COMMENT: Marty,
Each day I read reports from so called reputable people expressing what they think might happen given the backdrop today. It is laughable. Most do this based on superficial analysis or cursory comparisons with things that appear to line up, appear to rhythm, to paraphrase M Twain. What a joke.
I say this here because as I relearn what I once thought I knew, analyze my mistakes using real data…it brings me back to you and your marvelous study of history, your database, which is incomparable, and your willingness…let’s call it humility, to let Socrates make the call. Just remarkable.
What this has done for me is save countless hours reading nonsense and instead focusing on the data. Not trying to push my opinions on a trade and expect the market will follow, but respect what is there and not force things. Nothing is absolute, no one is always right. But today there are so many people who are flat out wrong, who claim to be right…just give them time, it explains why the government fails repeatedly…because these are the people who, like Keynsians or socialists claim…just give it more money…it will work. Right. History always seems to tell a different story.
MS
REPLY: Thank you. What I try to get across is what I have learned from my clients. Because I was perhaps the only international analyst in foreign exchange back in the 70s and 80s, we ended up with the largest client base that was so diverse that it compelled me to look at the world through everyone else’s eyes. I remember doing an institutional conference in Zurich probably around 1982-1983. People started flying in to attend from around the world. There were people from the USA and Canada as well as Germany who traveled to Zurich.
I remember doing a forecast on gold after I had provided a forecast in Swiss francs. I had said that gold would rise in dollars, but that the dollar would decline against the Swiss. The Swiss aptly said if they bought gold they would lose. I realized at that time that forecasts had to be based upon the individual currency. The above chart showed the start difference in a forecast for gold based upon the currency.
Everything I have learned has come from my clients. I have designed Socrates to be an international tool so everyone around the world can do their own technical analysis and use our tools on any market around the world expressed in their own currency.
I was a history buff. I am not the all knowledgable soothsayer. My studies are probably the most comprehensive when it comes to economics and monetary history. I am not the one who cares about every war and how they won or lost if it had no relevance to the monetary system and economics of the time.
I bought my first Roman coin probably around 1963 for $10. I was fascinated that I could actually have a piece of history. I then learned that much of history was not only preserved by the coins, but it was confirmed by the coinage.
For example, we know when Titus opened the Colosseum because he issued a coin to announcing it. We know that Brutus did assassinate Julius Caesar on the Ides of March (15th) in 44 BC because he issued a coin bragging about it. Probably the rarest of all Roman coins is the Saturninus gold aureus. It is one of two in existence which proved the academics all wrong and the book “Historia Augusta” was real.
Roman coins enabled me to reconstruct the world monetary system to answer the question — how did Rome fall? This eliminated all the opinions. I did not stop with Rome. I reconstructed the entire world. It was to ELIMINATE opinion, which to me was biased and worthless. I have mentioned that in high school I had to read “The Great Crash of 1929” by Galbraith. Never in there did he ever talk about the sovereign defaults, which I only discovered by coming across a copy of Herbert Hoover’s memoirs in an antique store in London. That meant I could not trust the history books and I had to investigate the raw sources.
I am trying to put this all together in a book which will probably be 5 or 6 volumes. But it has to be authoritative for it is breaking new ground on a global scale.
