Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently put to another blog entry at this site:
“Prosecutors respond to the pressures placed on them.”
If death threats were made, why would there need to be pressure. Either it happened or it didn’t.
It’s common for death threats advanced on the internet not to be prosecuted, Anonymous. As you well know.
What is different about this case is that the death threats were employed as part of a 12-year cover-up of errors made in a retirement study.
My guess is that the crime for which you will be prosecuted is financial fraud.
There are people who came to think it was a funny joke to employ insanely abusive tactics on the internet so that they could control what was said on discussion boards or blogs at which they participated. The people who engage in this behavior are losers (“loosers” in internet lingo) who have never achieved much with their real-world identities. By engaging in these tactics on the internet, they were able to tell themselves that they possessed an importance that they could never hope to achieve through legitimate means.
Most people hate these tactics. Most people refrain from participating in internet discussions because they do not want to get mixed up with these losers in any way, shape or form. This is why every board and blog on the internet has rules protecting all us Normal from you Goons.
It was inevitable that sooner or later the mistake of tolerating the Goon tactics was going to cause big trouble. This is the case in which it happened. Greaney got an important number wrong in a retirement study. I pointed it out. The community showed great enthusiasm for the learning experience that followed. Greaney experienced intense feelings of embarrassment. He called on his Goon Squad for help. Motley Fool elected to make a smelly buck off the people addicted to Buy-and-Hold strategies rather than to enforce its published rules in a reasonable way. Everyone paying attention got it that it is a felony to cover up errors in studies that millions of people use to plan their retirements. So it became a priority not only to cover up the errors in the retirement studies but also to cover up the cover-up and then to cover up the cover-up of the cover-up and on and on. Big names like Jack Bogle and Larry Swedroe and Bill Bernstein and Scott Burns and big institutions like Motley Fool and Index Universe and the Get Rich Slowly blog and Morningstar and Vanguard and the Bogleheads Forum got involved along the way.
The sooner that all these people and institutions come clean, the less will be their financial obligations and the shorter will be their prison sentences. We all have a patriotic duty to bring down The Buy-and-Hold Mafia.
Bringing down the Buy-and-Hold Mafia is not a one-man job. I can do it with a little bit of help from a patriotic venture capitalist or a patriotic reporter or a patriotic blogger or a patriotic economists or a patriotic owner of a large web site or whatever. I will keep holding up my end by ending 50 e-mails every day re the Wade Pfau matter and by writing blog posts here and columns and guest blog entries elsewhere. But I am under no illusion that I can pull this off by myself. I can promise anyone who helps out that he or she can make millions while knowing in his or her heart that he or she has done wonderful things for his or her country by doing so. But that’s all I can do. I cannot promise the patriot who steps forward that he or she will not be attacked by the Wall Street Con Men and their Internet Goon Squads. That comes with the territory.
What I can say is that both the Wall Street Con Men and you Goons grow weaker with every passing day. The secret of the success of Buy-and-Hold was its creation of $12 trillion of Pretend Money. The Pretend Money is today in the process of disappearing and the next crash will likely put is in the Second Great Depression. At that point, we can all pull together and move forward (a process that begins with the announcement of long prison sentences for those who have posted in “defense” of Mel Linduaer and John Greaney on more than one or two occasions) or we can all go down together. No one is ever going to have any doubts in his or her mind as to how I am going to vote re that one.
The fact that you have not been prosecuted yet does not justify a belief that you will never be prosecuted, Anonymous. If anything, it suggests that you will be prosecuted more harshly than you otherwise would have been. People do not like to be tricked. People do not like to be taken. People do not like to lose most of their retirement money at a stage of life at which it is too late for them to do much about it.
When millions of middle-class people learn what has been done to them, my expectation is that they will be looking for a someone or a number of someones to hang from a tree. This is the biggest story of corruption of our time. It will be my job then to try to calm people down. I can’t say that I expect to enjoy great success with my efforts. But I can assure you that I will be fighting on your behalf. The references that I make today to your future prison sentence is really just part of that effort to help you out — I obviously have a lot more power to get your prison sentence reduced today that I will have if we experience the next price crash without you yet having come clean.
I naturally wish you all good things regardless of what investing strategies you elect to pursue, my old friend.
Rob
Anonymous says
Rob,
You know that most don’t agree with your comments, but let’s put that aside. Bottom line, what is it you want? Is it simply for people to suck it up and bear with your posts and allow you back on the boards?
Rob says
The fact that the majority of today’s investors do not follow Valuation-Informed Indexing strategies does not have to be viewed as a bad thing. From one way of looking at it, it can even be viewed as a very, very good thing.
Valuation-Informed Indexing is the first true research-based strategy. It is backed by 33 years of peer-reviewed research. It reduces risk by 70 percent. It increases returns by enough to permit those investors who follow it to retire five to ten years sooner. It puts an end to the economic crises that are caused by the boom/bust cycle that inevitably follows from promotion of Buy-and-Hold strategies. So the transition from Buy-and-Hold to Valuation-Informed Indexing is the biggest advance that we have seen in the history of personal finance. It will make us all much richer (in every sense of the word) people.
If there were only a few people who did not know about Valuation-Informed Indexing today, we would want to spread the word for the benefit of those few. But, given that most of today’s investors do NOT understand the implications of the peer-reviewed research of the past 33 years presents us with a huge opportunity. We will not be helping out 10 percent or 20 percent of the population when we open the internet to honest posting on SWRs and scores of other critically important investment-related topics. We will be helping out 80 percent or 90 percent of the population. The opportunity presented here is off-the-charts exciting.
There are some who will indeed have to “suck it up and bear with my posts,” as you put it. That’s certainly true of you Goons. It is also true of some others who feel pain when they see evidence presented that they have made mistakes in choosing their investing strategies. It’s a small percentage of the board population that feels that way, but there are indeed people in this category. Yes, those people have to suck it up. They agreed to tolerate the expression of a variety of viewpoints when they were granted the ability to post at our boards and blogs. They are going to have to honor the promises they made when they were granted posting privileges or find some other internet to which to direct their posts. We have rules on this one and we need to insist that those rules be respected.
The majority of community members are in a middle ground. They don’t fully understand or believe in Valuation-Informed Indexing. So they are not willing to fight for the right to hear about it. But they have zero problem with the idea of permitting people who want to hear about it to do so. The majority of our community members are NOT Goons. They are not Valuation-Informed Indexers. But they have no problem with the idea of others learning about it and in many cases they have a small interest in learning about it themselves so long as the threads in which they do so are moderated in a reasonable manner and they don’t see the death threats and the demands for unjustified board bannings and the tens of the thousands of acts of defamation and the threats to get academic researchers fired from their jobs that you Goons have been using to poison those threads for 12 years now.
Getting back on the boards with my right to post honestly re the last 33 years of peer-reviewed research respected is the first step on the path forward, not the last, Anonymous. Yes, of course I want that. And of course I demand that. And of course I insist on that. But please don’t think that that is the end goal. That is what we need to see for progress on all the other follow-up goals to be achieved.
I am happy to list follow-up goals if that helps. My guess is that you could imagine what they are. Or you could listen to the RobCast (#193 — My Vision) that I recorded on this topic:
http://www.passionsaving.com/personal-finance-podcasts-page-twenty-five.html
What I want is what I call “Normalcy.” I don’t want to see any invective from any poster, regardless of which “side” he or she is on. I put the word in quotes because I do not believe that there are any “sides” in a final, true sense. We all want the same thing — to learn how to invest effectively. The Buy-and-Holders need what the Valuation-Informed Indexers bring to the table and the Valuation-Informed Indexers need what the Buy-and-Holders bring to the table. We should be enjoying our good fortune in having been born the luckiest generation of stock investors ever to walk Planet Earth rather than quarreling over whether honest posting on what the peer-reviewed research says should be permitted on our boards or not. We should be going up, up, up, up, up rather than down, down, down, down, down.
What I most want to see is a change in attitude among the Buy-and-Holders. For the first 12 years, the attitude has been: “We have got to make the Valuation-Informed Indexer as uncomfortable as possible, we want them to leave the premises before they win converts and their new ideas begin to catch on in a big way.”
Yuck.
I WANT the new ideas to win converts. I WANT the new ideas to catch on. This is why I say that, for the first 12 years, you Goons and I have been working at cross purposes. I think that is unfortunate. I think it is unnecessary. And I don’t believe that we will have successful interactions until that basic attitude conflict changes.
Are you open to learning new things about how stock investing works?
If you are, I cannot imagine that we will not be able to work together to make everyone happy about the new arrangements.
If you are not, I cannot imagine that will will be able to work together to make everyone happy about the new arrangements.
We have to have that attitude change. We do NOT want anyone to say they believe in things they don’t really believe in. If you believe that the odds of a Valuation-Informed Indexing strategy producing good results are zero, you not only have a right to say so but a duty to say so. But even if you think the odds are zero, you should be happy that there are people in our community willing to argue the case for VII as effectively as they can. Those people add something important to the community discussions and those people must be respected and admired for their contributions. In the event that Buy-and-Hold really is the cat’s pajamas, those people help community members to see that by putting so much effort into making the case for the other side (and failing — which is what they will do in the event that Buy-and-Hold really is the cat’s pajamas and is not just imagined to be so by many of today’s investors).
My ultimate goals are very, very, very ambitious, Anonymous. I want to convert the entire world to Valuation-Informed Indexing. I want to get all the textbooks rewritten. I want to see a Nobel prize awarded to Wade Pfau and I want to see hundreds of academic researchers follow in his footsteps. I want to restore people’s confidence in our economic and political systems. I want to make Jack Bogle and Robert Shiller more famous and more loved and more wealthy than they have ever been before and make myself a good bit famous and loved and wealthy in the process.
But none of that is terribly important at this stage of the proceedings, in my assessment. What matters today is that I want to add to the value of every investing discussion board and blog on the internet in a big way by working WITH my Buy-and-Hold friends to enhance the world’s knowledge of how investing works.
Do you see?
I cannot contribute by arguing for Buy-and-Hold because I do not believe in Buy-and-Hold. If your idea of the purpose of the boards is to spread support for Buy-and-Hold, I don’t belong.
I don’t see that as the purpose. I see the purpose as spreading KNOWLEDGE whether the knowledge that is spread happens to count in favor of Buy-and-Hold or against it. Telling people about the implications of the last 33 years of peer-reviewed research obviously spreads knowledge in an important way. So that’s the direction to which I want to direct my energies.
I want to see us all Learning Together. That’s the short version of the story.
I believe that our wonderful Learning Together project will ultimately take us all to some amazing places. But talking about those places is better put off for later. Once we all see how wonderful the change is when we make the change we need to make, we will ALL be looking forward to our journeys to those amazing places. Today, we need to work up the courage to take the first magic step. The first magic step is adopting an ATTITUDE that is conducive to learning experiences.
That first step has proven difficult for us. The follow-up steps will prove a lot less so. I am sure.
I hope that helps a bit, old friend.
Rob
Anonymous says
If you want a change in attitude, then you need to change your approach. If not, don’t expect people to treat you any different.
Rob says
If you spell out changes you want, I can let you know whether they are possible or not.
If you say “the phrase ‘smelly Buy-and-Hold garbage’ leaves me cold,” I can respond by agreeing not to use that phrase or to use it only in certain circumstances or whatever. There is flexibility re that because the particular phrase is not required in conscience.
If you say “I want you to pretend that you believe that the safe withdrawal rate is always 4 percent,” I have no choice but to respond by noting that there can be negotiation on the question of reporting the results of a numerical calculation honestly.
There are things that I can do and there are things that I cannot do. I have 100 percent willingness to do any of the things that are in the negotiable category. But not all things are in the negotiable category.
You Goons may never treat me different. I get that loud and clear.
But the world is not populated solely by Goons. If you Goons never change, then the world may change and I may become able to overcome you Goons with the help of others.
So long as you demand things that are in the non-negotiable category, I don’t have a whole lot of options, do I?
I have never had to devote two seconds of thought to considering whether I would agree to any of your deals because every deal you have ever offered has started with a requirement that I agree to post dishonestly on safe withdrawal rates. Demanding that I lie re the numbers that my friends use to plan their retirements is so far out of the realm of what is possible that that one demand leaves us with nothing to talk about.
Only you Goons have the power to drop that insane demand. If we can agree to permit honesty on the SWR question, I believe that in time we will all see the merit of permitting honesty on all sorts of questions. But until you come to recognize the need for honesty in the reporting of the numbers that our friends use to plan their retirements, my hands are tied.
I have not been willing to post dishonestly re SWRs for 12 years and I will not be willing to post dishonestly re SWRs for 12 billion years. If my demand that I (and all others) be permitted to post honestly re SWRs constitutes the “approach” that you want to see changed, please understand that I have zero willingness even to consider such a possibility.
I hope that I am being clear re this point. It would be cruel of me to suggest any willingness whatsoever to negotiate re that point.
If there is something other than my unwillingness to post dishonestly re the numbers that my friends use to plan their retirements that concerns you, I am open to hearing the case for me making a change in “my approach.” But re that issue, the issue that has been the primary issue on the table for 12 years and counting — Please try to find someone else.
No can do.
Not this boy.
I can’t go for that.
It’s just not my particular cup of tea.
My best wishes to you, Anonymous.
Rob