March 19, 2009

Martin A. Armstrong says that the market crash will begin in earnest around March 19, 2009.

Who is Armstrong and is he worth listening to?

Yes - Armstrong Is Worth Listening To

Armstrong became a millionaire at age 15.

He was a frequent contributor to academic journals and was often sought for comment on financial topics.

Armstrong supposedly called the top of the Japanese market to the day, as well as other historical market events. He is certainly very bright, and a number of people think he is a genius.

Armstrong provides exact dates for sudden shifts in the market (and political events), and claims that on March 19, 2009, the market will begin a cataclysmic crash, and will not bottom out until June 13, 2011.

No - Armstrong Is a Fake

Armstrong pleaded guilty to fraud, and "admitted to deceiving corporate investors and improperly commingling client funds in a case that prosecutors said resulted in commodities losses of more than $700 million."

Before even beginning to serve his jail time for fraud, he served a 7 year contempt sentence after failing to surrender $14.9 million in gold bars and rare coins to the government. The judge said that Armstrong failed to turn over assets that would help pay back defrauded investors (see this).

Armstrong and his attorney claim he was framed for his political views, for blowing the whistle on market manipulation and perhaps for developing a system that accurately forecasts events. In other words, Armstrong says that he is a political prisoner, like the Russian economist Kondratiev, who was jailed and then murdered for his political views.

Inconsistent Dates

In prior writings, using the same formula, Armstrong gave the date for the start of the crash as April 23, 2009. This does not appear to be an intentional adjustment in the date, rather an error in simple calculation (he used the formula 2009.3 to calculate both dates).

Such a basic error may undermine his credibility . . . or it may be the absent-minded mistake of a genius who is so focused on giant concepts that he made a basic math error.

Bottom Line

If the stock market starts to crash in earnest exactly on either March 19th (Armstrong's current forecast) or April 23rd (his prior forecast), then I will assume that Armstrong is really onto something with his timing system, and I will take it very seriously.

In that case, I will take his forecast of a June 13, 2011 market bottom as actionable intelligence. In other words, I will start buying back into the stock market soon after June 13, 2011 (assuming, of course, that the governmental systems which govern the stock markets still exist in their current form).