Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently posted at another blog entry at this site:
From today’s post by you on this exact topic, which you agree can’t be proven one way or the other:
I am telling you what I believe, Anonymous. I stand by those words. If I said anything different, I would be telling you a lie.
I am not able to imagine any circumstance in which the promotion of Buy-and-Hold strategies would not cause an economic crisis. Once you tell people that there is no need to exercise price discipline, you have taken the brakes off the car and you are going to end up with a crash. Are you able to imagine a scenario in which you can drive a car without brakes to a happy conclusion?
I will acknowledge that these views are extreme if you go by the continuum of viewpoints held today. I have not heard anyone else saying what I say here. It’s fair to point that out.
But it is not right for me not to express my sincere views. It may be that there are many people out there today who share this view and are afraid to express it because they feel that they will be attacked for being too extreme. If the idea is going to be explored, we need to have people giving voice to it.
If everyone who holds this view says to himself “I’ll keep it zipped until lots of others are saying this,” the view will never be publicly expressed. I have a duty to say what I truly believe at every board and blog at which I post. Someone has to be the first to say these sorts of things. I wish it could be someone other than me. But. if no one else steps up to the plate, it becomes my job to do so. Someone has to get the ball rolling here. Shiller didn’t publish his research last week. It has been 33 years.
But I do NOT express this view or any other view in a dogmatic way.
I hold my views strongly but I do not hold them arrogantly. I often acknowledge that there are million of smart and good people who hold very different views. I often acknowledge that the Buy-and-Holders should be heroes to all of us and that we should feel respect and affection for them and be grateful for the important insights they have generated for our benefit. I often acknowledge that I have been wrong many times in my life and that it may be that I am wrong again. Those are not arrogant words, Anonymous.
I believe what I said. I believe it strongly. I have a right and duty to say precisely what I believe. A board community cannot achieve its potential unless every community member shares his sincere views. It is the interaction among a wide range of differing views (some on the extremes of the continuum and some in the middle of it) that creates a solid learning experience for all.
So there is nothing even a tiny bit wrong with me stating that opinion. If the opinion is foolish, it will be exposed as such. If the opinion has merit, that will become evident through the ongoing discussions. But the opinion that is sincerely held must be expressed accurately and in full strength for all the magic to happen. It would be wrong of me to state a view other than the one that I actually hold.
Dogmatism hurts us. I would be wrong to say “no one else may express a different opinion because it is so clear that I am right.” That crosses the line. I should respond to those who express other points of view with respect and warmth.
But I should of course NOT respond to those who engage in deception or intimidation tactics with respect and warmth. Those who post abusively hurt all of us. We all should be united in speaking out strongly against that sort of stuff.
I respect you for holding a different viewpoint. I do NOT respect you for posting abusively. When you post abusively, you degrade yourself. As your friend, I am compelled to urge you to stop doing that.
Rob
Anonymous says
No one is telling you that you cannot express your views. However, it is wrong for you to expect that you can express them on other people forums. It is hypocrisy when you whine and complain about being banned on certain boards, yet you freely deleted a large number of posts on your board.
Additionally, you keep wanting to force your views on others and immediately assume they arelting when they are not in agreement with you. Your fantasies about fraud and prison merely paint a picture of someone that suffers from a severe case of butt hurt due to rejection.
Perhaps if you conducted yourself with respect you would find that people would at least allow you in their conversations. Alas, this is something that you have not learned, or care to do.
x says
I am not able to imagine any circumstance in which the promotion of Buy-and-Hold strategies would not cause an economic crisis.
Then you have a incredibly stunted imagination. But that’s not my comment. Although you will certainly deny it, obviously your quest here is winding down. No new Robcasts in years, no efforts to participate in other boards, half-hearted replies to the few comments you allow through. Even the Goons have lost interest. So my question is what new exciting stuff is old Uncle Rob cooking up for the future.
Rob says
I don’t think I have a stunted imagination, X.
I cannot imagine the heavy promotion of Buy-and-Hold not resulting in an economic crisis because a core principle of Buy-and-Hold is that there is no need for investors to practice price discipline when buying stocks. That’s like driving a car without brakes — it always ends badly.
We need to teach investors how to practice price discipline (long-term timing). That’s 80 percent of the stock investing project. Leaving out 80 percent is leaving out too much.
We have 140 years of stock- market history available to us. In those 140 years, Buy-and-Hold became popular four times and we had four economic crises and each of them quickly followed the heavy promotion of Buy-and-Hold strategies. I don’t think that’s a coincidence. It is impossible for the rational human mind to imagine a circumstance in which the heavy promotion of a strategy that does not call for price discipline could ever fail to produce an economic crisis and indeed that is what we see when we look at this strategy’s track record.
My quest isn’t winding down. My quest is to help people achieve financial freedom early in life. I have no choice but to help people with investing. I tried avoiding the subject for several years and that did not work out for obvious reasons. I don’t ever intend to do that again. I hope to be able to write about other subjects again in coming years. But I will never again duck the investing questions. Too many people have done that and too many others have been hurt as a result. We should all speak up when we see Buy-and-Holders engaging in intimidation tactics.
The RobCasts were really only a one-year thing. I recorded all 200 of them in the 12 months following the 2008 crash. There were lots of ideas percolating at the time and recording RobCasts provided me a quick way of getting them into the record. I suspect that I will be recording more of them following the next crash. I could see getting into a schedule of creating one per week or something like that for many years to come.
I occasionally still participate at other boards. But it is true that I do that rarely today. I am emotionally exhausted, X. It is hard work putting your heart out there trying to help people and having people respond by ignoring you or expressing hatred of you. It’s very, very hard work. It’s important work and I am proud that I stood up to the abuse in the past and I fully expect to do so in the future. But, yes, I have eased up a bit. Sue me, you know? I have done a lot. I have done more than anyone else. I have worked this hard. I offer no apologies.
I allow fewer comments through all the time and my expectation is that I will be permitting fewer to go through in the future. That’s because most of the issues have been addressed multiple times. You Goons have often complained that the material here is repetitive. I don’t think that is so. There has always been some repetition. But most of the comments that I have let through have addressed at least one issue in at least a slightly new way. The overall story here is of huge importance. So I want to have every possible issue addressed at least once. So I have applied a light tough in the moderation of comments.
At this point pretty much everything that needs to be said has been said. So I am less inclined to approve Goon comments. I will always approve non-Goons comments and there will always be some Goon comments that will be approved. But, yes, I do think that the number that get approved has dropped and that that will be increasingly the case as time continues to pass.
Yes, the Goons don’t have as much energy as they did in earlier days. Who’d a thunk it? I’ll let you in on a little secret, X. The Goons are humans underneath the Goon exterior. There is a part of them that gets bored with destruction. It is a good sign that they are a bit less vigorous in their hate today than they were in earlier years. My guess is that we are going to see even less hate following the next price crash. I would not be one bit surprised if the Goons flipped to the other side some day in the future. In fact, I expect to see that happen. Consider the implications!
I expect to be cooking up lots of exciting stuff. I don’t think the excitement will come from new material or from me coming up with some new way of getting the messageacross. I think it will come from changes in the thinking of the millions of people whose lives are in the process of being destroyed by the relentless promotion of the Buy-and-Hold “strategy.” There is tons of material already at the site that will supply tons of excitement once we have a good number of Normals participating here on a regular basis. That’s the future. Its not me doing something new. It’s me doing the same old thing and it being received in different ways because people have come to see that not only is Get Rich Quick not the answer but that Get Rich Quick is actually the problem.
I hope that helps a bit, my old Goon friend.
Rob
Rob says
No one is telling you that you cannot express your views. However, it is wrong for you to expect that you can express them on other people forums.
No, it isn’t.
Any forum owner who bans someone solely for posting honestly on the topic of the forum is committing an act of financial fraud. That person thereby makes himself responsible for all losses suffered by people who read his forum thinking that it was a legitimate and non-corrupt enterprise.
If you don’t believe me, wait and see what your jury says following the next price crash.
We adopted the laws against financial fraud for a good reason.
I have every right in the world to post honestly at every board and blog on the internet. So do all of the thousands of people who over the course of the past 12 years have expressed a desire that honest posting be permitted.
You are wrong about this. As wrong as wrong can be. I am sure.
It is hypocrisy when you whine and complain about being banned on certain boards, yet you freely deleted a large number of posts on your board.
I have a responsibility as the owner of this site to delete sub-human Goon stuff, Anonymous. Give me a freakin’ break.
If I don’t delete your sub-human Goon stuff, how am I any better than all the site owners who have committed financial fraud by letting you post your death threats and your demands for unjustified board bannings and your thousands of acts of defamation and your threats to get academic researchers fired from their jobs? Huh?
I can be criticized from the other direction. A reasonable case can be made that I approve too many Goon posts.
There are reasons why I permit a good number of your posts to stay up. People need to see what we are up against. And, even though you are a Goon, you do sometimes express points that are shared by many Normals. There have even been occasions when you have made criticisms of Valuation-Informed Indexing that were legitimate or when you have pointed to caveats that people need to know about or when you have pointed us to articles that make good points. I often approve posts that contain that sort of material even when the posts also include some Goon stuff. In other circumstances,I wouldn’t do that. But given the circumstances that apply, I think it makes sense to bend over backwards to approve posts offered by Buy-and-Hold Goons. I don’t always get it perfect. But I work it pretty darn hard and I offer no apologies for doing so.
Additionally, you keep wanting to force your views on others and immediately assume they arelting when they are not in agreement with you.
One of your words got cut off somehow and so I do not fully understand what you were trying to say here.
I have never forced my views on a single soul. I demand that I be permitted to participate at every board and blog on the internet under the same terms as everyone else. I should not be penalized because I am the person who discovered the errors in the Old School safe-withdrawal-rate studies or because I am the co-author of peer-reviewed research that shows millions of investors how to reduce the risk of stock investing by nearly 70 percent. But no one has ever been required to accept the merit of the views I express. Every community member has the freedom to ignore any words of mine that do not possess appeal to him. That’s as it should be. I would not consent to have it go any other way.
I do not know what it is that you believe I assume re people who express interest in learning more about Valuation-Informed Indexing. The slider at the top of every page at this site tells the story that needs to be told. There are thousands of community members, including some of the biggest names in the field, who have expressed an INTENSE interest in learning the realities of stock investing. I will continue to stand up for those people and to demand that their desire for honest posting be recognized by everyone working in this field.
The 12-year cover-up caused the economic crisis. There are millions of people suffering today because my good friend Jack Bogle and the other Buy-and-Holders have not yet publicly acknowledged the errors they made that were revealed by the peer-reviewed research published by Robert Shiller in 1981. Those people matter. I am sure.
Your fantasies about fraud and prison merely paint a picture of someone that suffers from a severe case of butt hurt due to rejection.
There were people who warned Bernie Madoff that he was headed to a prison cell in the days before his term was announced. They were not engaged in fantasies. They were Bernie’s true friends. I care about you and I am going to continue to do what I can to get your prison sentence reduced. The only way to do that is to bring the massive act of financial fraud to a full and complete stop. I have been saying that we should bring it to a full and complete stop for 12 years now. That will never change. Book it.
Perhaps if you conducted yourself with respect you would find that people would at least allow you in their conversations. Alas, this is something that you have not learned, or care to do.
I won’t post dishonestly re the numbers that my friends use to plan their retirements. Not in 12 years. Not in 12 million years. Please try to find someone else.
Not this boy.
I can’t go for that.
No can do.
It’s not my particular cup of tea.
Rob
Anonymous says
Although you will certainly deny it, obviously your quest here is winding down. No new Robcasts in years, no efforts to participate in other boards, half-hearted replies to the few comments you allow through. Even the Goons have lost interest. So my question is what new exciting stuff is old Uncle Rob cooking up for the future.
Indeed. Rob you’re just phoning in the mania these days.
Rob says
There is a mountain of material in the Archives. There are new blog entries every day.
People are afraid to speak up because they know what the Buy-and-Hold Mafia will do to them if they dare to.
I have been urging people to overcome those fears for 12 years now. As I once had to. I was afraid once myself. So I understand the feeling.
Once 10 of us get over those fears and commit to protecting each other’s backs when we speak honestly about the implications of the last 33 years of peer-reviewed research in this field, there is no more Buy-and-Hold and there is no more economic crisis.
We will get there. We have no choice. Ignoring the dangers of Buy-and-Hold does not make those dangers go away.
When as a society we work up the courage to do what we all know in our hearts must be done, we will all reap the benefits of doing so together. I have plenty of material to share at that time.
This is going to happen. Not by me forcing it. But it is going to happen. And, once it does, there won’t be one of us, not even one of you Goons, who will ever want to go back to what we had in the Buy-and-Hold days.
I don’t think we should wait. I think we should end all this pain this morning.
But I don’t make that call.
I can ask. But the call is made by the larger community.
We’re working on it! We’re working on it!
We will end up in a good place, Anonymous. I believe that. I love my country and I believe that it can handle this matter. It has been a long time. Things are happening slowly. But things are happening and things will continue to happen.
That’s all that I can say about it.
Things are happening. I would like to see a quicker pace too. But the timing by which all these good things take place is not my call. I need to be patient every bit as much as you do.
My best wishes to you and yours.
Rob
Yogi Bear says
” I have no choice but to help people with investing. I tried avoiding the subject for several years and that did not work out for obvious reasons. ”
wtf?
Explain, please!
Rob says
I knew that Greaney got the numbers wrong in his retirement study in May of 1999, when I put my first post to the Retire Early board at Motley Fool. I didn’t work up the courage to post honestly on the subject of safe withdrawal rates until May 2002, three years later.
I engaged in all the same rationalizations that everyone else who ducks this subject engages in. I told myself that the Greaney study was an improvement on what people like Peter Lynch said in the days before the publication of the Old School SWR studies. It was an improvement. But that doesn’t justify keeping quiet about the error in the study, its lack of an adjustment for the valuation level that applies on the day the retirement begins.
I was a coward for the first three years of my posting at the Motley Fool board, Yogi. I’m not proud of it. I don’t intend to ever make that mistake again.
The one good thing that came from my cowardice is that it helps me to understand why many good and smart people are being cowards today in their unwillingness to call out the Buy-and-Holders on their b.s.
Mistakes like the one that Fama and Bogle made don’t remain covered up for 33 years without a lot of people shivering in fear over what will be done to their careers if they put their readers and clients first and speak out about what the last 33 years of peer-reviewed research says.
We are as a society paying the price of our cowardice today. As the price we pay gets larger and larger, more and more of us work up the courage to do what we know in our hearts is the right thing. It is a process that we need to go through to get from the dark place where we are today to the wonderful place where we will all be in our future.
I would like to move quicker. But it helps me to remind myself that I was once afraid to speak up myself. I am one of the humans too.
What makes me excited about the future is how much I was able to learn once I got over my fear of speaking out. We will be seeing thousands of people going through that process in days to come. The advances in the investing advice field in the last three decades have been 50 times more important and far-reaching than the advances in the computer electronics field. Yet many people who marvel at the advances in the computer electronics field are not yet even aware that there have even been advances in the investing advice field. There are many today who still believe that it is possible that someday Buy-and-Hold will produce good long-term results for one or two long-term investors.
We followed a normal process in our recognition of advances in the computer electronics field. In the investing advice field, we held off on recognition of huge advances for 33 years. That’s bad. But the corresponding good news is that, once we bring the Buy-and-Hold Mafia down, we all get to enjoy 33 years of advances at a single moment in time. I think it would be fair to say that, following the next price crash, we will be well-positioned to seeing the greatest period of economic growth ever experienced in our history.
The good news here is 50 times more good than the bad news here is bad.
Rob