Armstrong pursued his studies of economics searching for answers behind the cycle of boom and busts that plagued society both in Princeton and in London. He began to do forecasting as a service to institutional cash market players in gold that included Swiss banks. As currency also began to float in 1971, Armstrong found the gyrations thought-provoking and began to notice the same oscillations that appeared in stocks in 1966, real estate into 1970, and gold as it rose to $42 in 1968 and fell below the official price of $35 in 1970, were manifesting in the rise and fall of currency prices. Armstrong became one of the very first to being forecasting currencies.
Armstrong had the unusual background in computer science in hardware and software and was perhaps the first to begin to apply his diverse knowledge from two fields together. He began creating a global model in the mid-70s and was publishing the results from about 1972. His search for answers to the oscillations of the economy led him to conclude it was what people believed more so than realty. Of this maxim has been stated as SELL THE RUMOR, BUY THE NEWS. He named the major long-term global model the Economic Confidence Model, which fine-tuned the business cycle to 8.6 years, when most, including former Fed Chairman Paul Volker, accepted that the business cycles was about 8 years. This model has become famous for since the subsequent discovery that its accuracy may be based upon the fact that it is the perfect business cycle [(365.25 days x 8.6 = 3141.15 days) = Pi]
