Economic Confidence Model, just a play on numbers of 8.6

Martin Armstrong is known for his Economic Confidence Model, or ECM as he calls it, which is based on a cycle with a fixed period of 8.6 years.

One of the ECM target (turn) dates published by Martin Armstrong was October 1st, 2015. That date, as printed on his pencil charts, supposedly is the "peak of government confidence".  Also, it was the date when Russia's airstrikes in Syria started which prompted him to ask: Did World War III Start on the Precise Day of the ECM?.  But that is not all. Armstrong repeatedly said that the turning point marked the date of the "Big Bang".

So what exactly is it?  What is "peak of government confidence"?  As always, Armstrong is not clear about it.

Now I show an interesting aspect of his turning point arithmetic which is that there are actually two dates for the same event - 6 days apart from each other. It is a minor issue in the larger scale of his fraudulent misrepresentations - but critical in the context where he claims that his model predicted events with an accuracy down to the day. But the deeper I dig into his arithmetic, the more bizarre it gets, so read on.

According to Armstrong's numeric tables, that ECM date should be October 7th, 2015. This date is in one of his own publications, which was publicly available on several well-known websites, several of which no longer exist. Still extinct web sites can be found in the wayback machine or internet archive.  You can find copies of old Armstrong articles at contrahour.com The Business Cycle And the Future, nowandfutures.com The Business Cycle And the Future, and at HIS own website. 

Isn't that puzzling?  Just for a single ECM cycle, the ECM date is off by 6 days, with BOTH sources from Armstrong himself, and YET, Armstrong claimed in Did World War III Start on the Precise Day of the ECM? that

Russia began bombing CIA-trained rebels in Syria precisely on the day of the turn in the Economic Confidence Model.

By all indications and words from Armstrong, the ECM date was October 1st, 2015, based on that particular publication which refers to a site with the chart containing it.  But of course, he also stated that ECM date should have been October 7th, 2015 in the other source published back in 1999.  Well, obviously, October 7th is not October 1st.  There cannot be two dates for the ECM.

Following is some more background.  According to Armstrong, The ECM cycle is 8.6 years.  But quite often, you will also find him using 8.61, or 8.615.  In fact, I was amazed that Martin Armstrong published this number with such precision as 8.6153846615 the secret cycle PI upon which everything is constructed (shown at the top-right corner) at his website HEADLINE here.  In fact, he published this very number multiple times, but I was only able to dig out one page from the internet archive.With a claim of such precision of the ECM cycle length, it should not be possible to be off by 6 days in the ECM date. 

 
Furthermore, if you carefully study the publication in 1999, the calculation used 3144 days exactly between ECM dates.  It obviously should have been 3.1416 or PI * 1000, but Armstrong couldn't do math, and so he got 3144 days, instead of 3142 days.  That method of date calculation does NOT take into account leap years, as the Earth revolves around the Sun in about 365.242199 days in a year.  Armstrong after getting out of jail, apparently forgetting his previous date and calculation method, now uses a new method of calculation.  Based on his new calculation method, assuming that you start with a certain date in years, you just keep adding 8.6 years onto that date, and convert the decimal to the date in the year.  This method doesn't have the leap year problem, but based on this method, all of the future and past ECM dates will simply fall on the following calendar dates (by adding 8.6 repeatedly, dates are obtained by adding the # of days from Jan 1st of that (leap) year):

Decimal part in year	Date if 365 days/year	Date if 366 days/year
0.15	Feb 24th (54.75 days)	Feb 24th (54.90 days)
0.75	Oct 1st (273.75 days)	Oct 1st (274.50 days)
0.35	May 8th (127.75 days)	May 7th (128.10 days)
0.95	Dec 13th (346.75 days)	Dec 13th (347.70 days)
0.55	Jul 20th (200.75 days)	Jul 19th (201.30 days)

Isn't that funny that ALL historical and future ECM dates will simply fall on the above 7 dates in the yearly calendar?  Think about it for a moment.  The all-important ECM cycles will always produce important socio-economic dates on the just above 7 dates?

At this point, I cannot help, but laugh at the stupidity.  If there are only 7 dates that I need to remember for all of my history classes, the history classes would have been so easy.

Yet, that is what Armstrong is claiming for his ECM 8.6 year cycle in the latest publication.  And that is also inconsistent with his older date, and older calculation method.

But hold on, both dates should be coming from his super-AI computer.  Hmm....  Something to ponder on.

And of course, in that World War III article, Armstrong specifically stated that precise date was October 1st, 2015.  That means that his ECM model and cycle number at least has the accuracy of at least 1/365 or 0.27%.  If the uncertainty of 8.6 ECM cycle was bigger than that, you cannot be sure whether it was October 1st, or September 30th/October 2nd, etc.  But Armstrong was SURE.  So how can there be another date of October 7th, 2015, according to HIMSELF?

Why is Armstrong not so precise about his 8.6 number? Reading through all of his blogs, you would see he liberally uses the definition of fractal and applies 8.6 on the time scale of month, week, and hour as he claims to work.  The 309.6 year cycle is 8.6*6*6 = 51.2*6.  All the magical numbers as he claims.

 

Fine, since there are 12 months in a year, I’m just going to give that to him for him to "fractal"ize 8.6 years down to 8.6 months using 12 as the factor of scale. But 8.6 weeks?! Who says that every seven days is special in nature?  No other living organisms understand that a week is 7 days.  Week is an artificial concept only special to human.  If I start to claim fractal structures using arbitrary numbers as my base, and mixing in the 37.11 volatility, 3.14 as PI, 72 year cycle, I can probably produce any dates on the calendar.

 

The finer that I go, the easier it is to produce a new distinct significant date. Very soon, every date CAN be special, as long as I can grab a news headline to match it up.  Now, if I am imprecise about 8.6 versus 8.615 versus 8.6153846615, the job just gets even easier.  And yes, of course, I can produce 7 days as double of 365.242199 / 12 / 8.6153846615 = 7.066 days, or is it really 7.074 days = 2 * 365 / 12 / 8.6? And wouldn’t that 1% difference in "week" versus 7 days will give you almost 6 days difference in dates after just two years?!  I don’t think it would matter to Armstrong.  In fact, he probably likes the math better that way.  The fuzzier it is, the better, as long as some headline can be matched!

The world is a big place.  And there are headline news everyday.  The ECM is more like broken numerology.  As soon as you populate the entire calendar with all the fuzzy math, there is nothing that you cannot in "predict"  hindsight as accurate "down to the day" just as how Armstrong often claims.

 

If you are interested the ridiculous numerology it is based on,  read Armstrong's page:

Historical Turning Points on the Economic Confidence Model

In reality, pi, 8,6\4.3\2.14 etc don’t matter at all. Those are just numbers. Pick any number, say 7.2 or 11.7 or whatever, and run the same series in excel. Try playing with the result (changing turning points, i.e. dividing the initial number by 3,4,5 etc, and then testing those turning points on various markets). You will get the same or even higher probability of significant dates. I suspect Martin Armstrong picked 3.14 because it’s easy to explain to gullible crowds because 3.14 looks credible so he could sell it easily without any suspicion and monetize his made-up theory.

 

The key issue is that Armstrong has successfully re-defined, for himself and his shills, the concept of prediction: It is the ability to match in hindsight any cherry-picked event with any cherry-picked date that he can create on demand with the myriad of his number combinations.