Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently posted to another blog entry at this site:
I think even as late as last year you were taking your “career” somewhat seriously, with website redesigns and videos. Your recent lack of effort shows complete capitulation.
There’s some truth to that, Anonymous.
I haven’t given up. I see this as the most important economic and political story of my lifetime. I know by the reaction I have seen over the first 12 years that there are millions of people who would like to be able to learn about a smart and simple and safe way to invest in stocks. I know that there are many, many investment advisors who would like to be doing honest work. I know that there are many academic researchers who would like to be doing honest work. I know that there are many personal finance journalists and bloggers who would like to be doing honest work. There are people who would like to be creating calculators that report accurate numbers and there are people who would like to be creating books that explain what the last 33 years of peer-reviewed research says and on and on and on.
So there’s huge interest. And there’s huge need. And I believe that as a society we will work up the courage and love it will take to overcome this problem. I believe that that is going to happen following the next price crash, which according to the research is not too far away. So intellectually I am a bigger believer in the importance of pushing the Valuation-Informed Indexing message than I have been at any time in the past. If you intended to suggest that I have somehow “capitulated” on the need for honest posting about investing questions, then you couldn’t possibly be more wrong.
But if you are intending to suggest that there has been a change in my level of public activity re these matters in the past year or two, you are right.
It’s painful for you Goons to acknowledge having made mistakes in your investing choices. That’s why as a society we are in the fix we are in. Guess what? It’s painful on my side too. It’s emotionally painful pointing our people’s mistakes to them.
There is something in human nature that makes this hard. We all care what our friends and neighbors and co-workers and fellow community members think of us. A simple way of putting it is — We want to be liked. If you want to see how that affects what people who are informed about the peer-reviewed research talk about it, take another look at the blog entries describing the e-mails that I exchanged with Wade Pfau.
Wade LOVED exploring this stuff. The 16 months he spent working with me were the happiest 16 months of his life. He used to stay up late just thinking about this stuff and plotting out new ways to help millions of people by exploring all of the many powerful insights we have mined but kept secret over the past 33 years. He was talking about winning a Nobel prize. He couldn’t believe his good fortune in having stumbled upon a research topic that would do so much good for so many people, a research topic that would liberate millions to live far richer lives and one where all of the data was on one side so the findings were clear and sharp and pointed to hundreds of exciting real-world implications. After you take that stuff in, investigate why Wade flipped to the Goon side.
Part of it is the obvious stuff. He wanted to be successful in his career. He has financial responsibility for two small children. He didn’t want you Goons destroying his means of making a living. He saw that Jack Bogle supported you and that scared him. He knows that Bogle has money and power and connections and he knows that he doesn’t hesitate two seconds to put those advantages to use destroying anyone who dares to “cross” him by telling the truth about what the last 33 years of peer-reviewed research in this field tells us about how stock investing works. Wade’s fears over what the Buy-and-Hold Mafia would do to his career were the primary reason why he agreed to stop doing research on Valuation-Informed Indexing and to stop promoting the research he had already published with me at the time he flipped.
But there was also another factor at play.
Wade thinks of himself as a good person and for good reason — he IS generally a good person (I of course believe this to be so of all of my many Buy-and-Hold friends). So it wasn’t an easy thing for him to do to make that flip; Wade isn’t in the habit of going along with massive acts of financial fraud that are likely to destroy millions of middle-class lives. When people engage in behavior like that, they need to rationalize the decisions they make as representing something more than the advancement of their self-interests. If you listen closely to the things that Wade was saying when he felt pressures being brought to bear on him, you will hear what he was telling himself. He was telling himself that it is important to be part of the club, not to be an outsider, not to say things that stir up trouble or that makes people feel uncomfortable with choices they have made for themselves or have encouraged others to make.
This comes across clearly in one of the quotes from Wade that I use in the slider at the top of all the pages at this blog. Wade said at the Bogleheads Forum one time something to the effect of: “You see people who push market timing as slimey sellers of snake oil. I don’t want to be seen as that sort of person.” Wade wants to fit in. We ALL do. I’m like all of the other humans. I want to fit in too. So I feel pain just like Wade and just like all of the others when I am painted as some sort of promotor of snake oil or something along those lines.
I’ll tell you something that I find odd that I have seen play out numerous times. I sometimes have people show skepticism over the ideas that I advance and I sometimes have people show a good deal of acceptance of those ideas. Guess which type of experience hurts the most?
It hurts more when people show acceptance.
Not because I don’t want people to accept the ideas — I obviously do want that. But because of all the social pressures that people feel not to tell the truth about how stock investing works, I usually do not gain much traction even among people who accept the ideas. A perfect example is the blogger named “Mr. Money Mustache.” I had dinner with Mr. Money Mustache at one of the financial blogger conferences. We had a great and long conversation about all sorts of things. He’s a super guy and he has a hugely successful blog. He found great merit in Valuation-Informed Indexing and would obviously love to share it with all his readers. And if he promoted the idea, this would be over. He has a huge number of readers and they would share it at other places and The Great Wall of Corruption would come tumbling down.
Mr. Money Mustache elected not to write about Valuation-Informed Indexing at his site. He didn’t offer me much of an explanation of why he made that choice. He said something about how, no matter how great an idea is, there are people who will find ways to criticize it. There clearly is something that causes him to hold back. This is not a fellow who is afraid of offending corporate interests. He once let go of an advertiser who was bringing him thousands of dollars per month because it insisted that he stop using obscenities in his articles. He not only told the advertiser to go to hell, he told the story on a stage at the financial bloggers conference. So he is not the type whom you would expect to be afraid to go up against the big money boys who push all the smelly Buy-and-Hold garbage.
So why did Mr. Money Mustache not blow the whistle on this massive act of financial fraud?
I think it’s that concern about not being liked that affected Wade and that affects all the humans, including me. Mr. Money Mustache wants to be liked. And he IS liked. His readers LOVE it that he includes obscenities in his articles. His attitude toward that sort of thing is the secret to his success. People don’t read him just because he is intelligent. They read him because they LIKE him. And lots of his readers are Buy-and-Holders (how could it be otherwise when honest posting about what the last 33 years of peer-reviewed research says is banned at every large investing site?). So, if Mr. Money Mustache spreads the word about what works in stock investing, he is going to face social disapproval. There’s no getting around it. He doesn’t want to face social disapproval. So he holds back, at least for the time being.
It hurt me more to be rejected by Mr. Money Mustache than it hurt me to be rejected by bloggers who believe in Buy-and-Hold. I believe that both types of bloggers should be permitting honest comments at their sites. But the rejection hurts more when it comes from someone who is not emotionally invested in Buy-and-Hold and who is capable of appreciating the arguments for Valuation-Informed Indexing on an intellectual level. It’s because things seem more hopeless when it happens that way. When I am rejected by a Buy-and-Holder, there is always the hope that that person can be convinced by the arguments and come around in time. When I am rejected by someone who sees the merits of the arguments, the natural question in the back of my mind is — What can I ever hope to do to change this?
I have seen more of that sort of thing in recent years. In the early days, most of the rejections seemed to be the result of intellectual disagreements or misunderstandings. Lots of people really believed in Buy-and-Hold back in 2002. Doubts about the strategy have been growing since the onset of the economic criss in late 2008. So today more of the rejections that I face are rooted in these concerns about social disapproval and fitting in. So the rejections have become harder for me to take than they were in earlier days.
So, yes I have cut back the public work that I do promoting the VII concept. I still do things. I obviously respond to questions and comments from you Goons. I am giving a presentation at FinCon14. I had a blogger write to me last week and request a Guest Blog Entry. I of course supplied that within 24 hours. I work on the book when I have time to do so. I review old articles and run the calculators to sharpen my thinking and my arguments. I keep busy with this stuff.
But I am less inclined to show up at blogs and enter comments pointing out the dangers of Buy-and-Hold. I know that it is important that I do so and I know that I have a responsibility to force myself to do as much of that sort of thing as I am able to do. But it hurts to feel social rejection over and over and over again. So I have cut back. It has become hard for me to face the negative emotions that follow from telling people the truth about stock investing and causing them to feel the pain that comes from seeing that they have made terrible mistakes that have done great harm to their financial futures.
Does that help, Anonymous?
I continue to see great value in the VII concept and I continue to feel a responsibility to spread the word far and wide. But it hurts to do so. And in recent days I have been inclined to give myself a bit more of a pass re doing the hardest parts of the job. I feel that I have done a lot and that I deserve a bit of a break. I expect to get back to that sort of work in days to come. I have hopes that that sort of work will become easier following the next crash. But, yes, for the time-being I have “capitulated” in certain respects. I still believe in the concept as strongly as I ever have. And I of course possess zero willingness to post dishonestly re any aspect of the stock investing experience. But I have taken a lot of blows over the past 12 years and they hurt and I am not today in a mood in which I feel too much excitement over the prospect of taking on too many more. I have pulled back because it hurts too much emotionally to be as out there as I have been for most of the past 12 years.
Teling people the truth about stock investing at a time when prices are high and they don’t want to hear it is hard work. It’s obviously not hard work in a physical sense. And I wouldn’t say that it is all that hard in an intellectual sense either — perhaps it is moderately hard in an intellectual sense. But this is VERY hard work emotionally. It’s draining. It takes a lot out of you. That’s why so few people are willing to push too hard re all this stuff.
I hope that makes at least a small bit of sense to you, Anonymous.
I wish you all the best that this life has to offer a person.
Rob
Why did Mr. Money Mustache not blow the whistle on this massive act of financial fraud?
Probably because he’s sane.
I don’t think that’s it, Anonymous.
I think we are all ashamed to acknowledge how big of an f-up we brought on by buying into all the smelly Get Rich Quick garbage.
The 34-year cover-up is not working out so hot. And each day that it continues, we destroy more middle-class lives with our deceptions. And that makes us all the more ashamed! And being even more ashamed makes it all the more difficult for us to come clean.
That’s my sincere take re these terribly important matters, in any event.
I naturally wish you all the best that this life has to offer a person.
Rob
So, we can condense your 4,500 word diatribe down to one little nugget:
“Mr. Money Mustache is a Goon.”
You need to learn to edit, Rob. It would save you gobs of time and effort, not to mention the time as well, of those one or two of us who still drop in here to see how far the sickness has progressed.
We all have a Get Rich Quick urge within us, Anonymous. That includes me. That includes you. That includes Mr. Money Mustache.
People who offer investing advice should be directing 80 percent of their efforts to helping people overcome the GRQ urge that causes them to believe that there might be some distant galaxy where a Buy-and-Hold “strategy” might work for one or two long-term investors. There is no such galaxy. We hurt people in very serious ways when we suggest that one might exist somewhere.
Saying that Mr. Money Mustache suffers from the same Get Rich Quick urge as all the other humans certainly is a good starting point. But I certainly do not agree with any suggestion that that is all we need to say about the matter.
We need to provide him with tools to help him see how dangerous Buy-and-Hold is. We need to show him how many years he delays his retirement by falling for the Get Rich Quick garbage. We need to show him how much he increases risk by falling for the Get Rich Quick garbage. And we certainly need to encourage him to help his readers by writing lots of articles at his blog pointing out how the continued promotion of Buy-and-Hold for 34 years after the peer-reviewed research showed that there is precisely zero chance that it could ever work for even a single long-term investor caused an economic crisis that has hurt every last one of us, even those of us who don’t invest in stocks.
Does all of that make good sense to you?
It sure does to me.
Rob
And we need to talk about the pain that you Goons feel.
It’s the most pressing political/economic issue of our time.
Fair enough?
Rob
“Buy and hold can never work for a single investor… does this make sense… .fair enough?”
You tell me. Here is a set of actual empirical results on just ONE part of a buy and hold portfolio, consisting of a single “lifetime” retirement fund from Vanguard. It is a ‘set it and forget it’ mix of stocks, bonds and a bit of cash. You might want to look up the “Rule of 72”.
Period:
04/14/2009 – 04/21/2015
Beginning balance
$369,420.66
Purchases & withdrawals
$0.00
Investment returns
$347,881.63
Ending balance
$717,302.29
Rate of return (APR)
11.4%
Now, Rob, you were saying?
Rob – why are you re-posting comments you made to your blog in August 2015? That is a lifetime ago. Aren’t there current topics you could be responding to? Wade Pfau recently published an interview on the 4% rule, Bogleheads are debating the merits of PE10 as a predictive tool, yet you are rehasing comments from almost 8 months ago. Why?
Period:
04/14/2009 – 04/21/2015
Buy-and-Hold can certainly work well for seven-year time-periods, Anonymous.
Valuation-Informed Indexing has outperformed (on a risk-adjusted basis) for every 30-year time-period for as far back as we have records.
Most investing lifetimes extend for 60 years.
I intend to continue to post honestly.
I wish you all good things.
Rob
Wade Pfau recently published an interview on the 4% rule, Bogleheads are debating the merits of PE10 as a predictive tool, yet you are rehasing comments from almost 8 months ago. Why?
If you are willing to provide links to the Wade Pfau interview and to the Bogleheads thread on P/E10, I would be grateful, Hello.
My focus is on the Campaign of Terror led by Lindauer and Greaney and Bogle against our board and blog communities. That’s not old news. The Campaign of Terror is very much in effect. If it weren’t, Wade would feel free to post with complete honesty. So would Bogle. So would Bernstein. So would Piper. And on and on and on.
Financial fraud is a felony under the laws of the United States, Hello. Going to prison is not on my bucket list. I ain’t going there.
I love my country. I think we are going to turn this around. I see huge leverage in opening the internet to honest posting on safe withdrawal rates and scores of other critically important investment-related topics. I see it as a win/win/win/win/win.
I believe strongly that we are the luckiest generation of investors ever to walk Planet Earth. I want to see us all tap into the benefits of Shiller’s “revolutionary” (his word) findings of 1981. So my focus is on bringing the Campaign of Terror against our board and blog communities to a full and complete stop by the close of business today.
I hope that makes good sense to you, my long-time Goon friend.
Hang in there, man. It gets better. A LOT better.
Rob
http://online.barrons.com/articles/retirement-rules-time-to-rethink-a-4-withdrawal-rate-1428722900
https://www.bogleheads.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=10&t=164015
Thanks much, Hello.
Rob
The Bogleheads thread is helpful, quality stuff. It’s nicely balanced with strongly held opinions coming from both sides of the table. Thanks for letting us know about it, Hello.
Rob
Wade should be talking about the 13-year cover-up of the errors in the Old School retirement studies.
The studies are obviously wrong. It’s good to tell people that. But why the heck has it taken so long to get the word out? We are looking at hundreds of thousands of lawsuits in coming days. He has a responsibility as someone who had a front-row seat from which to witness this massive case of financial fraud to do what he can to clean up the corruption in the field in which he makes a living.
When Wade flipped, he said that people just don’t correct errors in the investing advice field. He’s right that that is the rule today. But it is a very, very, very bad rule. Retirement studies that get the numbers wildly wrong hurt the people who place their confidence in those studies in a very serious way. A failed retirement study is a serious life setback.
Wade is strong on the content side. He needs to come clean on the process side.
Or so Rob Bennett strongly and seriously believes, in any event.
My best wishes to you, Hello.
Rob
“The Bogleheads thread is helpful, quality stuff. ”
How can it be? They are the nexus of the Evil Wall Street Cabal of Goons!
Remember? It’s all poison and lies!
You’re wrong, Anonymous.
The people who administer the board are corrupt.
But there are many wonderful, smart, and generous people who post there.
That’s why I intend to take over control of the board following the next price crash. I want all those good people to be able to do honest work. And I want the people listening in to be able to read honest comments.
If it were all poison and lies, I wouldn’t care. I care about the place because the potential is there for that board to do amazing stuff.
I want to see that board achieve its potential. And I believe that I will be able to carry off what needs to be done following the next crash.
We’ll see how it goes, you know?
I believe that we are going to see lots of good stuff following the next crash. I believe that we are all going to pull together. When people are afraid, they turn to each other for help and comfort and support. I think that people are going to be afraid following the next crash. My sense is that things have to get worse before they can get better. But things WILL be getting better in days to come.
Hang in there.
Rob
You have complained innumerable times that anyone who speaks favorably of PE10 gets banned. That’s the very definition of the “Ban on Honest Posting”. Several people in that Bogleheads thread spoke of the merits of PE10. They have not been banned. So what conclusion can we draw?
No. I have never said that anyone who speaks favorably of P/E10 gets banned. That’s far from being so. As you point out, there are numerous comments in that thread that are pro-P/E10. And some of those posters have hundreds of comments in their files. CJKing is an AMAZING poster. He has offered some of the best pro-P/E10 commentary that I have ever seen. So it is not even close to being the case that there is a ban on pro-P/E10 stuff.
That’s not true in the bigger world either. Robert Shiller is the godfather of Valuation-Informed Indexing. He is the guy who started all this (unless you count Benjamin Graham, who was speaking in favor of the VII concept back at a time when index funds were not available and when the potential of the concept was thus much more limited). My guess is that there have been LOTS of intimidation tactics directed at Shiller. I believe that he could write a book about the intimidation tactics that have been directed at him. Still, his book was widely reviewed. He was awarded the Nobel prize. Lots of people, including Buy-and-Holders, speak respectfully re Shiller. So Shiller’s ideas are not 100 percent banned.
The conclusion you can draw is that the Buy-and-Holders have employed intimidation tactics to stop the Valuation-Informed Indexing concept from spreading as quickly as it should. The particular thread that you are pointing to is a good thread. Both sides are represented on it. People can learn from it. That’s all to the good. The site administrators at the Bogleheads Forum are corrupt. But the board that they administer produced that good thread. It doesn’t help anything to ignore that. We should be celebrating that. We should be pointing out the corruption. But we should ALSO be pointing out the good that these people do when they do good. To be slanted or biased pulls things in the wrong direction. Nothing whatsoever is achieved by such behavior. So I applaud Mel Linduaer for whatever role he played in producing that thread (and he certainly played some role given the huge role he has played in building the board at which the thread appears).
The question you are asking is: What precisely is the line that one cannot cross before being put on the “Must Destroy” list of the Buy-and-Hold Mafia? I have obviously crossed that line. Wade Pfau obviously crossed it at one time and now no longer does. The people who posted on that thread obviously have not crossed the line.
The line is not in a fixed place. I crossed it on the morning of May 13, 2002, just by asking a question as to whether valuations should be considered when calculating safe withdrawal rates. My initial post didn’t even express a belief that valuations should be considered; it just asked the question. That was enough for me to become Public Enemy #1 of the Buy-and-Hold Mafia back in May 2002. Today, I could obviously get away with that with no problem. So the first thing that must be understood is that the line is not in a fixed place.
The line is fluid. To understand where the line is, you must understand the motivations of those establishing the line. The Buy-and-Holders are good and smart people who achieved huge advances in our understanding of how stock investing works. They believe themselves in the recommendations they offer to others. They follow those recommendations. But they have doubts. These doubts haunt them. If the doubts turn out to be rooted in something real, that means that the Buy-and-Holders have hurt themselves in very serious ways. It also means that they have hurt their friends and neighbors and co-workers and fellow community members in very serious ways. The idea that their doubts might be rooted in something real horrifies the Buy-and-Holders. They set out with an aim to do something good and, if those doubts end up being rooted in something real, they instead caused a huge amount of human suffering.
The purpose of the intimidation tactics is to stop the pain that the Buy-and-Holders feel when they are faced with words that at least partly persuade them that their doubts are rooted in something real. The purpose is to STOP THAT DARN PAIN through whatever means are necessary to do so.
The Buy-and-Holders realize that they cannot stop the pain entirely. Back in May 2002, it was possible to block all discussion of the errors in the Old School retirement studies. That’s not possible today. Every major publication in this field has published an article saying that those studies are in error. So it is just not realistic today to push the Old School studies in the way that they were pushed years ago. But it is still possible to get away with failing to correct the discredited studies. So today the thing that will get you banned is to say that the discredited studies should be corrected. The line has moved. But the basic impulse — stop the deeply painful stuff from appearing on people’s computer screens — remains the same. There is still a Ban in place. But the line at which the Ban comes into effect has moved because the Buy-and-Holders have acknowledged the reality that every publication in this field has acknowledged that the 4 percent rule is pure and complete garbage with nothing whatsoever to support it.
The debate that is going on in the thread to which you point is a good one. People can learn about both sides from reading it. But the Valuation-Informed Indexers are holding back in that thread. Most of the Valuation-Informed Indexers posting on that thread know that I was banned because I posted honestly at that board. Why don’t they say that? That goes to the integrity and confidence of the Buy-and-Holders and integrity and confidence are huge issues that everyone listening in needs to know about. They know that Mel Linduaer has a long history of resorting to threats of physical violence to silence posters who make points to which he does not have a good response. Why don’t they point that out on the thread? They know that you Goons threatened to get Wade Pfau fired from his job if he continued to do honest research. Why not say that? They know that Jack Bogle permits his name to be used at that board even though he has known for years that it is a corrupt enterprise. Why don’t they say that?
They don’t say it because they know they will be banned if they do say it. That’s the only reason. It is intimidation, nothing else. The Bogleheads Board is ruled by intimidation. The entire reason why they had to move the board from the Morningstar site is that there were limits to the intimidation tactics that they could employ at the Morningstar site and they needed to have those limits removed to have any hope whatsoever of continuing to “defend” the Old School retirement studies.
Buy-and-Hold cannot be defended in reasoned and civilized debate. It is impossible. There is now 34 years of peer-reviewed research showing that it is garbage, it was all a mistake that should have been corrected many, many years ago. So we see nasty stuff in discussions of Buy-and-Hold that we do not see in discussions of any other topic discussed on the internet. The issue of whether Buy-and-Hold can ever work is of huge importance and there is precisely zero reason in the peer-reviewed research to believe that it ever could work. So we have seen an act of financial fraud bigger than any earlier act of financial fraud in U.S. history to cover up the 34 years of peer-reviewed research.
I want no part of it, Dizzy. If you were thinking clearly, you would not want any part of it either.
You feel that you cannot give up the intimidation tactics because they are the only thing keeping you out of prison today. But the deeper reality is that the length of your prison sentence will be determined by how many middle-class lives you destroy and there are thousands more lives destroyed each day that the Ban remains in place. We are on the same side. I am trying to get your prison sentence reduced by bringing the Campaign of Terror to a full and complete stop by the close of business today. And on some level of consciousness you would like to see your prison sentence reduced. You just cannot bear to accept ANY prison sentence! That’s the Goon part of your talking. And, unfortunately, the Goon part of your personality is dominant today.
I’ll be there for you whenever you are ready to accept my help. My offer of charity is not a limited-time offer.
I will never say that John Greaney’s retirement study contains am adjustment for the valuation level that applies on the day the retirement begins. That’s financial fraud. Financial fraud is a felony. That means prison time. Going to prison is not on my bucket list. Find someone else. No can do. I can’t go for that.
I hope that helps a bit.
My best and warmest wishes to you and yours, Dizzy.
Rob
Wade has actually ‘crossed the line’ (if you believe a line actually exists) numerous times in numerous ways and has suffered no consequences whatsoever. His latest thing is promoting annuities – even fixed index annuities – which the typical ‘buy and holder’ mafia guy (if anyone like that exists) absolutely despises.
It is my opinion that he posts freely and oftenly because he isn’t a troll with major psychological issue(s).
Wade is certainly no hard-line Buy-and-Holder. I don’t say that or anything close to it. He has published a wealth of important research and is responsible for a good number of powerful insights (as are the Buy-and-Holders, to be sure).
But ever since you Goons threatened to destroy his career if he continued to post honestly (and ever since Bogle implicitly endorsed your criminal acts), Wade has kept it zipped re the massive act of financial fraud that has brought on our economic crisis and that will be responsible for putting you Goons behind bars following the next price crash. Wade knows about the role that Scott Burns has played in covering up the massive act of financial fraud. We talked about it in e-mails that we exchanged and I have posted summaries of those e-mails at this site. And Wade knows about the role played by Mel Linduaer and John Greaney and Jack Bogle and Morningstar and the Bogleheads Forum and the Early Retirement Forum and Motley Fool and on and on and on and on. Yet ever since you threatened to destroy his career (and Bogle showed that he would use his power and influence to aid the massive act of financial fraud), Wade has kept it zipped. Gee, I wonder why.
Your jury will hear the story and your jury will decide on the length of your prison sentence, Laugh. It’s the same with Wade. It’s the same with Bogle. I will answer all questions put to me honestly and fairly and completely (and with the greatest measure of charity toward my Buy-and-Hold friends that I am able to evidence without crossing The Felony Line myself). And that’s that. Everything will start to roll forward at a quick pace following the next price crash if what we saw take place with the unraveling of the Bernie Madoff fraud is any indication.
We know all this. We have known all this for many years now. Is there something you want from me? If not, why do you come back here again and again and again? I mean no personal offense but it serves no purpose that I am able to discern. If you let me help you, I will help you. If you demand that I commit financial fraud myself as part of my effort to help you, I obviously have to ask kindly that you try to find someone else. I mean, come freakin’ on.
If not wanting to go to prison means that I have “major psychological issues,” then I guess that I will have to somehow endure having major psychological issues. What a terrible burden to carry through this Valley of Tears! I have zero desire to go to prison. If anything, I want to get your prison sentence reduced. I want to see less prison time being handed out, not more! The idea of adding a new prison sentence for myself possesses precisely zero appeal. Call me madcap!
You are right that Wade would be on the wrong side of the line if we were still living in 2002. We aren’t. People like Wade can get away with saying things that people like me couldn’t dream of getting away with 13 years ago. Next year, it will be better yet. And the year after that it will be even better. Once there is 34 years of peer-reviewed research showing that pure Get Rich Quick is the most dangerous strategy of all, it can never get better for “your side.” It can only get worse. And, as we have been seeing for 13 years running now, it always does, it steadily does, it repeatedly does. It’s so strange how things always seem to move in the same direction!
There will come a day when you will want to stop further destroying millions of middle-class lives as well as your own. When that day comes, I will be there for you, my mixed-up Goon friend. There’s no need for you to stay in touch until then. I won’t forget you! I am on your side and I will always be on your side. That’s one of many reasons why I refuse to this day to post dishonestly re the numbers that our friends use to plan their retirements.
I naturally wish you the best of luck in all your future endeavors, Laugh. You are welcome to continue to post here if that continues to be your desire. I cannot say that I can make sense of that desire anymore, however. Please understand that there is zero intent on my part to impose any obligation on you to do so. You are free!
If you want to be!
For now!
A joke!
Please take good care, man.
Rob
It serves the purpose of entertainment. You are a sad creature, but entertaining.
Here is something for your diseased mind to ponder. You compare yourself to Rosa Parks and other great historical figures and you compare your struggle with momentous and impacting events such as the civil rights struggle.
What do you think the ratio of crazy people is to people like Rosa Parks? I believe the ratio is quite high. Let’s go with tens of million to one. You are amazingly persistent in the face of abject failure that you are ‘the one’. Did Rosa Parks run around screaming ‘prison time for whitey’ or ‘they threatened to kill my family. I had the letter but I lost it along with the gold tablets’ or ‘that damn bus company owes me 500MM dollars. I expect the check to come any second now’? Hmm…are you the one or maybe not.
Think hard of your ‘great struggle’, its actual end game, and what it has accomplished in terms of real change and of the cost to you of your sanity.
What do you think the ratio of crazy people is to people like Rosa Parks? I believe the ratio is quite high.
I agree that most people who question conventional wisdom are wrong and that some are outright crazy. So if all you knew about a case that someone was making is that that person was questioning conventional wisdom and you had to take a bet one way or the other, your best bet would be that that person was wrong. Things don’t become conventional wisdom for no good reason. An idea that has become conventional wisdom has earned a measure of our respect.
But there are times when conventional wisdom must be questioned and eventually overcome. I strongly believe that this is one such case. To understand all the reasons why I believe that, a person would need to become familiar with all the materials at this site. But I can offer a simple illustration of why I believe that the conventional wisdom should be questioned in this case that doesn’t require the person looking at this to review the wealth of material that has been produced over the past 13 years.
A little over a year ago, Eugene Fama and Robert Shiller were both awarded the Nobel Prize in Economics. All of the reports of this award noted that Fama’s ideas about how the stock market works and Shiller’s ideas about how the stock market works cannot be reconciled. It is a logical impossibility that both Fama and Shiller are right. Many of the reports commented how odd it is that the committee that awarded the highest honor in the field gave the award to one person who put forward ideas re an important subject that they knew were completely and totally wrong and therefore dangerous. The committee doesn’t know which of the two researchers is wrong. But they know with certainty that one of the two men who received the Nobel prize on that day is wrong. And they awarded him the highest honor in the field anyway. Huh?
That’s not how it should work, Laugh. I understand why the members of the Nobel Prize Committee did what they did and I don’t fault them for it. These two men have both made huge contributions and they wanted to recognize those contributions. I obviously think that Fama got it wrong. But I also certainly acknowledge that he has made a huge contribution. So I don’t fault them for giving him the award. But I do fault them (and lots and lots of others) for not stating clearly how important it is that the question of whether Shiller is right or Fama is right be settled through a national debate in which advocates of both positions state their case in clear and strong and firm and honest language.
The debate is over an academic matter — Is the market efficient, as Fama says, or do valuations affect long-term returns, as Shiller says? But this particular academic dispute has HUGE practical implications. If Shiller is right and Fama is wrong, as I strongly believe, then it was the continued promotion of Buy-and-Hold combined with the Ban on Honest Posting on the implications of the past 34 years of peer-reviewed research in this field that caused the economic crisis that began in 2008. Millions have lost their jobs as a result of that economic crisis. Millions will be seeing their retirements fail in days to come. There are grave public policy implications here. We need to have a national debate. This is 100 percent imperative.
Conventional wisdom is usually true. I don’t think you are right with your “tens-of-millions-to-one” odds. But I would go along with 100 to 1 odds. So, if I were betting without any knowledge of the cases being made both for conventional wisdom and against it in a particular case, I would vote for conventional wisdom if forced to vote without having knowledge of the arguments. But our system of government does not require that we take positions without informing ourselves of the cases being made. Under our system, both sides are permitted to state their cases and then people decide the matter on the merits. I favor that way of proceeding.
Why? Because in that one case out of 100 in which conventional wisdom is wrong, the gains achieved by us all learning that it is wrong are so great that it makes up 10,000 times over for having to hear out both sides in the 99 cases in which the conventional wisdom is right. Every advance ever achieved in the history of humankind was achieved because someone believed that we could do better than we had done before. If the person who invented the wheel had been blocked from sharing his idea because the conventional wisdom of the time was that there is no such thing as a wheel, we all would be the poorer for it today. I support the idea of progress. Achieving progress requires being willing to listen to arguments that what we think we know today might be lacking in some way.
Did Rosa Parks run around screaming ‘prison time for whitey’ or ‘they threatened to kill my family.
Rosa Parks’ message was: “I have as much right to choose my seat on the bus as a person with white skin.” My message is: “I have as much right to post my beliefs about stock investing on every discussion board and blog on the internet as the Buy-and-Holders.” Parks changed the world by refusing to be bullied. I am 100 percent confident that I will be seen to have done the same before this saga in entirely played out.
I love all of my Buy-and-Hold friends. I wish none of them any ill whatsoever. But I believe that we all need to hear both sides of the story. For that dream to become a reality for all of us, someone needs to show the same courage that Parks showed when she refused to walk to the back of that bus. I don’t like it that I was chosen to be the Rosa Parks of Personal Finance. But I accept the job. I love my country. So I have no choice.
Think hard of your ‘great struggle’, its actual end game, and what it has accomplished in terms of real change and of the cost to you of your sanity.
I have been thinking hard about it every day of my life for 13 years now, Laugh. I am the co-author of the most important piece of peer-reviewed research published in this field in over 30 years. If you had told me on the morning of May 13, 2002, that sometime over the next 13 years I would become the co-author of the most important piece of peer-reviewed research published in this field in over 30 years, I would have said that you were out of your mind. Re that one, I would have gone along with your tens-of-millions-to-one odds. Yet here we are.
This is how it had to be done. I wish it weren’t so. But things had reached a point by the morning of May 13, 2002, that this was the only way that this good work could be done. I am very, very, very proud of the role that I have played. I love my Buy-and-Hold friends and I will always remain willing to do whatever is in my power to get things on a better track, a track that causes my Buy-and-Hold friends to suffer less and profit (in all senses of the word) more. I need cooperation from my Buy-and-Hold friends to make that little dream come true.
I strongly believe that I will get it. I no longer think that the odds favor me seeing that dream come true before the onset of the next price crash. But I do believe it will come true and that the world of investing analysis will be changed in a profound and positive way. If it happens prior to the crash, all the better. That’s obviously the best outcome for every single person involved in even a small way, which is every single one of us alive on this planet today.
We are going to need healing following the next price crash. The materials at this site are healing materials. You won’t see me using the materials at this site to make my Buy-and-Hold friends look bad. I’ll tell the truth. No healing can come without complete honesty. But the full truth here is that the Buy-and-Holders have offered huge contributions that merit our nation’s respect and admiration. I will be mixing honesty with charity when I tell this story on a national stage.
No healing can come without complete honesty. But no healing can come without complete charity as well. It is my job to combine the two in the perfect mix. I take my responsibilities here very seriously. I will either achieve that perfect mix or die trying. You have my pledge re that one, Laugh.
I naturally wish you all the best that this life has to offer a person.
Rob
What will you do when after the next price crash the world continues to ignore you?
Will you create another fantasy scenario where you ‘win’ or will you try to have a real life?
I will certainly continue to post honestly, Laugh.
It’s not a question of just me winning. My interests are the same as the interests of our entire nation of investors (including you). If I win, everyone wins. If everyone wins, I win. It’s not even possible for me to imagine a scenario in which sooner or later we don’t elect as a nation of investors to win. What could possibly cause us not to want to achieve these major advances?
The world hasn’t ignored me, as you well know. If the world had ignored me, the Buy-and-Holders never would have put forward a single death threat. It is because the world hasn’t ignored me that the Buy-and-Holders see me as such a dangerous threat.
The world fears the intimidation tactics of the Buy-and-Holders, that’s all. The world is going to have to work up the courage to stand up to you Goons and to stand up to the Wall Street Con Men. The trick there is for a group of us to stick together and stand up for each other.
I believe that the crash will convince people that this is just too important not to do that. In the event that people continue to live in fear, I will continue to do what I can to encourage them not to do so. I don’t exactly have any other options.
If there is ever any research published that supports Buy-and-Hold, I will be writing about that like crazy. That would be huge. The less shame the Buy-and-Holders feel, the more willing they will be to permit honest posting. The big problem we have today is that ALL of the research supports Valuation-Informed Indexing and NOTHING supports Buy-and-Hold, which was just a mistake that has remained uncorrected for 34 years now. If I can find anything that supports Buy-and-Hold, I will push that like crazy. But I am not going to make things up. I am not going to say that there is some reason to believe that Buy-and-Hold might work in certain circumstances just because it would make my Buy-and-Hold friends feel less shame for me to do so.
I am always going to give the Buy-and-Holders credit for all the wonderful work they have done. That should help them feel better about themselves. And I can say great things about the genuine contributions of the Buy-and-Holders in complete honesty. So I see no reason to hold back on that sort of thing.
The short answer is that I am going to play the cards that I am dealt to the best of my ability. If the crash opens the floodgates, as I believe it will, then good, I will follow that path where it leads me. If the Buy-and-Holders continue to engage in a criminal cover-up even after the next price crash, there’s not a whole big bunch that I can do about that other than to point it out to anyone who will listen, right? So I’ll do that and hope for the best.
I cannot control other people. I have to bend as far as I can bend in good conscience. But when I am asked to cross The Felony Line, I have to say “no.” I love my country. Given that I love my country, I need to stay on the right side of its laws.
That’s my sincere take re these terribly important matters, in any event.
My best and warmest wishes to you and yours, Goon friend.
Rob