Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently posted to another blog entry at this site:
You do that Rob. I can see how it feels better to live in a dream world where you’re about save civilization from itself rather than face the reality of being an aging, unemployed dude sitting forgotten in your basement surfing the net all day.
Your $500M payday is coming, Rob. It’s right around the corner! Keep checking that mailbox. Fingers crossed.
Every important advance in the history of humankind was led by PEOPLE doing the right thing, Anonymous. There is no other way it can be done.
I have had thousands of people respond to my work with insanely kind comments. I am grateful to each and every one of them. We all should be grateful to every one of them. Not every one of them has been brave enough to speak up in opposition to you Goons. People don’t like having the lives of their family members threatened by the sorts of individuals who have put up posts in “defense” of Mel Linduaer and John Greaney. But they helped out by putting up kind posts. And we should all acknowledge that.
I have sent e-mails to the 30,000 names on the Social Science Research Network list. I heard many kind comments from those researchers and academics as well. Many wanted to know how they can help. I told them that they can help by letting their friends know about the 12-year cover-up and about the great amount of human misery caused by you Goons and by the Wall Street Con Men who either encouraged you or failed to speak out in opposition to you. Neither you Goons nor the Wall Street Con Men possess any power over us except what we grant to you by our cowardice in the face of your brutal intimidation tactics. We all should be grateful for the kindness and intelligence evidenced by all those fine people as well.
And we should all be grateful for the wonderful work done by the Buy-and-Hold Pioneers. Many Buy-and-Holders have behaved shamefully in recent years. But we wouldn’t have learned how to reduce the risk of stock investing by 70 percent had the Buy-and-Hold Pioneers not first done the fine work that they contributed in earlier days. So I certainly intend to be sure that they get all the credit they merit while also of course insisting that they acknowledge the mistake that they made that has brought on the greatest economic crisis in U.S. history.
You Goons live in hate. I obviously get that. But I believe that there is a part of you deep inside that at some point in your life wanted to do good for others. I believe that it is your shame over your behavior over the past 12 years that holds you back from coming clean today. And, while I of course wish that you would come clean before you do more damage, I think that the shame you feel does point to some measure of good that remains alive within you. I hope that that measure of good grows stronger with time. I believe that it will following the next price crash, when you will no longer be able to deny how much damage the pure Get Rich Quick approach has done to so many human lives.
Yes, I will keep looking for the $500 million settlement payment. As I have noted before, I don’t believe that I will need to file papers to collect that payment. I believe that my good friend Jack Bogle will take care of it when he sees the harm he has done by failing to take action on the Lindauer matter. If he doesn’t, he is not the man that I have long believed him to be. If I must file papers to get the money, I will file papers. But my personal belief is that that is not even going to be necessary.
I’m grateful that I was offered this opportunity “to save civilization from itself.” Few of us are ever offered such an opportunity and I certainly had no expectation that my May 13, 2002, post was going to lead us all to such a wonderful place. Except I think it would be more honest to say that I am permitting civilization to save itself rather than helping to save it from itself. I didn’t develop all the genuine breakthrough insights in the Buy-and-Hold concept that really have stood the test of time. And I didn’t publish the 1981 research showing the need for a correction of the foolish (we now see this!) “idea” that stocks are the only thing available for sale in this world re which we are not required to exercise price discipline.
I stood up to you Goons and demanded that the magical Learning Experience proceed despite the great pain you experienced while we all went further and further and further ahead in our understanding of how stocks work in the real world. But I obviously couldn’t have done any of it without the help of thousands of other fine and kind and smart and hard-working and generous people. Even you Goons came forward with points that turned into helpful RobCasts on one or two occasions!
Hate dies out in time. It creates nothing. It is a purely destructive force.
Love is where its at. Love heals. Yes, even in the investing advice field!
Love can take the worst economic crisis in U.S. history and turn it in to something good.John Walter Russell once told us that we were going to see good things happen as a result of our efforts to get the Old School SWR studies corrected that we could not even imagine on the morning of May 13, 2002. I think it would be fair to say that John has been proven right 20 times over. He possessed an intelligence that is only ever evidenced by those who feel a deep love in their hearts. I think it would be fair to say that the day when we all will be following John’s injunction to have big bunches of fun draws closer and closer!
Hang in there, my bruised and battered (by your own hate-filled impulses!) friend. It gets better. A lot better.
Rob
So let me get this straight you got one magical metric PE10, that is the end all be all ratio. When it is too high it should come down so because of that you know the prices have to come down. But there are two pieces to the ratio couldn’t earnings just go up instead of prices going down? Especially since you have been waiting for this number to drop for 18 years? Isn’t it possible that in 18 years the 10 year average of earnings could go up.
Thanks for a question that shows that you are making some effort to understand, Anonymous.
You first point is that I portray P/E10 as “the end all and be all” of stock investing. It is indeed that. The P/E10 value reveals the PRICE that you are paying for the stocks you purchase. Price is 80 percent of the story. If you get price right, it is hard to imagine circumstances in which you will not do well in the long run. If you get price wrong, it is hard to imagine circumstances in which you will not do poorly in the long run. Price isn’t quite everything. But it comes close. Price is BY FAR the biggest factor determining long-term success or failure. It is critically important to get price (P/E10) right.
Your second point is that we could return to a normal P/E10 value not by seeing price come down but by seeing earnings go up. Is that possible? It is possible TO A DEGREE. But not nearly to the degree that it would need to be so for a Buy-and-Hold strategy to work in the long run.
Stocks were priced at three times fair value in 2000. They always fall to one-half of fair value by the close of the secular bear market that followed every secular bull market. That is a loss of five-sixths of your portfolio.
The five-sixths number assumes that the U.S. market will continue to offer a long-term average return of 6.5 percent real, as it has for 140 years now. Is it possible that the long-term average return might creep up to 7 percent real, thereby reducing the loss to a bit less than five-sixths of your portfolio value? Yes. That is possible.
But you are still going to be suffering huge losses. Even if the long-term average returns increases to 7 percent real, you are still going to be suffering a wipe-out of most of the accumulated wealth of a lifetime. You still would have been better off if you had reduced your stock allocation to 30 percent or so.
All of the calculators at this site assume that stocks will continue to perform in the future at least somewhat as they have always performed in the past. That means that they assume that the long-term average return will remain 6.5 percent real. It is possible that that number could change. Please understand that it is every bit as possible that the average long-term return will drop as it is that it will increase. But, yes, it is possible that it will change.
But to assume that it will change enough to make a Buy-and-Hold strategy viable is to bet on the longest of all possible long shots. I don’t feel comfortable taking extreme long-shot bets with my retirement money. If you do, that is of course up to you. But I do not feel comfortable going there. And it would be dishonest (and fraudulent) for me to say that I do.
If you believe that we are going to see an average long-term return of 7 percent real on a going forward basis, you are of course free to make the adjustments in the numbers generated by the calculators that are needed to reflect that belief. The assumption of a 6.5 percent average long-term return is the obvious default assumption. That is what we have seen for 140 years. So that is the safest assumption re what we will see in the future. But I have of course have zero problem with the idea of any particular investor using a different assumption. It’s your money. It’s up to you.
Fair enough?
Rob
These are the words of Shiller himself in an interview:
“It’s not a timing mechanism, it doesn’t tell you – and I had the same mistake in my mind, to some extent — wait until it goes all the way down to a P/E of 7, or something…But actually, the lesson there is that if you combine that with a good market diversification algorithm, the important thing is that you never get completely in or completely out of stocks.”
So the guy who invented the be-all-and-end-all metric says flat out that you are using it wrong. But you would have people believe that your understanding of PE10 exceeds that of the Nobel Prize winner who invented it.
“I will keep looking for the $500 million settlement payment. As I have noted before, I don’t believe that I will need to file papers to collect that payment. I believe that my good friend Jack Bogle will take care of it when he sees the harm he has done by failing to take action on the Lindauer matter. If he doesn’t, he is not the man that I have long believed him to be. If I must file papers to get the money, I will file papers. But my personal belief is that that is not even going to be necessary.”
File the ‘papers’, Rob. I beg you!
Come on, even in your psychotic fantasy-land, you don’t expect a man in the twilight of his years, following a marvelously productive, full, and THOROUGHLY PRINCIPLED life, who doesn’t know you exist, to somehow out of the blue, without prompting, to decide to somehow spontaneously draft you personally, and you alone, a check for half a billion dollars. Right?I mean, certainly, even psychotic delusions and fantasy have to be bounded somehow, and have parameters; otherwise, even you couldn’t take them seriously, much less anyone else.
File the papers.
And post a link to the documents here.
Please!
These are the words of Shiller himself in an interview:
“It’s not a timing mechanism, it doesn’t tell you – and I had the same mistake in my mind, to some extent — wait until it goes all the way down to a P/E of 7, or something. But actually, the lesson there is that if you combine that with a good market diversification algorithm, the important thing is that you never get completely in or completely out of stocks.”
So the guy who invented the be-all-and-end-all metric says flat out that you are using it wrong. But you would have people believe that your understanding of PE10 exceeds that of the Nobel Prize winner who invented it.
No, he doesn’t, X.
Everyone acknowledges that investors need to take their personal circumstances into account when setting their stock allocation. I say that the average investor should be somewhere near 30 percent stocks today. That means that an investor like me, who is in circumstances where he needs to be more risk-conscious, should be at zero percent stocks. Even Bogle doesn’t say that investors should ignore their personal circumstances. You are talking trash.
The part where he says that you should not wait until the P/E10 goes to 7 is wonderful. Thank you very much for pointing us to that. Shiller DID say that in early 2009. I didn’t hear him say wait until it goes to 7, I heard him say to wait until it goes below 10. I recorded a RobCast on that quote and I argued that he was going too far. I said at the time that I thought it made sense for the typical investor to stay with at least a 30 percent stock allocation and also that investors should be gradually increasing their allocations as prices continued to decline rather than waiting for the P/E10 to drop to 10 (or 7) before buying any stocks.
Shiller is now acknowledging that he got it partway wrong. Good for him! I wish that Bogle would do the same. That would be wonderful!
Shiller is not God. He is a giant in the field (as is Bogle). But the reality is that we are all flawed creatures and that we all possess today only a primitive understanding of how stock investing works. We are in the early days of figuring out how this stuff works. We should thank our Buy-and-Hold friends for some huge advances. But we should also tell them all to take a pill when we see them becoming as insanely arrogant as you Goons show yourselves to be on a daily basis in your comments here.
Shiller needs to do three things.
One, he needs to speak out about the criminal behavior of those who have posted in “defense” of Mel Linduaer and John Greaney (and my good friend Jack Bogle). None of should want to see your prison sentences to be any longer than they absolutely need to be. We all should show our respect and affection for our Buy-and-Hold friends by doing what we can to help them out at a time when they are in great pain. I think it would be fair to say that Shiller has been negligent re these matters.
Two, he should write more frequently and in a more comprehensive way about the “how to” aspects of the question. He failed to do this in his book. For Valuation-Informed Indexing to become the dominant model, people MUST hear about the practical side of things and not just the theoretical side. Again, Shiller has been negligent re these matters thus far.
Three, he should speak out more about the DANGERS of Buy-and-Hold. It’s not just that Valuation-Informed Indexing is a far superior strategy. Buy-and-Hold is in the process of ruining millions of middle-class lives. It was the promotion of Buy-and-Hold that was the primary cause of the economic criss. These are public policy matters of great import. Again, Shiller has been negligent in failing to address them until today.
Shiller didn’t actually invent P/E10. That was Benjamin Graham. But Shiller has done more to promote it than anyone else. I have no problem with you giving him the credit. But the historical reality is that Graham was actually there before him. Graham wrote about a primitive version of Valuation-Informed Indexing in the 1930s.
Yes, my understanding of the implications of Shiller’s findings exceeds Shiller’s understanding of them. Nothing could be more clear. Saying that doesn’t take anything away from him. The hardest job is being the first to challenge the dominant model. It was Shiller who was first, not me. Shiller is the creator of the VII concept (unless you count Graham — I would list Graham as perhaps the grandfather of the concept). I would describe myself as the first to fully explore the PRACTICAL IMPLICATIONS of Shiller’s “revolutionary” (his word) findings. But, yes, there is a wealth of material at this site showing that I am today FAR ahead of Shiller re the practical implications of his ideas (as I am today far ahead of Bogle — VII COMBINES Buy-and-Hold as it has been promoted by Bogle with Shiller’s revolutionary advance).
Is it a strange reality that some guy whose only claim to expertise in this field is that he figured out how to get words posted to the internet had gone far ahead of both Bogle and Shiller over the course of the past 12 years? It is an exceedingly strange reality.
You know what made it possible?
You Goons.
I don’t mean just the few of you that post at Greaney’s site or at the Bogleheads Forum. I mean all of the investors who bought into the Buy-and-Hold concept and who react with anger when anyone explores the implications of the last 33 years of peer-reviewed research. You saw how that affected Wade Pfau. He has visions of winning a Nobel prize in the days when he was doing honest research and then threw that all away so that investors who had been burned by Buy-and-Hold would not hate him too intensely.
Shiller is human too, X. So is Bogle. If Shiller and Bogle thought that they could explore these ideas and not have people like you threaten to kills members of their families as their “punishment” for having done so, both Shiller and Bogle would have gone far past where I am today long before I came on the scene. Your intimidation tactics are holding us all back.
People learn by talking things over. I didn’t know one-tenth of what I know today on the morning of May 13, 2002. Had I given in to Greaney’s intimidation tactics on the day when he first threatened to kill my wife and children, I would be back where Shiller and Bogle are today. I didn’t. I interpreted the death threats as a sure indicator that there was something terribly, terribly wrong with the Buy-and-Hold Model. Buy-and-Hold is supposed to be science. True science does not prompt people to put forward death threats.
The true appeal of Buy-and-Hold is that it it rooted in emotion and that it appeals to the Get Rich Quick impulse within all of us, not that it is science. We should be helping investors to AVOID emotion, not to give in to it 100 percent. Emotion is the enemy. Emotion is the cause of stock investing risk. When we push emotion so hard, we make stock investing FAR more risky than it would be if we permitted people to learn what the last 33 years of peer-reviewed risk says.
I am ahead of these giants today not because they are dumb or because they are bad. I am ahead of them because I have been working it for 12 years and they have not. Bogle doesn’t work it because he is reluctant to acknowledge a mistake that he has been covering up for 33 years now. Shiller doesn’t work it because he wants to be liked and he has seen how many investors respond when he makes even minimal efforts to explore the practical implications of his revolutionary findings.
We should all be encouraging both Shiller and Bogle and thousands of others to explore these ideas. Doing so is a win/win/win/win/win. You should be doing that. You have money at risk. You should want to learn new things. You are going to learn new things a lot faster when we have thousands of people exploring these issues on a daily basis, not just me.
Those are my sincere beliefs re these terribly important matters, in any event.
I naturally wish you the best of luck with all your future endeavors regardless of what investing strategies you elect to pursue.
I will be writing a column for the Value Walk site re this quote from Shiller. I am grateful to you for helping us all out by pointing us to it.
Rob
“It’s not a timing mechanism”, says Shiller. You says it’s not only a timing mechanism, it’s THE timing mechanism. It’s the only metric in your calculator. And yet, you say he agrees with you. I wonder what he would say. Unfortunately, I can’t ask him because he has better things to do than sit on a blog bragging all day.
Yes, my understanding of the implications of Shiller’s findings exceeds Shiller’s understanding of them.
I’ll believe that when I see the photo of your Nobel Prize sitting on the card table in your basement.
And here are the TEN stock-selection criteria that Graham recommended for screening. Not one. TEN.
“List of 10 Stock Selection Criteria by Benjamin Graham”
1. An earnings-to-price yield at least twice the AAA bond rate
2. P/E ratio less than 40% of the highest P/E ratio the stock had over the past 5 years
3. Dividend yield of at least 2/3 the AAA bond yield
4. Stock price below 2/3 of tangible book value per share
5. Stock price below 2/3 of Net Current Asset Value (NCAV)
6. Total debt less than book value
7. Current ratio great than 2
8. Total debt less than 2 times Net Current Asset Value (NCAV)
9. Earnings growth of prior 10 years at least at a 7% annual compound rate
10. Stability of growth of earnings in that no more than 2 declines of 5% or more in year end earnings in the prior 10 years are permissible.
File the ‘papers’, Rob. I beg you!
Come on, even in your psychotic fantasy-land, you don’t expect a man in the twilight of his years, following a marvelously productive, full, and THOROUGHLY PRINCIPLED life, who doesn’t know you exist, to somehow out of the blue, without prompting, to decide to somehow spontaneously draft you personally, and you alone, a check for half a billion dollars. Right?I mean, certainly, even psychotic delusions and fantasy have to be bounded somehow, and have parameters; otherwise, even you couldn’t take them seriously, much less anyone else.
File the papers.
And post a link to the documents here.
Please!
Bogle may have led an entirely principled life up until the time when he let his name be used at a discussion board at which death threats and demands for unjustified board bannings and tens of thousands of acts of defamation and threats to get academic researchers fired from their jobs are used to block investors from learning about the implications of the last 33 years of peer-reviewed research in this field, Yogi. It is my strong belief that that is indeed the case. I view the man as a giant in the field (I rate him second only to Shiller on my list of most important investing advisors) and I obviously feel a great personal affection for Old Saint Jack or else I wouldn’t have spent the last 12 years of my life taking his ideas to many exciting places that he never dreamed that they would ever be taken. But he dropped the ball when he failed to do something about The Mel Linduaer Problem, no? In a very, very, very big way, no?
One of my top priority jobs is to get Bogle off the hook for his acts of financial fraud (the 12-year cover-up of the errors in the Old School SWR studies is by far the biggest act of financial fraud in U.S. history and my good friend Jack is right in the middle of that cover-up, which can be demonstrated just by looking at how often you Goons cite his words in support of your arguments). I love Jack Bogle. That is not even a tiny bit in question here. But the reality is that there are RESPONSIBILITIES that follow when one sets oneself up as an investing “expert.” My good friend Jack Bogle has failed in those responsibilities in a very big way.
Look at the safe withdrawal rate matter. I pointed out the errors in the Old School studies in a post that I put to the Motley Fool site on the morning of May 13, 2002. There are millions of people who are in the process of experiencing failed retirements as a result of the errors in those studies (virtually every article on retirement planning published in every newspaper in the country was rooted in the findings of those studies for a good period of time). When did Jack Bogle first come forward and demand that the errors in those studies be corrected within 24 hours?
He hasn’t freakin’ done it to this day!
And he’s an expert???!!!!
Huh???!!!
Jack Bogle is no expert in the investing field, Yogi.
He’s a smart guy. As smart as they come.
He’s a nice guy. As nice as they come.
He’s a hero to millions (most certainly including me — in fact, I believe strongly that my name should be the first one recorded on the list of people who views Jack Bogle as a Hero to the Middle Class).
So there are many, many positive things that we all can say about my good friend Jack Bogle and the many amazing contributions that he has made to making all of our lives richer (in every sense of the word).
But none of us can say that Jack is an “expert” when it comes to stock investing. If he were an expert, he would have known about the errors in the Old School retirement studies long before Rob Bennett put forward his famous post of the morning of May 13, 2002, and he would have seen to it that those studies were promptly corrected.
If you say that Jack is an expert, what you are really saying is that he is The Frank Underwood of Personal Finance. If he were an expert and knew about those errors and did nothing to get them corrected for all these years, then he is the most corrupt person who ever walked the planet.
He is not that. We agree?
If he is not that, then he is not an “expert” in any meaningful sense of the term. He is one of the darned humans. He has made HUGE contributions. There would be no Valuation-Informed Indexing today were it not for the decades of wonderful work that Bogle did laying the foundation for it. So in RELATIVE terms, it might be said that he possesses a good level of expertise.
But being the smartest guy in a field of people who are still at the most primitive level of understanding is not being an “expert” in the way that that word is ordinarily used. Bogle TRIES. He works it hard. But he is limited by his humanity. The human species does not yet know enough about this subject for any member of it to rightly consider himself or herself an expert. We are getting there. But we are not there yet. So please drop this idea that Jack Bogle (or anyone else, including Robert Shiller and including Rob Bennett) are experts.
Okay?
Now —
The continued promotion of Buy-and-Hold for 33 years after the peer-reviewed research in this field showed that there is precisely zero chance that it could ever work for even a single long-term investor caused the biggest economic crisis in U.S. history. Do you think that my good friend Jack wants that on his record? He obviously does not. He wants to make it up to the millions of middle-class people whose lives he has destroyed (inadvertently — but still). He wants to come clean. How do you propose that he go about doing that?
I have said that I will be directing 5 percent of my $500 million settlement to financing start-ups of blogs that will promote the VII concept. That’s $25 million. Say that I give $100,000 to each proposed blog start-up (on the assumption that the blogger can get by on $35,000 per year plus whatever he has saved and whatever he can earn from the blog, that’s three years of blogging for each start-up), that’s 250 new VII blogs. That will make a big difference, no? We won’t have to worry about seeing thousands of comments at this site every day when we have 250 new VII blogs on the internet, right?
That’s how we achieve change in this mixed-up world of outs. That’s how it is done.
I intend to devote another 5 percent of the settlement check to marketing efforts for THIS site. That’s another $25 million. Again, that will make a difference in the number of comments we see here, no? I have said that I will be taking over the Bogleheads Forum and moving it to this site. So the $25 million will be helping all of my VII friends that post at Bogleheads (they would obviously love to be freed to post their sincere beliefs) AND all of my Buy-and-Hold friends (I have a long record of being warm and welcoming to all Buy-and-Holders who do not engage in the sorts of intimidation tactics practiced by the sorts of individuals who have put up posts in “defense” of Mel Linduaer and John Greaney and I think it is fair to say that that covers the vast majority of the Buy-and-Holders who post at Bogleheads — the majority would obviously prefer to be able to participate in the board discussions without being required to sacrifice their personal integrity as the price of admission).
So EVERYONE benefits from the payment of the $500 million settlement. Men and women. Blacks and whites. Young and old. Valuation-Informed Indexers and Buy-and-Holders. EVERYONE.
And you are saying that Jack is going to wait until I file papers to arrange for payment of this check?
Somehow, I have my doubts, Yogi.
If I need to file papers, I will do so following the crash. My very strong hunch is that there is going to be no need to file papers. Jack is going to be looking for a way to make it up to the millions of middle-class investors whose lives he has destroyed (inadvertently — but still) and paying me $500 million is a quick, no muss/no fuss way of doing so. I would be surprised is he doesn’t demand that I take MORE than $500 million given the importance that he will attach after he sees the extent of the human misery he has caused to coming clean with the American people re these matters and getting about the business of rebuilding our broken economy.
I am taking a bet on the personal integrity of my hero. I have a funny feeling that Jack will not let me down. But we’ll see, right? It all starts to play out following the next price crash. Patience is an important virtue, grasshopper.
I obviously do not expect Jack to pay that amount out of his own pocket. There are many, many people and many, many big institutions who will feel a need to come clean with the American people following the next price crash. Jack is a leader in the field. It makes sense that he would lead the organizing effort. But I seriously doubt that it will take him more than a few weeks to arrange for collection of a sum of money far in excess of the number that I have indicated I am willing to settle for as part of my effort to put the nasty side of this business behind us and move on to the far, far, far more exciting substantive issues that make us the luckiest generation of investors who ever walked Planet Earth.
I hope that helps a bit, Yogi.
Don’t let the bad guys get you down, man.
Rob
Unfortunately, I can’t ask him
Of course you can. You Goons have connections to Bogle and Shiller would certainly respond to an e-mail on this matter sent to him by Bogle.
You CAN ask. And you SHOULD ask. It’s important.
Rob
And here are the TEN stock-selection criteria that Graham recommended for screening. Not one. TEN.
Indexing was not an option when Graham wrote those words. Indexing changed everything. Indexing revolutionized this field. THANK YOU, Jack Bogle!
The fact that index funds were not generally available in 1965 is what tripped up Fama as well.
Fama concluded that “timing does’t work.” With zero basis for doing so!
He THOUGHT he had showed that timing doesn’t work. But he had never even investigation long-term timing. All he looked at was short-term timing. Why? Because index funds were not generally available at the time! Long-term timing only works with index funds! Fama saw no purpose in investigating long-term timing at the time. No one did.
The first person to test long-term timing was Shiller. He found that it ALWAYS works and that it is ALWAYS 100 percent required for those seeking to have any realistic hope of long-term investing success.
Hundreds of tests have been done in the 33 years since Shiller made his “revolutionary” (his word) finding. Every one confirmed Shiller’s finding.
There is now a mountain of research showing that long-term timing is ALWAYS 100 percent required and ALWAYS works.
There has never been a singe sliver of data showing that there might be some alternate universe where long-term timing might sometimes not work or in some circumstances not be 100 percent required for those seeking to have some realistic chance of long-term investing success.
I wonder why.
Common sense tells us that no market can function unless most participants in it practice price discipline.
There is now 33 years of peer-reviewed research CONFIRMING that what common sense tells us MUST be so really IS so.
Spread the word!
Rob
Rob,
I owe you an apology. Apparently Jack does know you. I just heard him confirm it when he said, “Hey, guys, I think I have a pimple on my ass”.
That explains why, in the 12 years since I pointed out the errors in the Old School safe-withdrawal-rate studies in a post to a Motley Fool discussion board, Jack has not once demanded that they be promptly corrected.
Hang in there, man.
Rob