The short answer
Martin A. Armstrong is an American analyst and forecaster, best known as the creator of the Economic Confidence Model — the 8.6-year cycle framework he has applied to markets, currencies and politics for more than four decades. He founded Princeton Economics International, writes at Armstrong Economics, and supplies the foreword to The Armstrong Economic Code.
He is also a genuinely divisive figure, and any useful profile has to hold both halves of that at once. What follows is the public record.
The forecasting years
Armstrong began publishing commodity market forecasts in 1973. The cycle work that became the ECM was first applied publicly in 1977, when he called a strong bullish trend in commodity prices. Over the following two decades he built a consultancy around cycle-based forecasting, trading under a series of names including Princeton Economics International, Princeton Economic Consultants, Economic Consultants of Princeton and Armstrong Report, Inc.
The technical claim he made for the operation was scale: a computer model tracking tens of thousands of variables, backed by what he has described as one of the largest economic databases anywhere, extending the record back far enough to test cycles across centuries rather than business cycles. How much of that infrastructure existed in the form described is one of the things his critics dispute.
A note on the word “Princeton”
This trips up almost everyone who reads about him. The Princeton in his company names refers to Princeton, New Jersey — the town the firm operated from — and not to Princeton University. Armstrong attended RCA Institutes and audited courses at the university, but did not take a degree. The association is frequently assumed in both directions, and it is worth getting straight before you weigh anything else.
The conviction
In 1999, Japanese fraud investigators alleged that Armstrong had collected money from Japanese investors and improperly commingled the funds. He was subsequently convicted in the United States on investment fraud charges, served eleven years, and was released in 2011.
That is a matter of public record, and leaving it out of a profile would make the profile useless. It is worth separating two questions that tend to get merged, though, because they have different answers and different kinds of evidence behind them. Whether Armstrong handled other people’s money properly was settled by a court. Whether his cycle framework describes something real is a separate question, and it is not settled — by the conviction or by anything else.
Readers can reasonably conclude that the first answer should colour how much benefit of the doubt the second gets. That is a fair reading. It is not the same as the question being closed.
After 2011
Since his release Armstrong has published prolifically at Armstrong Economics, applying the model to currencies, sovereign debt, commodities and political events. In 2016 he launched Socrates, a subscription analytics platform that his company describes as using his proprietary models, an extensive historical database and machine analysis to track international capital flows.
The case against, stated plainly.
Sceptics characterise the ECM as a numerological system whose apparent accuracy comes from fitting the model to events after they happen, and describe Socrates as a repackaging of the earlier framework rather than a new one. Some have questioned the technical sophistication of the software behind it.
More broadly, mainstream economics does not recognise a pi-derived business cycle, and would not accept a fixed wavelength as the right shape of explanation for expansions and contractions.
We link the criticism rather than bury it. A framework worth 302 pages should survive being looked at, and a reader who only encounters the case for it has not really been given the model.
Why Kerry Lutz wrote the book
Kerry Lutz is a recovering New York attorney turned financial broadcaster, and the founder and host of the Financial Survival Network, where he has published thousands of interviews with economists, investors and forecasters over more than a decade. Armstrong has been among his most frequent and most argued-with guests.
The Armstrong Economic Code is the result: years of those conversations and of reading Armstrong’s own output, compiled into a single volume for a general reader, organised around five ideas the book argues an investor should not forget. Armstrong contributed the foreword, which makes it an unusual thing — a book about a forecaster’s model, written by someone outside the operation, with the forecaster’s participation.
If you are trying to decide what to make of Armstrong, the model itself is the more useful place to start than the biography. Begin here →