The Secret Cycle: Is the financier Armstrong a con man, a crank, or a genius?
Posted: Sun Feb 15, 2015 5:03 pm
[quote=http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2009/ ... cret-cycle]
He opened a forecasting firm called Princeton Economics International, based in Princeton, New Jersey. His model singled out, in advance, the day of the October, 1987, crash. “Never did I expect this to work on such a precise time level,”? he wrote later, in an essay called “Understanding the Real Economy.”? “It made no sense. I personally assumed it was just a fluke. This took place on the minor halfway point up the first leg of the 8.6-year cycle, at 2.15 years.”? Afterward, he was messing around with numbers and realized that 8.6 years was exactly three thousand one hundred and forty-one days: 3,141, the number pi times a thousand. The cycle mystery had deepened. If pi was essential to the physical world, perhaps it somehow governed the markets, or the fluctuations in human behavior and mood that manifested themselves in the markets. It was, after all, the magic number associated with the swing of a pendulum, Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, and the Great Pyramid at Giza. Why not the vast monuments of data known as the financial markets? “Suddenly I saw it in my mind’s eye,”? he wrote. “There was a Geometry of Time itself.”?[/quote]
He opened a forecasting firm called Princeton Economics International, based in Princeton, New Jersey. His model singled out, in advance, the day of the October, 1987, crash. “Never did I expect this to work on such a precise time level,”? he wrote later, in an essay called “Understanding the Real Economy.”? “It made no sense. I personally assumed it was just a fluke. This took place on the minor halfway point up the first leg of the 8.6-year cycle, at 2.15 years.”? Afterward, he was messing around with numbers and realized that 8.6 years was exactly three thousand one hundred and forty-one days: 3,141, the number pi times a thousand. The cycle mystery had deepened. If pi was essential to the physical world, perhaps it somehow governed the markets, or the fluctuations in human behavior and mood that manifested themselves in the markets. It was, after all, the magic number associated with the swing of a pendulum, Heisenberg’s uncertainty principle, and the Great Pyramid at Giza. Why not the vast monuments of data known as the financial markets? “Suddenly I saw it in my mind’s eye,”? he wrote. “There was a Geometry of Time itself.”?[/quote]