The Defeat of Martin Armstrong

This is a summary of the conclusion of my project. I might expand this as I get more time. I will show that Martin Armstrong is defeated in a specific virtual space, in his own niche. In battles that I fought on social media platforms against him as a swindler and destabilizing disinformation agent.

Before I describe the battles, let me refer to the ultimate conclusion which is the fact that Martin Armstrong failed to defend himself against my final statement that he is a fraudster and that his business is a scam, a business run with the intention to harm its clients. This is a serious allegation. Please see:

Legal Disclaimer

My Campaign on Zero Hedge

For the full details of it, read: The Martin Armstrong Scam on Zero Hedge.

This one, my latest campaign, was my shortest, and most successful campaign which started in Feb 2024 and peaked on Mar 29, 2024, with another final peak on May 10 2024. I regret that I did not run it earlier because I neglected the potential of the excellent Zero Hedge discussion platform, the potential that it has for both the scammer and myself in the fight against him. I should not have been surprised that Armstrong operated on this platform with three or more user accounts about 18 hours a day by posting on average about 25 messages a day. I cornered him with my single account. His desperation can be seen in the following message:

Martin Armstrong as Skip59 on Zero Hedge on Wed, Apr 17 2024 

I don’t know why your so bitter towards Martin Armstrong but I’ll continue praying 🙏 that you get over it..!

When Armstrong starts praying then that usually means that I must have done a few things right. It is interesting that it took Armstrong and his shills three months to understand that all his messages on that platform became counter-productive as soon as I appeared because I replied to them with links to this site.


The Battle on Twitter

On Twitter, it took me about 4,000 messages (tweets) in less than two months as Armstrong Follower (account suspended due to over-use) for a total defeat. Here is the defining conversation:

Strange people on Twitter begging for attention. If someone is harassing you in reference to me, report them & block them. Thanks in advance.

5:32 PM · Nov 22, 2021·Twitter for iPhone
Would be nice to see some proves from your side that any of those claims by @ArmstrongFolly are false ?!

3:09 AM · Nov 23, 2021·Twitter Web App
Replying to @Shadurskis and @StrongEconomics

Martin Armstrong will never be able to challenge me because all my claims are incontestable. The proof is here: https://armstrongecmscam.blogspot.com/p/legal-disclaimer.html

Therefore we get: https://armstrongecmscam.blogspot.com/2021/09/martin-armstrongs-death-threat.html

And again I say: https://armstrongecmscam.blogspot.com/p/martin-armstrong-hyper-fool.html

5:14 AM · Nov 23, 2021·Twitter Web App
Replying to @Shadurskis and @ArmstrongFolly

Please, do not mention that account on my posts. Thanks.

6:23 AM · Nov 23, 2021·Twitter Web App

Two days after I cornered Martin Armstrong who could not mount any defense, there is only one last ditch indirect effort by a sock puppet shill. @TruthSe49517863 Truth Seeker on Twitter
Replying to @Shadurskis @StrongEconomics and @ArmstrongFolly
the guy has 3 followers. He's a loser! Martin has been spot on about everything. I have followed him since 2000.

3:54 PM · Nov 25, 2021·Twitter for Android

The Battle on YouTube

On YouTube, due to the more persistent nature of the platform, it took me about 5,000 messages (comments on videos) in more than a year, starting in Feb 2020 and ending in Sep 2021. The effort was huge because I had to catch up with about 350 Martin Armstrong videos dating back to 2014 (many of them copies). Because of my own extreme message volume, I had to use five accounts to get past the YouTube limits. See this message posted by Martin Armstrong for the defining moment (after he issued his death threat): Martin Armstrong as A yg 
Martin on fire 🔥
His downfall on YouTube began when he deleted all comments from his videos in his own channel after he realized too late that I had responded to every single message in them. But he could not control most of the other videos whose channel owners would not delete my messages - or too late to be effective.

Here is a record of how he used his well-known sock puppet accounts to explore alternatives:

great video but i fear it won't last long

Here, he even asks his followers how to switch platform:

Where can we find you if YouTube deletes this account? ...
Thank you, but I knew that. What I wish is mirror channels on other platforms.

And here he is trying to persuade one of his interview hosts to switch platform by posing as an unsatisfied viewer (using his old shill trick):

Thank you for this interview! 👍 Martin Armstrong is always super relevant and current! 😄 @Kerry Lutz: please get a mirror site on some other platform? YouTube is highly unreliable.

He switched his video platform to Rumble mainly to evade my responses. I did not penetrate that platform because I am happy with his underground status there. There is another reason for his switch: YouTube penalized him for his increasingly aggressive content that violated their policies.

His downfall on the YouTube platform is finally confirmed in Jan 2022 when an empty video containing his name only as click bait for the channel is uploaded: This Week in Money: Ross Clark, Martin Armstrong, Robert Campbell. January 8, 2022

 

The Battle in the reddit Forum

The forum Unofficial Armstrong Economics Fan Forum is special because it is exactly the opposite of what its name infers. It is moderated by that very unpopular LateralusYellow guy who is a shill paid by Martin Armstrong. I posted a few hundred messages there, using multiple new accounts. I needed to create these accounts because after new messages, LateralusYellow deleted them and banned my accounts. He also installed a so called auto moderator robot with rules that ban users who post links to this site. So it is actually an official Armstrong Economics support forum. But more than this, most messages posted on this forum are actually created by shills, posing as newbies asking fake questions about the Socrates subscription service.

However, the forum has still been quite useful for harvesting user feedback which I recorded in Socrates Subscriber Testimonials. This was possible even after the messages were deleted because they show under the user's history. I also saved some messages in the web archive. Technically, it is of course not possible to win a quick battle in an echo chamber controlled by shills. Nevertheless, I register my own victory which is to drive the nature of it to its final state which is authoritarian. Messages in this forum are as sycophantic and  ridiculous as the messages generated using the notorious Fake Fan Email Confidence Trick.
Finally, on 16 April 2022, LateralusYellow capitulated. Shortly after I exposed his commercial involvement there. He packed his bags, changed venue, and since that date, he served a short stint as the main (paid) contributor of that only remaining Martin Armstrong echo chamber, the private Facebook Group "Martin Armstrong and Socrates Traders". He didn't last there long and has not been seen since then. Outed! So I won this battle in the end as well.
.

The Battle in the Bitcoin Forum

I spent about 500 messages to defeat him there. The forum with the topic Martin Armstrong Discussion has a special function as it is the platform that I used with my own account AnonymousCoder to exchange personal messages with Martin Armstrong who used his shill account Gumbi there.
 
I defeated him by exposing his lies while he was trying to recruit new victims for his scam business. He initially tried to re-purpose and completely control that forum by using multiple sock puppet identities. I documented the details in Martin Armstrong The Hyper Shill

The Next Steps?

The complete destruction of his Socrates gimmick. I already exposed its internals. As you can see in the following, I succeeded again.

 

Final: Socrates Operational Encirclement with Socrates Twitter Service.

The Armstrong Socrates Repo pretends to find the holy grail, the hidden order, in Armstrong's Forecast Arrays. At the same time, it appears to be promoting Armstrong's Socrates innocuously without any reference to or visible affiliation with Martin Armstrong.

It is mocking an Armstrong fantasy that seeks to find his perceived holy grail of forecasting. Read:

Does the Model Change Its Mind?
 

It is a blog page where he wrote years ago about a pet project that he had in his mind. This project would apply pattern recognition (his GMW Global Market Watch) to the Forecast Arrays charts with the aim to make the perfect forecasts based on them. Quote:

There is a third approach, which is PATTERN RECOGNITION. My personal goal is to write the code to merge all three and then see what happens. Perhaps then it will be able to definitively forecast everything precisely in a unified manner – my version of a Grand Unified Theory. That would be really awesome. I am not yet sure that can be accomplished. Nevertheless, it is my project in the spare time when I can find some.

On Mar 26 2023, there were still no Socrates Repo takers. This indicates to me that Socrates has completely lost its momentum. But later one of Armstrong's shill showed up there and got exposed and humiliated promptly.

You might want to visit that service and donate your Socrates Pro snapshots if you are still subscribed.

Armstrong is trapped

After wasting 11 years in jail, he spent years re-inventing his scams. He thought he had a solid business and his daughter, who supported him for years was hoping to inherit it. That was exactly what I wanted to prevent from happening. You can see how much they invested in his flagship service, which they proudly market as the "Socrates Platform".

Instead, I destroyed all illusions that he and anybody else ever had around Socrates.

Snake Oil Salesman Martin Armstrong, having nothing of substance to offer for sale, had no other choice than jumping on the bandwagons of anti-COVID-19 vaccination campaigners, mixed bag conspiracy theorists and Donald Trump MAGA goons.

Which is a trap again as I have described in The Hyperspace Attention Seeker 

These strange bed fellows discredit themselves and each other long term so there is no way out.

Quantitative Results

Apparently the Socrates service conversion factor from these folks is not high enough to replenish the pool of subscribers which leaks disillusioned clients at a high rate. This is again what I wanted to achieve. Here is my rough estimate of the results:

According to the statistics at ask-socrates.com page visits

The site has 182100 page visits per month.

With the bounce rate of  0.37:

182100 * (1-0.37) = 114723 visits per month.

This number  includes the same subscribed users multiple times. Factoring out these repeat visits by saying that subscribers visit every day of 30 days in a month:

114723 / 30 = 3824 subscribers.

That is an optimistic number because not all multiple page visitors are subscribers.

Given that, let's assume that on average, a repeat visitor is a subscriber with a $15 subscription. This would be the majority anyway.

Calculate in $ terms:

3824 subscribers * $15/subscriber/month = $57360 per month revenue.

Update October 2023: 5,400 visits per month with a bounce rate of 92%. This is a total collapse with no chance of recovery.

The End

My guess is that a revenue of roughly $700,000 a year is not enough to cover all expenses: Hosting costs for multiple web sites, computer programmers, the person who writes the daily Market Talk, the 3rd party market data provision, customer support and the initial cost of creating the web application service which had to be done twice. This is a significant up-front cost of several million $ which is hard to recover in the six years that Socrates has been online.

My guess is that he now needs to cut his losses. He is certainly putting his shills on a diet. I have noticed a dramatic decline of shill activity since around May 2023 and even before since the retirement of The reddit Armstrong Economics Fan Forum.

It does not help that his book business is going to face a hard landing. See my analysis Martin Armstrong Book: The Plot to Seize Russia. This disgusting book looks more like desperate marketing than substance.

I guess that Armstrong's Socrates service will not be active much longer. My view is confirmed by the fact that Armstrong's shell company in the United Arab Emirates seems to be in disarray or has gone into hiding. This is important because this company employs managers and programmers to run the Socrates service. For details, see:

Princeton FZ LLC

My conclusion was certainly not premature because on June 25 2023, he seems to feel lonely behind his paywall and posts:

PRIVATE BLOG – Is Someone There?

You can't make this up.

 

Aftermath: The Tide has turned against Martin Armstrong - irrevocably

On June 19, 2023, the perhaps otherwise questionable fintech industry, part of which has tried so far to ride Armstrong's wave as I noted in Armstrong Economics - The Scam Business Model Exposé and to a lesser extent in The Hyperspace Attention Seeker, now justifiably tries to capitalize on my complete destruction of Martin Armstrong's enigmatic heroism. Again, I am not writing this without a hard proof.
 
Watch this short video (please note that I am not in any way affiliated with them):



Conspiracy Theory as Excuse for turning off Socrates

On Jul 27, 2023, Martin Armstrong prepares the exit but not without selling himself as a an AI hero. In Here Come the AI Regulators – the United Nations he writes: (quote):
... Proposed solutions from the summit included a global registry for AI applications and a global AI observatory. I am opposed to that for the next step will demand a copy of your source code for regulators to review. Sorry, but Socrates will then be turned off. ...

... There is NO WAY I will deposit my code with any government agency, no less the United Nations knowing their goal is a one-world government. They would exploit my work and use it against society – not for its benefit.
...

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