Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently posted to another blog entry at this site:
Who has been the trigger for 99% of your posting, blogging, and other non-family activities over the last 12 years?
HINT: It hasn’t been Robert Michael “Hocus” Bennett.
I presume that your point is that it is you Goons who are the trigger for my posts.
That’s so only in a direct, obvious sense, Yogi.
The laws of the United States make your behavior a felony. And the rules of every discussion board and blog to which I have posted prohibits your behavior too. My view is that those rules should be enforced in a reasonable manner. If they were, Greaney would have been kicked off the Motley Fool board when he posted his first death threat and every post that I would have made in the years following would have been in response to questions of middle-class investors who have expressed a desire to learn about the realities of stock investing.
I urged Greaney’s removal back in June of 2002. So the fact that you Goons have been able to disrupt conversations at so many venues is not my doing. We have a problem AS A SOCIETY. We have Wall Street Con Men who have become millionaires pushing the smelly Buy-and-Hold garbage. We have millions of middle-class people who are being exploited and financially destroyed. And we have site owners who are afraid to take on the powerful Wall Street Con Men because they have seen how ruthless they are in their response to anyone who dares to “cross” them by posting honestly.
My job is to solve the problem.
Part of the way that I solve it is by responding to questions and comments put forward by you Goons.
I always make clear my opposition to your most abusive stuff. I often delete your most abusive posts. So I have done nothing to encourage your acts of financial fraud. I am clean.
But I do respond to posts that contain genuine questions or comments or in some cases genuine questions or comments mixed in with fraud and abuse. That’s a good thing to do. That builds a record. That gives me practice responding to questions. Many of the questions you advance puzzle ordinary investors too, not just Goons. After the crash, when ordinary people develop a desire to see the answers to their questions, they will have a resource to come to to find them. It is a very, very, very positive and constructive and life-affirming thing for me to respond to genuine or even semi-genuine questions.
You Goons trigger my posts in the sense that you put forward the words that determine which points I am going to address on any given day. But it is not really you Goons who have determined that my words appear here rather that at the boards and blogs to which I intended to post them. You played a role in that, to be sure. It was your abusiveness that blocked the thousands of community members who expressed a desire to be able to participate in discussions of what the peer-reviewed research says. But you could not have pulled that off if there was not a huge lack of understanding of how stock investing works among the general public.
In other circumstances, large numbers of posters would have demanded that you be removed when you engaged in all of your dirty tactics. You Goons didn’t create those circumstances any more than I did. Those circumstances were in place when I put forward my famous post of the morning of May 13, 2002.
It is that human ignorance that truly has triggered everything that I have done, not you Goons. You make it harder to solve that problem of human ignorance, that’s all.
You Goons are a mountain that we all need to climb to get to the place where deep in our hearts we all want to be. It is my job to overcome you. Part of the job is to respond to your genuine and semi-genuine questions. So I do that.
The end result is that we will advance to a place so wonderful that most of us cannot fully imagine how wonderful it is today.
It all will be worth it in the end, Yogi.
50 times over.
If you want to say that you trigger my efforts, I could say the same in return — that it is my honest posting that has driven you so crazy that you are now on your way to a prison sentence following the next crash. Now THAT”S triggering!
My stuff helps you as much as it helps everyone else who reads it. I have zero problem with that. I don’t approve of your abusiveness. But I consider myself your friend. If you profit from things I have said, I think that’s just super.
And your abusive stuff doesn’t just hurt me. It hurts millions of middle-class investors too. And it hurts you. It is your abusive stuff that will be putting you in a prison cell following the next crash. So you are being triggered in a much worse way than I am being triggered.
I am dealing in the most effective way possible to the circumstances that exist. Those circumstances are not ideal. I wish that Bogle had said the Three Magic Words 33 years ago and that we all were today enjoying the greatest economic advance we have ever seen in history. But the reality is that we are awfully darn close to that wonderful place today,. The good news is 50 times more good than the bad news is bad.
The peer-reviewed research that I co-authored with Wade Pfau is the most important research published in this field in the past three decades. I think it would be fair to say that Wade is going to be awarded a Nobel prize for that research and that I will likely be awarded a Pulitzer prize for the work that went into getting it published. Was that research paper triggered by you Goons too?
Trigger me more, Yogi!
Hit me with your best shot!
A $500 million settlement payment may only last my family for 20 generations. I need to take it up to 40 generations. Please trigger me more!
I did not study investing in school. I never managed a big fund. Yet I have taken this thing to places I never imagined I could take anything in the course of this lifetime. If that’s the result of your triggering, please keep triggering me like mad.
Honest posting leads to good places. That’s the point.
I am going to continue following this wonderful Learning Together path.
I believe that the day will come when we will have responsible people (including Old Saint Jack) speaking out about you Goons and your abusive, fraudulent behavior. At that point, we will leave the ugliness behind us and will be able to achieve three decades worth of advances in our understanding of how stock investing works in a very short amount of time. I cannot wait. I can bear with a little triggering if that is what it takes to get to that magic place.
I would have preferred to have never have had to deal with you Goons in carrying out the tasks needed to get us all there. That option was never made available to me, as you Goons well know. So I did it this other way instead. The important thing is that I did what needed to be done. That’s what matters, not the Goon stuff.
My take.
I wish you well.
Rob
Hello says
More unfettered discussion of safe withdrawal rates
https://www.kitces.com/blog/the-ratcheting-safe-withdrawal-rate-a-more-dominant-version-of-the-4-rule/
Rob says
We discussed this article on another thread, Hello. It’s a super article. I wrote a comment about it on the other thread and I am writing a column on it that will appear in a week or two at the Value Walk site.
The ratcheting thing is great. That’s the benefit of a Learning Together experience. There are always many way to look at a problem. Kitces is adding something important here. We all should be excited and happy about that.
He doesn’t handle the valuations issue properly. Those who engage in ratcheting still need to take valuations into consideration to get the numbers right. This doesn’t change that. It’s obviously not possible that anything could ever change that.
There has not been anything even a tiny bit “unfettered” about any discussions of safe withdrawal rates for at least 13 years now (that’s how long I have been around to see how fettered the discussions have been but the problem had obviously been in place before I came on the scene). Kitces is saying something important here. He would in all likelihood have said it YEARS AGO had we been having unfettered discussions all along.
And Kitces OBVOUSLY would like to be talking honestly about the valuations issues today as would thousands and thousands of others. If all those thousands were talking honestly on a daily basis, we all would be reaping the benefits of their honesty on a daily basis. The last 34 years have been the most important 34 years in the history of investment analysis because it is 34 years ago that the final critically important piece of the puzzle snapped into place. But we have largely squandered the great gift we have been given.
There are people who were advocating Buy-and-Hold strategies in 1980 (when the peer-reviewed research really did appear to support them) and who are still advocating Buy-and-Hold strategies today, 34 years after the peer-reviewed research showed that there is precisely zero chance that such a strategy could ever work for a single long-term investor in this or any other solar system. Huh?
In a world in which there were unfettered discussion of investment issues, we would never see a single death threat or a single demand for a single unjustified board banning or a single act of defamation or a single threat to get a single academic researcher fired from a single job. People who have confidence in the ideas that they are advocating don’t behave that way. Not ever. And in a world in which there were unfettered discussion people would have at least some minimal level of confidence in their ideas. The pain that the Buy-and-Holders are in would be impossible in a world in which there were unfettered discussion of investing ideas.
I think we will find our way to that world. We have no choice. So we are going to figure it out somehow. But we are not quite there today.
That said, Michael’s advance is a big one and we should celebrate that. All advances are a plus. When we combine it with the many other advances that we have denied ourselves over the past 34 years, we are going to have something absolutely amazing. Good for us!
The good news here is 50 times more good than the bad news here is bad.
We all should be very, very scared about where we are today and also very excited and happy about where we are today. Both things are so.
Humans!
Rob