect some of the very basics of what MA is talking about. I am sure he is not the only one stating these things but he has been pretty consistent about it over quite a long period of time. His shorter term timing (at least as stated in his blog) isn't necessarily reliable enough to risk your hard earned money on. His main overall views, longer term trends etc, I would humbly suggest, are worth paying serious attention to though. Take what he offers and make the best use of it, is my approach.

Fred

You can't understand his public claims, because the thought process of his model (which is very complex and has overlapping cycles) is spread out over numerous blog posts and public writings. When you take some statement out-of-context of the understanding of the entire holistic set of writings, then you are making false accusations because you don't understand what he has actually said holistically. Thus if you don't buy his services where you can get precise assistance from the model on your specific trading objectives, then you are just blowing farts in the wind with your erroneous "criticism" (more like making yourself look like the fool that you are).

Continue to enjoy wasting your fucking time. I don't know who wastes their time other than someone who is paid to do it, an idiot, an addict, or because it is a form of fun/entertainment (cure for boredom and inability to find something more interesting to do). So you decide which applies to yourself.


Why not head over to the Altcoin forum and try to convince fools to stop gambling. You could not do it in a million years. Since when it is YOUR job to worry about how other people evaluate the performance they get from speculating.

Matthew 7  applies. Look first at the plank in your own eye, before worrying about the speck of dust in someone else's eye.


If all Armstrong is selling is that some people think they have gained knowledge, then it is no other person's duty to tell everyone else that what they perceive to have gained in return for reading Armstrong (for free!) is useless.

Note I have made successful financial trades based only on reading his blog. I've been selling out of silver, Bitcoin, and Philippines pesos into dollars every since 2011 for silver (and in fact I publicly predicted the top precisely many months before it happened so Armstrong just confirmed for me!), 2013 top for Bitcoin, and since 2014/5 for the peso. This has been an extremely correct trade! But as an example of why you fools are clueless, that correct trade doesn't count the speculation trades that could have been made on the shorter-term moves of BTC in its rollercoaster gyrations along the way down from $1000 (although I did correctly predict most of those too based on mania sentiment). So this is why you can't take his blog posts out-of-context, because the longer-term cycles are not the same as the shorter-term cycles, plus cycles from different asset classes and phenomenon interact.

Armstrong was the first one to shock everyone by predicting the dollar would rise in the coming global economic contagion (post 2015.75). All the delusional goldbug anal-lists were predicting hyperinflation and a dollar decline as China took over, etc...

Also before when I was reading only his public writings, I didn't know the predicted < $1000 low for gold wasn't until March 2016 (which someone shared with me from his paid gold report) and thus I made some wrong decisions about the potential low for BTC being at the 2015.75 turn date this past September. So having access to the paid reports is essential. That coming low does not change the long-term forecast for a secular bull market peak of $2500 - $6000 ($12,000 being the maximum possible chart projection but won't happen except in some very rare circumstances).

Regarding MA's "Advice For Europeans" today http://www.armstrongeconomics.com/archives/date/2016/01

"... you should open an account in the United States as your hedge against European banking madness. Europeans can still open accounts in the USA, but Americans cannot open accounts in Europe. This should be the best bet until 2020. Switzerland still has approved bail-ins. Canada is not altogether great either. In Britain, the currency is in a bear market and Cameron has lost his mind. So the best bet, for now, is a U.S. bank account until the cycle reverses probably as we near 2020..."

What got me scratching my head was his recommendation for Europeans to open an account in an American bank, stating it was "the best best bet as we near 2020".

In this post from the start of the month: "2017: The Year from Political Hell" http://www.armstrongeconomics.com/archives/41318 he says: "...In the USA, this is when everything goes negative, and that is the government’s own budget. So this time, the public will start to hear more about the budget crisis we face. This is also why the G20 will start to track all money movement...";"...The sum of all our worst fears is coming. You will know it by its number – 2017".

I can't see from those remarks why any of us would want to hold a sizeable sum in any bank during the next couple of years and beyond, whether it be in Europe OR America; the latter supposedly going tits up towards the end of 2017.

1. You don't need to buy MA's garbage in order to criticize his public claims. He's made predictions publicly in interviews and most of them have been false.
2. Just because you criticize someone doesn't make you a "paid disinformation agent."

I'm glad to hear your time was well spent. I hope the paid subscribers fare similarly.

vokain, good seeing you back in the game again.

For me (as mentioned somewhere above), I really do not know Armstrong's actual track record re making accurate predictions.  It may very well be true that Armstrong's paid subscribers get the better material (better trading calls) as TPTB suggests.  I have only his blog as info, and as sloanf mentioned, I have NOT done any fact-checking.

Nor have I based any trades on his public blog.

Still, for me Armstrong reads history and current events in a manner where I learn.  So, for me the time spent reading Armstrong has been very positive.

Looking back, was it better or worse to tie your time and money with Armstrong?

it is you who doesnt understand. I welcome both sides of the argument... your god may be a false prophet.

Stop spamming the thread. Armstrong doesn't have to prove anything to you. You are not paying for his services. Thus you have no official data from him to accuse him with. His public writings and blogs are not official trading data from his company. End of story.

Your speculation about his trading data is ambiguous because he never promised any trading accuracy to anyone who doesn't buy his trading data. The public writings are not his official data. There is no way he can communicate the complexity of his dynamic models in static written form. His trading models are meant to be used in real-time by savvy traders, not by idiots who think they can extract his model by reading hastily written blog posts. You are completely misinterpreting the intent of the information he puts out for free. It is not for trading. It is only broad stroked informational.

Continue ranting and it is clear you are a paid disinformation agent.

It’s not me who should prove whether the model exists or not, ok. It’s MA who should prove it to everybody because he makes claims and sell his stuff at exorbitant prices based on those claims. The same goes with the data and everything else. Based on the facts available in public assess I made a conclusion that he does not have the super-computer, nor capital flow model, nor data (at least not in the form he claims) and shared this conclusion with you. If you don’t agree, then bring facts that prove the opposite. Otherwise, it’s just your biased view.

Now, let me expand on his made-up letters since you broght it up and some others mentioned them elsewhere http://www.informedtrades.com/showthread.php?t=1341538&page=7. All those letters could be broken down into three main categories:

1.   Dear MA. Thank you for your existence. Our whole family has been reading your blog for years. It is so great that my 97-year-old grandma decided to learn how to read so as to be able to follow your blog. Occasionally on big family gatherings such as Thanksgiving or Christmas we even read your blog out loud (uncle Derek reads it because he has a strong voice and a better diction than our grandma). My children don’t go to school anymore because they have your blog. What else can you ask for in life, right? Thanks to your unique knowledge and extraordinary insight, we now know that politicians are not good as they claim during election campaigns and also that something bad is going on in Europe. It was really an eye-opener. Could you please elaborate on why grass is green and water is wet? Thank you.

2.   Your honor. I am so fortunate that I have stumbled upon your blog. I am a historian with a PhD but never have I read anything like what you put on your website. It is so clear to me that Will Durant and Eugen Weber are not in the same league with you because they probably copied some of their work from you. Even Herodotus would feel deeply ashamed of himself after reading the stuff you researched and kindly shared with us on your fascinating blog. Our academic community together with UNESCO should initiate the process of updating school programs around the globe with all your valuable insight and discoveries. A truly eye-opener. My son now actually can see things better after your blog (used to wear thick glasses). Would you please make some more dvds for Amazon and Netflix so everybody could benefit from your brilliant understanding of history? Thank you.

3.   Your majesty. Words can’t express how grateful I am for living in the same time with you. Your knowledge of economics and physics is so amazing that you should be awarded the Nobel prize for both. I am just one of millions of your loyal followers and has been attending your conferences since the Civil War. I remember you once said gold would go up and down. And it did! You also said that there would be wars in the world. And then they happened! The world best forecaster indeed! Now everybody steals your predictions and claims as their own all over the place. They are so dishonest. At your last conference there were tens of thousands of people and you could not place them all so you had to turn thousands away. Will you hold your next conference in a larger place say exhibition halls or convention centers to accommodate all participants? Thank you.

MA's answer regardless of the question asked almost always goes like this:

Thank you. It’s been a mystery to me. Some call it a miracle, some call me the greatest forecaster on the planet but I put it down simply to my unique ECM model. Gold went up precisely on time and according to the model. It’s not my opinion, it’s what computer says based on capital flows across the globe and the unique historic data that cost me hundreds of millions. Even the IMF does not have such database. The computer model works through 32000 variables and 72 metrics and so much else, it’s not humanly possible to produce forecasts like this. Even Microsoft and IBM clouds combined would not be able to process it. NASA confirms that they are not going to have such processing power before at least 2032, the next ECM turning point. It’s all because politicians are all corrupt, they can’t even run a bubble-gum machine. Back in the old days, the Roman empire collapsed precisely for the same reasons - they were all lawyers, not traders and programmers like myself. Governments are everywhere hunting cash and want to impose more taxes, bankers are sucking the blood of the economy, riots are everywhere just in line with our War cycle model. The Euro is about to crack because European leaders didn’t listen to me. Welcome to Big Bang.
Remember it was all rosy before when I consulted presidents and prime-ministers all over the world. Milton Friedman used to come to my conferences and sit quietly on the back row, Maggie Thatcher used to call me for my advice, Paul Volker wrote a book borrowing my ideas on cycles and so on. I am going to publish a report on gold soon and hold a conference next month where I will go in depth on all that and also on how to solve sovereign debt problem, find a cure for cancer, set peace in the Middle East, reduce inequality, eradicate poverty, and understand women. Sign-up early since places are limited.

Charles Ponzi was a very smart man, so was Bernie Madoff and many others. They also made a lot of right calls. Not only that, if you flip a coin, you will get 50% right. So what? What MA does differently, however, is that he claims that
1.   He has a model that 100% right (over 90% of his forecasts are wrong even after shifting dates, flip-flopping, and other tricks. Nobody has seen the model, and what he shows is just print-screens from something written for MSDOS. And then he claims his computer is not connected to the internet because he does not want to get hacked. Oh my - an MSDOS program getting hacked via internet!) 
2.   He collected unique historical data worth of hundreds of millions (we have the Library of Congress, the British library and others, the IMF and so on, but nobody has anything like it and his data is unique. Nobody has seen the data, he always shows only one chart and claims it took N-years to produce and cost hundreds of millions)
3.   He is an excellent programmer and wrote all the code (Up until 1999 when he was charged he was not known as a programmer. Then all of the sudden, he somehow became a programmer. At the age of 50. In jail. It’s like saying “I started to do ballet at 50 and became a famous ballet dancer)
4.   He was a very successful trader and made a lot of money (the SEC documents show he was a terrible trader and lost hundreds of millions of clients’ money. That’s the reason why he decided to cheat to cover up his losses. And MA officially admitted all this)
5.   He is a remarkable historian (no historian has ever examined his writings on accuracy and fact-checking. It may very well be all bs)
6.   He is totally innocent, all that japanese story was a conspiracy plot against him (I cited numerous sources earlier that proved the opposite)
7.   His mission in life is to educate an average Joe because he is filthy rich so he does not need money since he is not a salesman like everybody else (If that was the case, why bs people with made-up praise letters and brag about his computer, data, etc. He is a salesman and what he does is exactly a pure and utter sale. And despite his “mission” he charges Joes hundreds for reports and dvds and thousands for conferences)
8.   and thousands of other similar claims

And then you say I am not objective or something. Who cares. You should have done all the fact-checking yourself instead of drooling over his bs. I did all the work for you citing sources and everything for free and put everything right in front of your nose. If you have facts (not your personal views or biases) – let’s see them.

...

Armstrong has more thought-provoking pieces up today re Europe.  Europe is really in big, big trouble. 

If one country (say Germany or France) gets really tough on the "Migrants" ("Invaders" would be a better term), that might fractures the EU as others object...  But, they can choose:  their culture remaining intact OR being all PC...

Germany and France both have the potential to elect a tough Strongman who WILL kick 'em out.  The potential.  But will they?

The UK may not escape unscathed either, there were recent riots at Calais.

I mean that by not promulgating any illegal activity, then I can't be at odds with TPTB's control. For example, I realize now that creating any decentralized file storage technology which can't allow for protecting against illegal content is non-viable so I won't be developing that direction.

They should also realize their their Bittorrent gambit is out of my influence any way, and besides I explained it has technical weaknesses which will limit Bitttorrent's applicability.


My point to the Bittorrent developers was if we maximize the upload bandwidth we can take from any particular user, we steal from ISPs who don't throttle it in order to provide downloads to other users whose ISPs have provided less upload bandwidth. Upload bandwidth for an ISP is nearly always much less than download bandwidth. Thus no (or most) users will ever be in balance, and they will have more download capacity available than they have upload bandwidth. So the upload bandwidth is taken systemically from those who have more of it. But ISPs are not charging us based on a model of upload bandwidth. They are maximizing our download bandwidth and that is what they compute when they factor their costs. They don't expect us to use so much upload bandwidth because of the client-server architecture of HTTP (which is the most popular use of the internet). There is physics involved as to why client-server is more efficient in terms of (infrastructure) costs. Go compare the cost of a fully symmetric DSL line to an asymmetric one.

Netflix is adding another wrinkle (not the client level P2P one afaik) but it is stealing bandwidth at the trunk lines infrastructure layer. But the analogous arguments can be (and are being) made that ISPs shouldn't be allowed to throttle or block client level protocols as well. This will be politically popular, yet we dig our own grave.

Taxation is necessary to charge the total cost of bandwidth to the collective so no ISP or trunk level provider is at a disadvantage relative to each other. So the government can conpensate those who are a natural disadvantage. Of course once the government taxes, then of course the internet will be monopolized by an oligarchy.

These issues are conceptually related to the centralization of a block chain due to the CAP theorem which I have been exploring my thread on that topic in the Altcoin Discussion forum. I will need to research more the Netflix issue and think about what might be a solution. We get back to you on that aspect.



Yes but not in all cases. Your group's Streemo is a direct connection between two peers. Thus their upload and download bandwidth has to match (up the threshold they coordinate to use). So presumably it is economic (and I assume Streemo won't try to slam the upload bandwidth threshold and will leave some dynamic headroom as it must to avoid intermittent lags in the streaming feed).

Rather what I meant is that P2P can't be a paradigm that extracts upload bandwidth from some peers and gifts it to other peers in a systemic way such as Bittorrent's optimistic unchoking algorithm without my suggested fix (which they apparently ignored).

So I still wouldn't think file serving from user clients will work because it is assumed we will max out the upload bandwidth and provide it as a service to the network. In short, we can't use user clients as servers and expect not to mess up the economics. The "last mile" connections would need to violate physics in order to be economic as a servers. We can do P2P exchange between a mutual set (all uploading to each other) of users consuming some reasonable level of upload bandwidth, but any form of broadcast is going to strain the economics of P2P.

I can agree with that. That's why I feel sorry you couldn't finalize the collaboration with the Gadgetcoin developers. They aren't in your level terms of knowledge nor in communicating ideas, but they have the very same libertarian, open source idealism as yourself.




The government doesn't see this way. They will take you out in the Philippines within a heartbeat if you are a really danger to TPTB.



Why the taxation is necessary and why are you talking about this? Don't ISPs charge for the service and therefore we pay for the bandwidth already? My understanding is that the taxation is considered because certain service providers like Netflix generate extra profit on the backbone of the internet infrastructure which is operated by ISPs, and those ISPs don't get a share from Netflix's profit. Sorry, I am sure you are correct, and I just try to get my head around of what you are talking about.



Are you saying P2P will only work if it requires a little bandwidth, because larger bandwidth usage will trigger taxation and other measures? Again, I am not disagreeing, I just want to understand what you are saying. Thanks!

Now for a more important revelation... Can we get this on Armstrong's radar so he can blog about it?


Because I viewed the linked archived content (and saw the existence of the Bittorrent forum archive going back many years even before 2008) when I made the post in the Monero Speculation thread, and now as you can see the entire archive is gone. And that was only a few days ago. So the probability that the sudden removal of that archive did not result from me pointing out that Bittorrent is in bed together with the corruption of the Net Neutrality movement is approximately Nil.

I am not saying necessarily that any particular Monero community member was responsible for the removal of the archive. I am saying that someone who reads the Monero thread and/or who reads all my posts was responsible. And it is very likely that TPTB are watching very closely all my posts, because they understand (as do many astute readers) that I am one of the brighter minds on the forum who is very truly anarcho-Libertarian oriented and that I have the marketing skills to actually make something happen on a large scale.

However, TPTB shouldn't fear me, because I am not going to do anything illegal.

The most important point to take from the post I made is that Bittorrent is a political gimick used to fool the masses into submitting to taxation of the internet bandwidth via Net Neutrality. Bittorrent was never economic. It is a fraud and those who are stealing content deserve their fate by buying into an uneconomic lie.

And this pertains to the Technology vs. Marketing thread in the context of we are discussing whether potential markets and technology are viable. It makes no sense to state marketing or technology are important, if we don't understand how delusions about each can be foisted upon us. Also I was responding to an upthread post claiming that we can replace centralized social media with decentralized variants. And to address that possibility, I must talk about the foundational issue of decentralized file storage. That should have been obvious from the post (and its context) that you are reacting to.

Also for those who don't fully grasp my economics point, the point is that if we try to force ISPs to give away bandwidth for free, then we in effect socialize ISPs. And then the government can step in with Net Neutrality taxation to make it "fair" by compensating some ISPs for others or what (but in essence what we have done is attempted to steal and thus the government is called upon to take over and steal from all of us). We are fucking idiots!

For those can't deduce the implications, without stealing bandwidth by doing file transfers P2P (taking the expensive upload bandwidth that ISPs have statistically allocated for client-server model paradigms) then we can't have file storage that is resistant to regulation and thus we can't steal copyrighted content (as I explained in my prior post that hosting content on servers will be regulated by the hosting provider's Terms of Service). Afaik, the reason upload bandwidth is expensive for ISPs, is because telcom "last mile" technology is focused on maximizing download bandwidth for the client-server model of HTTP. It is a natural law of physics that you would not run a main line water/gas pipe from the substation to each home, instead use multifurcation from the main to progressively smaller diameter pipes.

P2P can not be a bandwidth driven paradigm! Fuhgeddaboudit.

The problem for humanity is that ISPs are playing along with this Net Neutrality takeover (even while pretending not to), because of course it is a plan by which the internet can be monopolized and controlled by an oligarchy. So our problem is that paradigms such as Bittorrent which foster this theft, are less expensive to host content with. And thus this is why the new Bittorrent browser is receiving funding because TPTB have decided this a good direction to go and further their control of the internet. How can we can compete with the download costs of stealing it from the collective. We probably can't. So fucking clever how TPTB fooled us into thinking we had won (after they closed Napster and we thought we fought back), and yet we dug our own grave. Because stealing is evil. But the problem is that this lower bandwidth cost (by stealing it) paradigm can also be used for distributing legal content.  However Bittorrent does have the weaknesses that files are slower to start loading (i.e. higher latency), it isn't interactive, and it only applies to files that many users are simultaneously downloading. So thus we still have a means to fight back if we are clever.

When will fools learn that anything pumped up in the MSM is always a fraud to fool us. Kim Dotcom is being made into a martyr to fool us into believing that we must fight for Bittorrent every where and to give a boost to the launch of a Bittorrent web paradigm. We will be totally fucked with Net Neutrality.

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I agree with much of this. I think he gets much of the macro stuff pretty right. I dont trade and I havent paid for his reports. Sloanf has some valid, yet weak, criticisms (how many economists etc make 100% correct calls anyway? Should we dismiss everyone whose call is off?). But then Sloanf overlays his own assumptions, gliding over the fact that they are in fact, just assumptions.

- No proof there is no model

Yet he was jailed for failing to give up his assets which included the model. Further, in the doco there are other programmers talking about working with the model, setting up traps & watching hackers intrude.

- No proof he didn't pay his team to spend a year in London Museum analysing historical data back to Greco - Roman times.


End of the day, if you don't agree with MA's stuff, don't read it.

I told you I am not going to let you drag me into a nonsense discussion where you move the goal posts every time.

I already pointed out that you are full of shit. So enjoy your time wasting diatribes.

Those who want to profit will continue paying attention to Armstrong. Those who try to trade on his blog posts will lose their shirts. If you want to trade based on his model, buy his services.

I think you are taking the scepticism about Armstrong to an unfair level, which has an undesired effect on your objectivity.

As far as I know the Japanese investors never complained about Armstrong. I also disagree that his history and physics related opinion a "bs and lies" as you said. I think he makes many logical conclusions based on historical data. It remains to bee seen whether his analysis and approach, his opinion about the existence of cycles can be a formed into a new economy theory or not.

All I am saying, it is not very classy to publish "reader's opinion" like "you obviously do what no one else has ever been able to accomplish". It seems Armstrong receives such extreme cheerleader hosanna every day, which is obviously very unlikely. I think he makes those questions/opinions up, because WTF, which grown up man would write to another grown up man such heart breaking complementing syrup? So yes, I agree with you this is a not very classy second car dealer salesman approach. I understand your scepticism, but I think you got to the point where you can't see any more his work objectively. You don't realize that he is obviously a very smart man and many of his calls are spot on.

Actually you can http://www.forexfactory.com/showthread.php?t=211657