Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently put to the Goon Central board:
Will the argument remain circular after the Campaign of Terror is brought to a full and complete stop (by the close of business today?).To a large extent, it will.
The true believers will remain true believers. They will no longer make use of death threats and board bannings and tens of thousands of acts of defamation and threats to get academic researchers fired from their jobs. But their minds will not change in a day or a week or a month. It is the minds of those on the edge that will change. I did not believe most of what I believe today on the morning of May 13, 2002. I learned because I heard things said that I had never heard said before. John Walter Russell changed his mind on many things too. Wade Pfau changed his mind on many things too. So did hundreds of others. More of that will happen once all the ugliness is put away. The percentage of the population that believes in Valuation-Informed Indexing will grow once honestzzz posting is permitted at every board and blog on the internet. People will start making money from Valuation-Informed Indexing once the Social Taboo that today stops people from talking about the last 30 years of peer-reviewed academic research is lifted. There will be new calculators created and the people who created them will become famous and seeing that will encourage others to create new calculators. There will be hundreds of books written exploring the ideas that I have explored at my web site over the past 10 years. There won’t be one academic researcher publishing research showing the superiority of VII over Buy-and-Hold, there will be hundreds. The Goons will be sent to prison. News of that will go viral. People will wonder how it could be that an investing strategy that is promoted as research-based ended up causing hundreds of people to get sent to prison. The new ideas will grow and grow and grow and grow and the old ideas will lose supporters and lose supporters and lose supporters and lose supporters. Eventually there will be no more circular discussions because there will be no more Buy-and-Holders. Buy-and-Hold was a mistake. The reason why the discussions have been circular is that there is no effective way to defend a mistake. The only hope that the Buy-and-Holders have had going back to the morning of May 13, 2002, was to turn the discussions into a circle of nonsense and add generous helpings of hate and anger and envy and malice and intimidation to the mix. Those days are coming to an end. The discussions will not be circular much longer. Once we give ourselves permission to discuss the peer-reviewed academic research of the past 30 years honestly, there is no more Buy-and-Hold. That’s a very, very, very good thing for all of us. There is no purpose in discussing Get Rich Quick strategies. They never work. We should be discussing research-based strategies. Once those who have posted in “defense” of Mel Lindauer and John Greaney are placed in jail cells, that’s what we all will be doing. Do I wish that prison cells did not have to enter the picture? Of course. Obviously. But that one was never my call, was it? My call was whether to post honestly on the errors in the Old School safe withdrawal rate studies or not. I elected to post honestly. And that has made all the difference. Rob |
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