At the age of 13, Martin Armstrong started working at a car dealership in Pennsauken, New Jersey. In 1965, at the age of fifteen, he bought a bag of rare Canadian pennies that would have made him a millionaire in a short time if he had sold them before they dropped in value.
Career start
Professional biography of Martin Armstrong began relatively early. After becoming a store manager, he and his partner opened a retail outlet for collectors. Then he was 21 years old. Armstrong moved from investing in gold coins to setting prices for commodities, including precious metals.
In 1973, Martin Armstrong began to make predictions about the situation in the goods market, but initially it was just a hobby. As his coin and stamp business failed ten years later, Armstrong began to devote much more time to his promising hobby. In 1983, Martin Armstrong, whose photo you see in front of you, began taking paid orders to predict various market situations.
Education and formation of views
After graduating from high school, Armstrong attended RCA College (now TCI College of Technology) in New York and took courses at Princeton University, although he did not receive a diploma or degree.
His economic philosophy was influenced by his lawyer father, whose grandfather lost his fortune in the stock market crash of 1929. Inspired by a number of films he watched in school, Martin Armstrong came to believe that assets do not correlate linearly with time and that, historically, a market crash occurs on average every 8 years.
Criminal cases
In 1999, Japanese investigators accused Armstrong of taking money from Japanese investors, misusing it, pooling funds with other investors' funds, and using fresh money to cover losses he suffered while trading. U. S. Attorneys called it a Ponzi scheme that netted Armstrong an estimated $3 billion in profits.
Apparently, Armstrong was assisted in his scheme by the New York Corporation, which made false account statements to appease our hero's investors. In 2001, the corporation agreed to pay $606 million in compensation for its involvement in the scandal.
Trial and sentence
Armstrong was indicted in 1999: Judge Richard Owen ordered more than $15 million in gold bars and antiques purchased with funds from foundations and privateinvestors. The list includes bronze helmets and a bust of Julius Caesar. Martin Armstrong handed over some items as compensation, but claimed that many of them were not in his possession. This has resulted in several lawsuits filed by the SEC and the CFTC.
Armstrong was jailed for 11 years for contempt of court and charged with fraud. He later admitted that he had defrauded corporate investors and improperly pooled client funds, and his losses, which he covered with that money, in commodities amounted to more than $700 million. He was released on September 2, 2011 after serving a total of 11 years in prison.
