QUESTION: Hello
I read all your blogs and prescribe to your market reports. I will now attend my first event in Rome. For me it all makes sense.
My questions is, which you must have gotten before, why don’t you offer a fund that is based on Socrates, so that we all your followers could invest in it.
Best regards
PaB
ANSWER: Yes, I get that question/request all the time. We are in negotiations with a government wealth fund that wants, not just to use the model, they want to open it up to accepting money to manage for individuals. The most critical thing to me is SECURITY. Before I could ever endorse any fund, there are basic questions of who controls the money and who makes the trading decisions.
All the studies have shown that they can have a fantastic model and still lose money because human emotions will override trading decisions more often than not. It takes conviction (experience) to trade for others. On top of that, it is easy to double your money when trading a fund of just a few million. Double a fund with hundreds of millions or billions is much harder and often impossible. Why? The greater the size, the more diverse you must be in trading. This is why a lot of the big players rely on us because it is the same model across all markets. A common ground.
People can claim to follow our model, but do they? Will they pull the trigger, get too greedy, or tremble at the thought of buying a falling knife? It is not always the model you are signing up for. It is the emotions of the trader behind the model that plays a very big role in decision making.
I was interviewed by a journalist in Munich. She knew I have been the largest strategic adviser in the world. When I testified before Congress, I had the equivalent of 50% of the national debt in assets under contract for advisory services. Her question was how could I step in during a crisis and make decisions that so many jobs and lives relied on? I told her I never thought of that. I just handled the crisis, saw the problems and acted. She told me she had interviewed people in other fields who were renowned for their skills. She explained to have interviewed a well-known brain surgeon who was one of the best. He had to quit when he began to realize that the slightest mistake could cause the patient to die or become paralyzed. Before he thought about that and just acted, he was the best in his field. She explained to me that this was the same pattern that was common in all the various people she had interviewed. I found that very interesting.
There is generally over $1 trillion in the room at a WEC. The last one in Orlando had 37 countries represented. To this day, they still do not teach hedge fund management, currency hedging, or anything that deals with the risks of the real world. I help some of the biggest wealth funds in the world that are trying to help society survive the chaos. I help multinational companies survive the foreign exchange machinations and I run around the globe meeting with central banks. I do these things because I hope to change things for the better insofar as illustrating that we are all connected globally. This runs counter-trend to politics where people think they can elect one person to create jobs or whatever domestically. They will preach always taxing the rich. But the rich can leave. The wage earners cannot export his labor to a more favorable jurisdiction. The larger the government, the lower the economic growth, because the average person is left with a diminishing pot of disposable income.
These are my goals to help turn the tide in the big picture. Nothing will ever grow in a garden by just constructing a fence. You have to plant seeds. Politics has to change. Dr. James McHenry, one of Maryland’s delegates to the Convention to create the US Constitution, wrote in his notes that were first published in The American Historical Review, vol. 11, 1906 (p. 618) which recorded the exchange of words with Benjamin Franklin. It read: “A lady asked Dr. Franklin, ‘Well Doctor what have we got a republic or a monarchy?’ ‘A republic,’ replied the doctor, ‘If you can keep it.’” While Franklin and Thomas Jefferson are my two most respected Founding Fathers, the extent of their knowledge of the history of Rome was colored by Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire published in 1776 and Franklin had even met with Gibbon reading passages prior to its publication. Their misguided view of the fall of the Roman Republic was colored by Cicero who supported the oligarchy led by Cato. Julius Caesar was cheered by the people and the oligarchs fled Rome. Cicero painted Caesar as a dictator when that was a political office which even he had held. It was this misinterpretation of history that led to the establishment of a Republic rather than a Democracy. For EVERY Republic collapses into an oligarchy.
I greatly appreciate all the emails asking me to return to funds management. Been there, done that. I still have trouble sleeping more than three hours straight because I was an international hedge fund manager. I was even named “Hedge Fund Manager of the Year,” along with many other things from “Economist of the Decade” to “Foreign Exchange Forecaster of the Year.” Socrates is the ONLY such system that covers the entire world and it has taught me so much over my life. It has enabled me to see the connections that otherwise would be far too complex to explore and record personally for there are far too many variables in play. Socrates is the ONLY system that can even write an original analysis in any market no less the fact that it does so on over 1,000 instruments worldwide every day providing objective analysis in areas that nobody else even covers.
I am not 25 and trying to make mountains of money. Fortunately, I have the luxury of not needing money in my life to survive. The more you make, the more you lose your personal freedom. Making billions does not change your lifestyle. That is money you cannot spend personally. As they say, it does not buy love, but it also attracts people who are not your friends. You will find yourself standing in the middle of a crowded room, and even if you are the center of attention, you are very much standing alone.
So there is a balance. You want to be comfortable to support your family and enjoy this gift of life. Go too far, and you lose that as you become more and more isolated because of the money. I have been the target of corrupt courts, evil bankers who trade against their own clients, and court-appointed receivers who seize the company and stop its publication at the direction of the CFTC and SEC who are on a short leash held by the bankers. I believe they even tried to kill me to stop the forecasts. I was in a coma for a few days, but to their shock, I survived.
Mountains of money are really just monopoly money for power-plays like buying companies etc.. You can fly around the world 1st class and stay in the best hotels every night for a year and you will not spend $1 million. Yes, you can buy things like art or houses. But you become a slave to your money. You do not own it. It dictates your life.
So from a personal perspective, I do not need money. I am trying to pass on what I have learned. Civilization is constructed by the accumulation of knowledge. So I have no intention of going back to fund management. That is a 7-day a week job, on call 24 hours a day. I will do my best to find someone and some organization I can trust before I would ever make any recommendation. There are already too many people claiming to use Socrates to raise money. Remember one thing: they can claim anything. It is also the integrity and experience of the trader to follow a model free of his own emotions. Their mistakes they will blame on a model. But it is always just theirs.
