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Recent Posts:
- “If Buy-and-Hold Were a Real Thing, We Never Would Have Seen a Single Abusive Post, Much Less Any of the Criminal Stuff.”
- Valuation-Informed Indexing #689: People Are Afraid to Post Even Anonymously in Support of Market Timing
- Valuation-Informed Indexing #688: Is It Mean to Tell People That Their Portfolio Is Worth Only 50 Percent of What They Think It Is Worth?
- “The Fact That 4 Percent Barely Survived When Prices Were at Insane Levels Shows That 4 Percent Is an Extreme High-Risk Withdrawal Rate for Retirements Beginning at Insanely High Valuation Levels.”
- “There’s Not a Switch That You Can Flip to Have Everyone Drop Buy-and-Hold and Adopt Valuation-Informed Indexing on the Day That Buy-and-Hold Is Discredited by New Research. People Have To Be Educated As To What the New Research Says and Then They Need To Ask Questions About It and Ponder the Answers They Hear and Gradually Become Persuaded of the Merit of the Findings of the New Research.”
- “Demand for Stocks Is Insufficiently Flexible”
- Buy-and-Hold Goon to Rob: “We Are Still Waiting for You to Say Those Words. Until Then, Expect to See the Same Horrible Results.”
- Buy-and-Hold Goon to Rob: ” Each Person Decides What They Want to Buy at the Price That Is Being Offered. No One Is Forced to Buy Stock, Like Anything Else.”
- “Once a Board Tolerates Abusive Behavior Aimed at Supressing the Discussion of the Research, That Board Becomes a Fraudulent Entity.”
- Buy-and-Hold Goon to Rob: “The World You Want to Exist Simply Can’t Happen. If It Did Happen, You Would Be Outbid By Other Investors Eager to Snap Up Those Amazing Bargains.”
- “Stocks Are Extremely Risky Today. The CAPE Value Is Just a Notch Below the Level That Brought on the Great Depression. But That Is a 100 Percent Optional Situation. We Could Open Every Site to Honest Posting. We Could All Work Together As a Nation of People to Pull That CAPE Value Down to a Reasonable Level.”
- “The Bennett/Pfau Research Shows That Most of the Risk of Stock Investing Results From Investors Failing to Act to Rein in Irrational Exuberance (Through Market Timing!).”
- “Shiller’s Research Was Not Available at the Time the Buy-and-Hold Strategy Was Being Developed. So the People Who Were Putting It Together Had to Take a Wild Shot in the Dark.”
- “Bans Are Not the Norm. If I Had Not Been Hugely Successful, You Goons Would Never Have Insisted on a Single Ban.”
- “Do You Think It Would Have Been Better If I Had Kept It Zipped re the Error in the Greaney Retirement Study?”
- “The Last Thing That a Buy-and-Holder Wants to Hear Is What the Research Says. Research and Buy-and-Hold Cannot Co-Exist. They Are Opposites.”
- “The More People There Are Who Practice Market Timing, the Quicker Prices Will Correct.”
- “People Were Afraid to Tell the Story of How Cigarettes Cause Cancer in That Day Just As They Are Afraid Today to Tell the Story of How Retirement Studies That Lack Valuation Adjustments Eventually Cause Failed Retirements.”
- “If the Only Way That the People Who Advocate Buy-and-Hold Believe That They Can Maintain Confidence In It Is To Deny People Access To Challenges To It, Buy-and-Hold Is a Gravely Flawed Strategy.”
- Valuation-Informed Indexing #687: Investor Irrationality Is Scary — That’s Why We Are So Reluctant to Talk About It
- “Getting the Numbers Right in Retirement Studies Is Important.”
- Buy-and-Hold Goon to Rob: “Which Expert Has Publicly Stated That Greaney Made an Error?”
- “Say That Each Time Someone Says ‘There Might Be an Alternate Universe Where Market Timing Is Not 100 Percent Required for Every Investor, You Never Know,’ $10,000 Worth of Wealth Is Destroyed. Consider How Many Times That Statement Has Been Made and You Can See Why We Are Likely to Lose Trillions and Trillions in the Next Buy-and-Hold Crisis.”
- “The Title of the Book Is ‘Investing for Humans.’ That’s a Bold Title. Has There Never Before Been a Book Showing Humans How to Invest in Stocks? The Incredible Reality Is That There Has Not Ever Been One.”
- “There Were People Who Believed That the Greaney Retirement Study Was Real”
- Valuation-Informed Indexing #686: It’s Not Enough to Tolerate Market Timing — We Need to Encourage It
- Buy-and-Hold Goon to Rob: “Gee Rob, You Finally Convinced All. I Have Alerted All the Goons Around the World and Instructed Them to Open Up the Entire Internet, Including All of the Investment Boards, With Orders to Give You Full Access to Every Site and Board”
- “The World Will Do What the World Elects to Do”
- “When You’re Telling People Why They Need to Engage in Market Timing, You’re Telling Them Why the Strategy That Posits That Market Timing Is Not 100 Percent Required Is So Dangerous. Buy-and-Holders Don’t Want People Hearing That Message.”
- Buy-and-Hold Goon to Rob: “There Are Numerous Sites Where Shiller and CAPE Are Discussed. The Fact That You Have Been Banned at a Number of Investing Sites Does Not Mean That the Topic Is Not Discussed.”
- “When Someone Discovers Something Dramatically New, the World Doesn’t Flip a Switch So That Everyone Comes Around to the New Idea in 10 Minutes. There Has to be a Process of Questioning and Discussing and Exploring Implications Before People Feel Comfortable Moving on to Something New.”
- “Working Through the Abusive Stuff Is the Price That Anyone Who Cares About Getting Stock Investing Right Has to Pay in the Year 2023 to Get to the Learning Stuff.”
- Valuation-Informed Indexing #684: “Investing for Humans” Is a Strange Title for a Book
- “Human Beings Did Not Come to Planet Earth With an Instruction Booklet on How Stock Investing Works. We Have Been Learning Over Time. We Achieved a Major Advance in 1981. We Need to Give Ourselves Permission to Talk About It and Learn From It.”
- “Is There Any CAPE Level at Which Stocks No Longer Represent a Bargain According to Your Perspective on Things?”
- “What Do You Say When There’s a Price Crash? Do You Say That It Just Happened, That Nobody Knows Why?”
- Buy-and-Hold Goon to Rob: “If You Had a Serious Life Issue Right Now and Needed $100k to Cover the Cost, Would You Be Able to Do So? Do You Own a Home for Your Retirement Years? Can You Afford to Go on a Retirement Trip? How Is That Playing Out for You?”
- Buy-and-Hold Goon to Rob: “No One Else Thinks There is an Error, So It Doesn’t Need to be Fixed. “
- Buy-and-Hold Goon to Rob: “Except for This Board, Everyone Else Follows the Laws and Social Norms. You Are Widely Banned and Ignored. Your Wife Dumped You. The Problem Is You and Your Behavior. Until You Learn That and Fix Your Problems, Nothing Will Ever Change for You.”
- “The Market Is Not Free for So Long as Honest Posting re the Peer-Reviewed Research Is Not Permitted. I Agree That We Would Have Something Close to an Efficient Market If We Permitted Honest Posting re the Research at Every Site. But That’s Not the Situation That Applies. A Free Market Is One in Which the Information Needed to Make Good Decisions Is Easy to Access.”
- “When You Take Valuations (the Most Important Consideration in Determining What Is Safe) Out of the Story, the Number You Come Up With Could Be Just About Anything. In Some Cases, It Is a Wildly High Number. In Other Cases, It Is a Wildly Low Number. In Still Other Cases, It Is Not Too Terribly Off the Mark. It Is Essentially a Random Number. It Is the Number That Would Apply in a World in Which Valuations Did Not Affect Long-Term Returns, a World That Those Who Follow the Peer-Reviewed Research Should Have Stopped Worrying Too Much About in 1981. The 4.0 Percent Number is the Safe Withdrawal Rate for the Dark Ages of the Investing Advice Field, the Safe Withdrawal Rate for a Time-Period in Which Shiller’s Amazing Research Did Not Yet Exist.”
- “If the World Were Open Today to Hearing About the Dangers of Get Rich Quick/Buy-and-Hold Strategies, the CAPE Value Would Not Be 31. That CAPE Value Suggests an Insane Level of Emotion. The More Emotional We Are About Stock Investing, the Less Open We Are to Taking the Peer-Reviewed Research Into Consideration.”
- “There’s a Phrase in That Article That Makes My Blood Run Cold. It Refers to ‘the Glorious Bull Market.’ To Me That’s Like Referring to ‘My Glorious Brain Cancer.’”
- “Valuation-Informed Indexing Is Research-Based. Buy-and-Hold is Emotions-Based. Advocates of the Two Models Speak Two Different Languages.”
- “A Good Number of the Site Owners Loved My Stuff. You Goons Today Have an Influence on What Is Said at Our Boards Far Greater Than What Your Numbers Suggest Your Influence Should Be.”
- Valuation-Informed Indexing #684: It Took Me a Long Time to Say That Buy-and-Hold Is Dangerous
- “Those Latter Realities Are Being Suppressed at This Time So That the Former Realities Can Remain Realities a Bit Longer. If As a Nation of People We Were to Give Full Recognition to the Latter Realities, the Former Realities Would Change. We Would Collectively Set the Stock Price at a Very Different Place. I Would Like to See That Happen. I Would Like to See All of the Realities Given Recognition.”
- “Say That Wade Had Flipped of His Own Volition. If That Were So, the Fact That There Was a Time When He Believed That ‘Yes, Virginia, Valuation-Informed Indexing works!’ Would Mean That Honest Posting re the Research Should Be Permitted. Wade Holds a Ph.D. in Economics From Princeton. If Someone With That Background Found Merit in Market Timing Even for a Brief Time-Period, It Is Something That We Should Be Permitted to Discuss at Every Site. People Should Be Able to Hear Both Sides and Make Up Their Own Minds.”
- “Do You Think Irrational Exuberance Is a Good Thing or a Bad Thing? I Think It Is a Very Bad Thing. I Think of Irrational Exuberance as the Cancer of the Personal Finance World. So Somehow It Doesn’t Impress Me Too Much When You Say: “Hey! We Managed to Let the Cancer Get More Out of Control This Time Than It Ever Did at any Earlier Time in U.S. History.’”
- “Those Who Treat Irrational Exuberance as Real Always Feel Threatened Because It Is Impossible to Have a Quiet Confidence in Something That Is Inherently Irrational. When You Place Your Confidence in Something Irrational, You Have a Fear That It Is Going to be Taken Away at Any Moment.”
- Buy-and-Hold Goon to Rob: “What You Call Research Is Your Opinion of What One Guy Said. You Even Stated That Shiller Doesn’t Say What You Say.
- “No One Enjoys Suffering. But Say That You Were a Soldier and You Were Sent on a Mission That Put Your Life at Risk. Would You Say “I Won’t Go Because It Will Hurt My Family If I Get Killed?” Sometimes There Are Bigger Things at Stake Than One’s Own Family.”
- “There Were Numerous References in the Movie to How He Was an Idiot Who Was Going to Lose His Job. It Was an Important Theme. The Guys Who Believed in the Pre-Research Stuff Hated Him as Much as You Goons Hate Me. Research Was as Much of a Threat to Them as It is to You.”
- “There Were Regular Suggestions That the Brad Pitt Character Would Soon Be Out of a Job, That He Was Unemployable Because He Was Going With the New, Exciting Idea Rather Than Sticking With the Old, Worn-Out One. Then, When Things Flipped, He Was Offered the Biggest Contract Anyone in His Field Had Ever Been Offered. That’s the Way It Works. New Ideas Are Worthless Until People Give Up on the Old Ideas and the New Ideas Come to be Perceived as the Only Ideas Worth Having.”
- “Awareness of the Error Corrects It. Irrational Exuberance Is Self-Correcting SO LONG AS INVESTORS HAVE EASY ACCESS TO THE INFORMATION NEEDED TO MAKE RATIONAL CHOICES. A Ban on Honest Posting Neutralizes the Part of the Brain That Wants to Make Rational Choices by Permitting the Investor to Enjoy His Delusion Without the Unccomfortable Feeling That He Has Permitted His Risk Profile to Get Out of Whack.”
- “We Have Elected as a Nation of People Not to Apply the Laws That Apply in Every Other Realm of Human Endeavor in the Investment Advice Realm Because the Mistake That Was Made There (the Claim That Market Timing/Price Discipline Is Not Always 100 Percent Required for All Investors) Was so Terrible That It Is Hard to Face Up to It. I Think We Need to Face Up to It.”
- “It’s Something Inherent in Human Nature. We Have Had Bull Markets Since the First Stock Market Opened for Business. And They Have Always Hurt Us. Why Have We Not As a Nation of People Worked Up the Will to Stop Them From Forming? That’s What Shiller’s Research Is About. That’s What My Journalism Is About. It’s About Changing the Nature of the Stock Investing Project in a Fundamental Way.”
- Buy-and-Hold Goon to Rob: “In Social Situations, They Are Going To Be Polite and Not Say Anything To Hurt Your Feelings. When They Learn of Your Divorce as Part of Your Conversation Regarding Investing/Finance, Just Look at Their Facial Reaction. They Now Know You Are a Train Wreck.”
- “I’ve Been in Social Situations Where I Meet Someone New and I Tell Them My Story, the Board Bannings and the Divorce and My Inability to Build My Internet Writing Business and So On. I Have Never Seen a Negative Reaction. People Generally Don’t Know What to Make of It. They Have Never Heard of Something Like This.”
- Valuation-Informed Indexing #683: Is There a Case for Using the Historical Surviving Withdrawal Rate for Planning Purposes?
- Valuation-Informed Indexing #682: The CAPE Value Translates Emotion Into a Number — That’s Huge!
- Valuation-Informed Indexing #681: Language That Could Be Added to the Buy-and-Hold Retirement Studies to Put Readers on Notice of Their Risks
- Valuation-Informed Indexing #680: The Shift to Valuation-Informed Indexing Is an All-or-Nothing Thing
- Valuation-Informed Indexing #679: If Valuations Can’t Be Used for Market Timing, Shiller’s Research Serves No Purpose
- Valuation-Informed Indexing #678: How Has the Mood of Investors Changed Over the Past 27 Years?
- Valuation-Informed Indexing #677: Stock Losses Are a Real Setback Even Though One Day Prices Will Recover
- Valuation-Informed Indexing #676: Shiller Quantified What Was Previously Thought To Be Non-Quantifiable
- “If There Is No Strategic Change That Follows from Shiller’s Research, I Have a Hard Time Understanding Why He Was Awarded a Nobel Prize.”
- “Research Looks at Historical Outcomes. The Difference Is That Research Looks at All Outcomes, Not Just Those in the Present Day or the Recent Past.”
- “Are You Able to Identify Any Strategic Change That Was Necessitated by the Publication of Shiller’s Nobel-Prize-Winning Research Showing That Valuations Affect Long-Term Returns?”
- “Anyone Who Says That Market Timing/Price Discipline Is Required When Buying Stocks Separates Himself From the Pack by Doing So.”
- “Even If You Post Anonymously About the Realities of Stock Investing, You Have Still Separated Yourself From the Pack”
- “What Matters to Me Is the Journalism Question — Permitting People to Have the Discussions They Want to Have — and the Human Psychology Question — the Incredible Ability We Humans Possess to Engage in Self-Deception, Even When It Does Us Great Financial Harm.”
- Buy-and-Hold Goon to Rob: “Your Typical Diatribe About People Not Having Information Is a Bunch of B.S. Everyone Has Access to All the Information That Is Publicly Available.”
- “I Had Also Hoped to Go Over Why Trying to Get “Everyone” to Market Time Wouldn’t Work and Why VII in General Would Not Work “
- “I Want Things to go According to the Published Rules of the Sites and the Laws of the United States. I Don’t Believe That We Can Indefinitely Have a Situation Where the Laws and Social Norms That Apply in Every Field of Human Endeavor Other Than the Investment Advice Field Do Not Apply in the Investing Advice Field.”
- “When You Are Dealing With a Revoltionary Advance in the Understanding of a Subject, the Talking-It-Over Part Is an Essential Stage of the Learning Process.”
- “We Have Laws and Cultural Norms That Apply to Everything in the United States Except for Buy-and-Hold. The Cultural Norm Is That, When You Learn That You Made a Mistake at an Earlier Time When All of the Information Was Not Available to You, You Correct the Mistake and Move on to Better Things.”
- “Using Valuation-Based Market Timing Would Not Have Outperformed the Market Using Information Available at the Time of the Investment Decision.”
- “As a Nation of People We Have Given You Veto Power Over What Is Said About Stock Investing on the Internet. It Was a Mistake to Give You That Power. But You Have Been Given It. Your Power Is a Reality of the Stock Investing World in the Year 2023. So We Need to Understand Why We Have Done That.”
- Valuation-Informed Indexing #675: Only Those Who Engage in Market Timing Are Truly Following a “Strategy”
- “The People Who Developed the Buy-and-Hold Concept Did Not Start Out With the Idea of Bringing on Yet Another Economic Crisis. THEY MADE A FREAKIN’ MISTAKE.”
- “There Are Millions of Smart and Good People Who Believe That Buy-and-Hold Is a Sound Strategy. I Do Not Agree With Them. But I Very Much Believe That They Should Be Permitted and Encouraged to Participate in All Discussions.”
- “I Didn’t Know That Anything Was Going On On the Morning of May 13, 2002. So Everything Written in the Book will Be Things That I LEARNED By Having the Courage to Say What I Believe and Then Watch the Reactions.”
- “How Is It That There Are Site Administrators Who Agreed to Ban Me Because I Pointed Out an Error in a Study That People Were Using to Plan Their Retirements? That’s an Issue of Huge Public Policy Significance.”
- Buy-and-Hold Goon to Rob: “Research Is Not Banned. You Are Banned.”
- “The Price That Is Set at a Time When Honest Posting re the Research Is Banned Is Obviously Not the Price That Would Apply If Honest Posting re the Research Were Permitted.”
- “Do You Think That the Buy-and-Holders Support This Cover-Up? I Surely Do Not Think That.”
- “Shiller’s Research Does No Good If We Are Not All Free to Talk About It At Every Site.”
- “The Odd Thing, of Course, Is That Shiller Never States in His Book in a Clear and Direct Way That All Stock Investors Should Be Engaging in Market Timing at All Times. Why Wouldn’t He Say That?”
- Buy-and-Hold Goon to Rob: “You Didn’t Want to Discuss Investing Matters. You Wanted to Make the Discussion About You and Your History at Other Sites.”
- Valuation-Informed Indexing #674: The Stock Market Craves Information It Has Been Denied
- Valuation-Informed Indexing #673: The Stock Market Is an Information Processing Machine
- “What Will Happen Once We Have Opened Every Discussion Board and Blog on the Internet to Honest Posting re the Last 42 Years of Peer-Reviewed Research, Without a Single Exception? Will There Be Even One Person in This Field NOT Talking to Me Then?”
- “”You’ve Said That 10,000 Times. I Heard You the First 10,000 Times. I Don’t See Any Particular Need for You to Say It 10,000 Additional Times.”
- “The Peer-Reviewed Research Looks at the Entire History of the Stock Market While Your Scoreboard Is How Things Feel at a Moment in Time When Irrational Exuberance Is Out of Control and the CAPE Value Is Scary High.”
- “I Don’t Need Any Specialized Knowledge and Training To Be Able to Read the Title of a Book. The Title of Shiller’s Book is ‘Irrational Exuberance.’ Does That Sound Like a Good Thing to You?”
- Valuation-Informed Indexing #672: Buy-and-Hold Is a Price-Indifferent Strategy — That’s Not Good!
- ” I Was a Buy-and-Holder Because I Had Heard That Buy-and-Holders Believed in Using the Peer-Reviewed Research As Guidance on How to Invest.”
- “The Vast Majority of Buy-and-Holders Doesn’t Even Know About the Error They Made. The Vast Majority of Buy-and-Holders Follows Buy-and-Hold Strategies Themselves. Are They Engaging in a Conspiracy Against Themselves? Does That Not Seem a Little Far-Fetched?”
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