Topic: Martin Armstrong Discussion - page 94. (Read 647176 times)

Yes, I read that this morning and thought it quite coincidentally relevant to this thread. A few pages ago we discussed Renaissance Technology and Two Sigma as actual audited examples of what MA claims.

If you search "Renaissance Technology" on Google, then click the People also search for link in the right side bar, Bridgewater Associates is top result #2 after Two Sigma.

Putting two-and-two together here, it seems quite coincidental that MA would pick out one of his rivals, from a thread (this forum) that ranks on page one of google for certain search queries that also contain "martin armstrong".

Made me wonder if in a roundabout way, he is trying to save face again for anyone who might start reading this thread, while not making it too obvious he's been snooping around here past week or two...

Thanks. Yes, it is disgraceful, disgusting. Please keep posting. He re-writes the past again. Nobody including himself would have singled out his "Energy Models" signals from the mix of conflicting signals that his super stupid computer created at the time.


Martin Armstrong is a charlatan, and he spent 11 years in jail for that reason but he has not changed.

Read this blog starting here to find out more about computerized fraud.


See armstrongecmscam.blogspot.com for a more compact view of major findings posted in this blog.

Every single defrauded person should report their case, see Where and how to complain

https://www.armstrongeconomics.com/markets-by-sector/stock-indicies/dow-jones/why-hedge-funds-have-missed-the-moves/


Lmao, here he goes again, shamelessly doubling down on everything. Now Armstrong is practically saying that he and Socrates were incredible in forecasting the rally from the December lows, the June low etc. What a complete bogus from this total conman. Why does he mention his "great" Energy Models after the rally? Why was he bearish at the end of May/beginning of June despite the fact that his Energy Models were already negative? And did Marty again write his own questions, because a lot of people missed the current rallies because Socrates didn't recognize them.

are you talking about the "phantom" reversals as bikefront has described it further above?
If they come from the reversals table in the reversals tab (not the elected reversals part), then  that is the table which has issues. I'm not using that anymore, but only the reversals table in the dashboard.

But this data has definitely (according to MA) gone through a conversion from the backend system to some other system, because reversals originate from the backend system that armstrong doesn't connect to the internet.  So even though these are reversals, the data doesn't come directly from the backend and therefor if there is wrong information in those tables that are on the Socrates website, it doesn't mean that the backend has the same, wrong information. It can mean that there is a conversion problem during the export process.
I must admit, I also have some difficulties to understand why the errors are not fixed quickly. But as long as there is an alternative (Dashboard reversals table), I can live with it.

regarding the IBM Sequoia, this is a bit of a mystery to me too, but I don't care too much about it, as long as Socrates is delivering reliable and good data. It's probably just a marketing thing, but I don't know. Certainly he must have a lot of servers and computing power to calculate all of that data, additionally produce the reports and provide the website  to the users.

On the website he write that they are sharing Sequoia with other institutions

true, but I assume you can still devide the computer into several partitions that are physically not connected with each other, even though this is marketed as a single supercomputer.
From the old HP days I know their supercomputer "superdome" and it was possible to partition it and use it as separate servers, each with it's own memory /CPU slots and its own dedicated storage.  It could be the same with Sequoia. A bunch of partitions are connected to the internet and the sensible partitions aren't.

Some website says that the power consumption of Sequoia is about 7 Megawatt. Amazon has a datacenter in Virginia which has a power consumption that is 100 times more with almost 1 Gigawatt.  So 7 Megawatt is a lot, but it should be manageble, if you put it into perspective with other datacenters.

And yet:

https://www.armstrongeconomics.com/institutional-time-share/
You can put your entire portfolio into the system and it will monitor everything far more intensely than any human staff are even capable of accomplishing and without the risk of pure opinion.

That to me sounds like an internet-connected system, where Socrates is hosted on IBM Sequoia supercomputer... Which was commissioned by the US government initially for nuclear weapons simulations, and eventually opened up to academic researchers:

https://www.computerworld.com/article/2530771/ibm-to-build-massive-supercomputer-for-u-s--government.html
https://phys.org/news/2013-05-simulation-sequoia-supercomputer.html

We can safely debunk that one, not ignoring the fact MA is deeply suspicious and critical of government, so why would he be using their equipment to host his messianic Socrates source code? Also, ML/AI requires vast volumes of data and ideally in real time, especially if it is making predictions. So any device not connected to the internet would have delays in its access to data, and trying to time-stamp manually uploaded data would turn messy and be hugely laborious. It also means the machine cannot run in real-time, it would be constantly on the back foot and useful only for longer term predictions, if it could predict anything at all.

Further, I have previously explained, even a rudimentary pre-school understanding of physics would make one realise MA must be lying about something. To have a supercomputer - as MA alleges (whether IBM Sequuoia or not) - that is being fed vast volumes of data to predict future socioeconomic flashpoints "to the day" and market moves across all asset classes, would require VAST volumes of energy.

As one of the above posted articles explains about IBM Sequoia:
The supercomputer is also helping to drive a massive power upgrade at Lawrence Livermore, which is increasing the amount of electricity available for all its computing systems from 12.5 megawatts to 30 megawatts. To achieve the upgrade, it will run more power lines to its facility. Sequoia alone is expected to use about 6 megawatts, according to Seager.

So where exactly is MA sourcing this energy and how is he funding it? Perhaps that perpetual energy device he mentioned in his travels to Japan is in fact in his basement... Running a dynamo keeping Socrates energy-hungry guts filled ad astra.

The IBM Sequoia beard for what is potentially a DOS-based system running on a basic server somewhere is ideal for his typical audience (non-techy, ageing so won't understand nor scrutinise), or his international audience like in Japan/China where things are more likely to be lost in translation and nor will it be easy for them to scrutinise his invented claims where 99% of his content is in English.

Martin Armstrong is a charlatan, and he spent 11 years in jail for that reason but he has not changed.

Read this blog starting here to find out more about computerized fraud.


See armstrongecmscam.blogspot.com for a more compact view of major findings posted in this blog.

Every single defrauded person should report their case, see Where and how to complain

That's correct. The only way to verify is to subscribe to Socrates and watch it happen or record it and then backtest it. But this is the case with any system.

For example the reversals table in the dashboard and the elected reversals.

There are different ways to trade Socrates numbers. One of them is by elected reversals without the array. The arrays make it more complex.Of course you can increase the complexity with the various of Socrates indicators (GMW, Pivots, indicating ranges, etc.)

This is a controversial topic and I don't see a direct connection to Socrates. In my understanding MA doesn't want to explain how it works or if it is real.  He just reported what he experienced and finds it interesting.

In my understand it's not the backend. Since MA doesn't want the backend to be connected with the internet, the data must be exported at least once to some other system and probably distributed or mirrored from there to one or several web servers. I assume that this is where the discrepancies and out of sync issues happen.

Thanks for the insights! I still have lots to learn.  I shall be back in 2041 to compare your forecasts 

Over and out.

Has Socrates lost its AI thingy and the self awareness? Socrates is supposed to be the foundation of everything, the main asset!

Apparently decades were not enough to get the basic logic right. If it is not working now it will never work.
We are talking about the back-end that has been running for decades. Yes. Ported from Assembler code.
And there is code in it that KNOWS that it is never going to work because otherwise there would not be the fix-it-patch-it phantom reversals that come out of multiple sets of reversals. Please stop bullshitting us!
This has been online for years. It is pretty obvious now, and I mean really obvious for everyone to see that the whole contraption is pure fraud.


Martin Armstrong is a charlatan, and he spent 11 years in jail for that reason but he has not changed.

Read this blog starting here to find out more about computerized fraud.


See armstrongecmscam.blogspot.com for a more compact view of major findings posted in this blog.

Every single defrauded person should report their case, see Where and how to complain

IMO the goal should be not to trade after MA's blog posts but only after Socrates numbers itself.  Trading should be done  completely independent of his advise or opinion.
Blog posts can be used for educational purpose, but not mainly for trading decisions.

backtest I've posted already several times:  http://armstrong.forumprofi.de/showthread.php?tid=78&pid=234#pid234

The system is not everywhere buggy, but I can understand people who would rather wait until some bugs are fixed. And for people who have problems with Socrates, this would also be my advise (to wait).

hehe, I've no idea what you are talking about.
There are many things I can't explain, but there are a few things I can and they are enough for me. The main point is, they need to work

I think he was talking about the long term trend.
In any case, nothing to lose is not a good reason to post something that everybody would want to have. And then if you post something, then people come along and say naa, this is totaly subjective, it's a fraud you idiot and alike or you are being ignored.  So not even without a benefit, but  potentially ignorance, bashing and flame-wars.

I'd say it's one way, but you can also backtest yourself (if you are patient enough, have technical skills and take the time to do it). And yes,   if you are really in the need of convincing people of something you can do live trades. But if not, then you don't care. You just offer what you have for those who understand and don't care much about the rest.
IMO it doesn't happen very often.  There are other discrepancies (as the banner says on the website). Once the banner is removed, then one can expect a near perfect system. Until then, just wait and do something else.
I understand that people want to just start trading Socrates with real money,  expect fast result, loose money and get mad at MA. That is the greed that eat's the brain. Maybe that was to harsh but Soctrates is really complex and should not be taken lightly. Additionally it has bugs.


At the moment, I agree. There are too many bugs (even obvious bugs) in the system.  It makes it very hard, depending on what the trading system is used. I do not perceive "Phantom" reversals as a big problem since it doesn't happen often and they don't seem to be a bug.  But there are other problems which are bugs (at least in part) and are a bigger problem. For example the arrays (not monthly).

How to copy Socrates Private Blog Text

Socrates is designed to prevent copying the report contents to the clipboard.

Obviously, this is not helpful in case you want to build a track record. You need to copy the text to archive it.

There are two ways to do it:

1) Save the entire page

2) View the source code of the page in your browser, copy the text part and remove the HTML tags and save the raw content as text file. I prefer this option because a text file or text snippet is easier to manage.

Martin Armstrong is a charlatan, and he spent 11 years in jail for that reason but he has not changed.

Read this blog starting here to find out more about computerized fraud.


See armstrongecmscam.blogspot.com for a more compact view of major findings posted in this blog.

Every single defrauded person should report their case, see Where and how to complain

@Alex-11, we are not talking about you, specifically, on why you should post to demo that Socrates works.

We are talking about several thousands of all the forum users HERE.  Let's assume that there were 5000 people on the forum who posted and contributed to 300+ pages.  Out of 5000 people, from average to smart, and some of even fund manager, as one of them has disclosed, ZERO out of 5000 people can demo that Socrates can make a profit, when Armstrong/Socrates system is supposed to be flawless.

The weight of evidence and statistics shows that in all likelihood Socrates does NOT work.

It really just takes 1 person to disapprove that by SHOWing just one method on HOW to use Socrates for profit consistently, but that person/method does NOT exist.

So if you want to PARTICIPATE in this forum discussion on "HOW to use Socrates for profit consistently", and your position is that it works, then SHOW it.

If you do NOT want to PARTICIPATE in this forum discussion, it is perfectly fine that you just stay away.  But WHY are you here posting zero evidences, arguing that Socrates works with empty words?

If you want to PARTICIPATE according to your argument position, then SHOW it, and I'm all ears.

And if your position is not sure, you can post bullish/bearish reversal levels, arrays consistently, for people here to propose and TEST any "possible" trading method.  That will be helpful too, but arguing by saying that "why you should convince anyone" does NOT work.  Exactly, if you think you shouldn't, then STAY AWAY.

I have already shared it:

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.51666429

The instrument is Gold Futures. The article is one part of the clear evidence.You don't even need the historical report files for that part because Martin Armstrong writes the evidence in the public blog. The other part of the evidence is in the report files that contain the reversal tables. These reversal tables contain the electable reversals. I have all reports with these tables.

I have seen it in hundreds of reports. I have the report files. In fact I have over 33,000 report files, so for me it is child's play to prove this for multiple instruments. One can see from the output (which is the reports that appear weeks after the reversals should have been generated), that the code is in hindsight lining up fake reversals like pearls on a string to make it appear as if they were elected to match the past trend.

This particular case is outstanding because Martin Armstrong actually writes it in his private blog also so he cannot say later that it was a bug in the code.

It is fairly clear that he uses multiple sets of reversals in the same time frame. One set is the published reversals which may have failed (in this case all four of them), and the other set is the fake reversals which are used in hindsight to fill the gaps that are left by the failed reversals.

You cannot imagine how bad I felt when I discovered this.

If someone is willing to take Martin Armstrong to court about this, then I am willing to share the data with a lawyer. And I will provide the analysis to make the various cases.

As I said before, this is really different from trading risk. It is the concealment of bad performance and replacement of the historical record with fraudulent data. I guess this is covered by different laws. I am not a lawyer but a competent computer programmer. Actually, I am the first and so far the only one I know of who has discovered this flaw in Socrates which I call the Smoking Gun.

Martin Armstrong is a charlatan, and he spent 11 years in jail for that reason but he has not changed.

Read this blog starting here to find out more about computerized fraud.


See armstrongecmscam.blogspot.com for a more compact view of major findings posted in this blog.

Every single defrauded person should report their case, see Where and how to complain

Can you share that part of the code? Which instrument?

Part 3
After MA having been barred from working as an investment advisor by the US securities industry, Armstrong has been on a crusade to rewrite his past as well as attempt to create a credible track record of economic forecasts. Armstrong has a good deal of experience in generating PR and fudging his track record. After all, this is how he was able to convince investors to hand over money to him which was then lost trading commodities.
Despite his claims to the contrary, Armstrong has no official written track record that can be relied upon. While he has written jumbled nonsense, he makes sure to keep things open-ended enough in order to flip-flop when things turn against him. In short, he offers virtually no transparency with regards to his so called track record. He mainly makes videos, gives fake interviews to shills and enters posts on his blog. This enables him to flip-flop and alter what he said in the past without much if any notice by the suckers who foolish enough to be foolish by his teenage antics.
Imagine if you had been convicted of running a Ponzi scheme and you were consequently barred from the securities industry. After you were released from prison, if you wanted to convince people you are credible, wouldn’t you make sure to publish all of your research in order for sophisticated investors to determine whether or not you had a clue and whether  or not you were publishing legitimate research?
On the contrary, if you were clueless, you would not want knowledgeable investors to see your “research” because they would realize you were nothing more than a fraud. Thus, you would be much better off by allowing only unsophisticated sheep who subscribed to your research to examine your “forecasts” because you could play word games with these naïve suckers and convince them that you made predictions when you really didn’t.
I do not know how MA can look in the mirror in the morning?
I feel sorry for the people who work for him.

It is interesting that today we discover the same behavioral pattern in the output of the Socrates source code:

https://bitcointalksearch.org/topic/m.51666429

In the same way, the behavior goes beyond concealment. The failure to execute a signal is turned into the opposite: The claim that execution occurred is manufactured in the reports that Martin Armstrong repeats in his private blog, tricking the reader into believing that the system would have generated a profit had the reader bought the subscription and executed the signal that did in fact not even exist. A computer program lies about its own (lack of) performance.

Martin Armstrong is a charlatan, and he spent 11 years in jail for that reason but he has not changed.

Read this blog starting here to find out more about computerized fraud.


See armstrongecmscam.blogspot.com for a more compact view of major findings posted in this blog.

Every single defrauded person should report their case, see Where and how to complain

I just wanted to clarify this single point above. I didn't wanted to generally discuss MA. I know your opinion about MA.

Part 2.

Crook  of the Month: Martin Armstrong

Martin Armstrong: Miserable Trader and Former Ponzi scheme Operator Lies about His Terrible Track Record.
He claims to have been “self-taught”. I suppose he taught himself how to cheat investors because he certainly never learned how to trade commodities, as evidenced by the massive trading losses he suffered.

The district court sentenced Armstrong to sixty months imprisonment and three years supervised release, and ordered him to pay $ 80 Mio in restitution to sixty defrauded customers.

As part of his guilty plea, Armstrong entered a sworn allocution admitting to and describing his crime. In his allocution, Armstrong admitted that between 1992 and 1999, he sold promissory notes issued by Princeton Economics subsidiaries (“Princeton Notes”) to investors, mostly Japanese corporations.
Armstrong through his agents, represented to the investors that the proceeds from the sale of the Princeton Notes would be held in accounts at Republic New York Securities and that those accounts “would be separated and segregated from Republic’s own accounts and would not be available to Republic for its own benefit.”
According to Armstrong’s allocution, after he suffered “some millions of dollars of trading losses”, he decided “not to disclose to investors that ….  Substantial losses had been experienced in this trading of futures. And we did not disclose it.” Armstrong also admitted that his concealment of his losses went beyond non-disclosure: “letters were sent by my company to investors concerning how much money was in fact in the accounts assigned to them. I … did send out those letters, even though  I knew the amounts in the accounts were less than the letter stated.”

You wan't to send him money. Go ahead!