Below are some relevant extracts from Martin Armstrong's The Analytical Shill. The article is generally about how research and analysts are conflicted and how analysts and investors and gurus can be blinded by their biases. The paragraphs below are straight from the article and will jump around a bit because I've just pasted them in order they appeared without all the extraneous stuff.
Martin Armstrong:
The metals were one favorite sector where they were constantly bullish – never bearish for 19 years. But hey, the market manipulators always needed cheer-leaders to get people to buy every high so they could sell.
On the Buffett Silver Manipulation, it was PhiBro who had a shill call the Wall Street Journal and tell them I was trying to manipulate silver down because I was short. When the WSJ & I argued and they refused to print the name Buffett they demanded I give them, that forced the CFTC to act calling me to ask where was it taking place. I told them London and they called the Bank of England. When they in turn ordered all silver brokers to show up the next morning, Buffett was forced to come out and admit he bought $1 billion worth of silver but denied he was manipulating the price.
You can ask the guys at GATA. They were well aware of the first 1993 Manipulation by PhiBro (Philips Brothers). They got in bed with Buffett when he stepped in to run Salomon Brothers after they got caught MANIPULATING the US Government bond auctions. They began buying silver and the CFTC stepped in demanding to know who their client was. Now if it had been anyone else, PhiBro’s reply was they refused to tell the name of the client. Forget the law. That does not apply to New York firms. The CFTC responded saying if they could not know who their client was, then PhilBro had to exist the trade. They did and of course made a fortune for the hawkers had all the little guys buy silver just in time for PhilBro to sell it to them.
This is WHY the manipulations began to move to London. Not only did PhiBro try to get me on board, their broker walked across the floor and SHOWED my broker Buffett’s orders at the low!
To create the fundamental, they moved inventory from New York to London. They were manipulating silver as always. Playing games with the inventories. They were moving silver from New York to London where the Buffett orders were being executed. This made the US warehouse inventories drop sharply. Go look at the analysts who talked silver up on that very fundamental. If they said there was a shortage of silver and you better buy it is going to $100, then you may be dealing with a shill or a biased analyst.
Many of the metals analysts with an agenda back then hated my guts. How dare I say there was a manipulation when it was at last silver was going up instead of down. Now I was part of some covert conspiracy hell bent on suppressing the metals because I dared to say “they are back” (manipulators) and the target was $7 by January 1998. To this crowd, a manipulation is always to the downside and never up.
Go check the recommendations of analysts back then. See where they stood. The best one I heard was silver was in demand in London because it was .9999 there instead of .999 in New York.
GATA began to see the same nonsense that I did during the early 1990s. It was just that I saw the manipulations as being UNBIASED. In other words, they did not care what they manipulated as long as there was a guaranteed profit. They manipulated even base metals such as rhodium. They manipulated platinum in league with Russian politicians who strangely recalled all platinum to take an inventory. Hell, Ford Motor Company filed suit over that manipulation.
How do you distinguish a REAL bull market from a bullshit manipulation?
Most manipulations can be seen easily when you look at a market in terms of a Basket of Currencies. Why? Because a REAL bull market must take place ONLY when it rises in terms of ALL currencies. Unless that takes place, investors in some countries will be sellers while others are buyers. Here is a classic example as to why we were bearish on gold for 19 years despite the hate mail and the best attacks of the shills. The manipulators ALWAYS need to get the metals guys worked up into a fever to sell to them to make their profits and big bonuses.
So when analysts only espouse one side, be very careful. For no matter what the market, there is always a time to rally and a time to pause. Nothing is ever straight up or straight down. Anyone who portrays that is either ignorant of the market behavior, or a shill – paid cheer-leader. Putting out bogus research has been the name of the game. Unfortunately, there are just some people who are hardcore.
Markets are the same mix as politics. There are people who simply believe in a given position and no matter what you say or what evidence you present to the contrary, they will never believe it. Thus, I have NEVER been interested in preaching to the choir. I have always preferred the independent thinker – the investor who wants to really learn about market behavior and not read someone who simply supports their never changing view of the world. Nor am I interested in exchange words with those who may not be shills, but are just part of a particular hardcore group. I am cheered only when I agree, and if I disagree, I am despised. But that is expected in the retail world – NEVER in the professional institutional world.
There cannot be a perpetual bull market in anything anymore than you can stand there with your arm straight up in the air. Oh shore, you can do it briefly. But then your arm will feel so heavy you can no longer keep it up. Everything takes a pause for the same reason you sleep at night. Nothing can maintain the same energy output all the time. People come up with all sorts of excuses why they are right yet the market declines. Usually it is some conspiracy of a mythical group so powerful that they just win.
Markets collapse because EVERYONE who ever thought of buying has bought. They are now counting their profits for the next eternity. Something happens and scares the herd. Suddenly, the long try to sell but there is no bid. The market collapses in the blink of an eye. Why, because the majority has already bought and there are no new buyers to keep the momentum going. It is never some mythical short player preventing the upward advance. It is just not time yet.
Philip Tetlock, a professor of organizational behavior at the Haas Business School at the University of California-Berkeley, has been following the so called experts for some 25 years studying primarily the institutional forecasting skill of political experts. He had signed up nearly 300 academics, economists, policymakers and journalists keeping track of more than 82,000 forecasts plotting them against real-world results. He analyzed not just what the experts said but how they reasoned and how quickly they changed their mind in the face of contrary evidence. He also tracked how they reacted when they were wrong, which was of course the majority of the time. Most could not even beat a random forecast generator.
Tetlock's research did discover that there was one kind of expert turns out consistently more accurate forecasts than others. The most important factor he discovered was not how much education or experience the experts had but how they actually thought. The best forecasters were those who were self-critical, eclectic thinkers who were constantly updating their beliefs when faced with contrary evidence instead of clinging to dogma. He found the best were suspicious of grand schemes and conspiracies and were more practical about their predictive ability. The less successful forecasters clung to the same ideas never wavering pushing the same idea to the breaking point of absurdity. These types of people were more often embraced by the media because they loved to articulate and persuade as to why their idea explained absolutely everything.
Tetlock uncovered widespread forecasting failures. Of course, there is the herd of followers who for some reason want a GURU and unrealistically expect infallibility. This may reinforce the pundits that like to put on a show and claim why they are personally better than everyone else and only their ideas are correct and when wrong, it is the result of some giant conspiracy, not their lack of ability to forecast.
The key to the future lies in the UNBIASED view of whatever it is. You cannot be married to a single position EVER! Tetlock points out that a successful analyst always qualifies their arguments with "however" and "perhaps," while the dangerous analysts build up momentum with "moreover" and "all the more so" as they try to be more entertaining. The dangerous analyst wants to keep the clients happy and to a large extent preaches to the choir telling them what they want to hear.
The one thing about markets is that the MAJORITY just have to be wrong! Why? They are the fuel that drives the market up and down. Trap the majority either long or short and you create the fuel for the next move in the opposite direction.
So for now, it is far better to let the markets speak. As I stated at just about every conference I have ever given, there is ONLY one analyst that is never wrong – that is the market itself. The key to successful trading & forecasting is to learn how to let the market speak to you and go with the flow. It does so in both TIME as well as PRICE. Turning points are NEVER specific events, but inflection points where highs and lows take place. It would have been nice to have a low first and a more orderly advance afterwards. But markets like to create the worst of all worlds.
So for anyone who thinks he can beat the game as an analyst or trader, must remember one thing. The market is always right. To survive, we have to align ourselves with the market and listen when it speaks. This is not a game for arrogance and prognostications fixed in stone steeped in bias and dogma. History repeats – but also with a slight twist. So how high will gold go? It is a question of CONFIDENCE.
You will ALWAYS be your greatest adversary, for to succeed you must conquer your own biases, fears, and doubts. You cannot do that as Philip Tetlock has keenly demonstrated with fixed ideas. If you are married to a philosophy and will not yield and blame everyone else for conspiring against you and that is the reason something has not yet unfolded, you better see a shrink.
