Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently posted to another blog entry at this site:
I would like to be able to fly like superman, have more money than Bill Gates and be able to look like I am 25 for the rest of my life, but we all can’t expect our fantasies to be reality, right?
This comment goes to what I mean when I say in response to all of your intimidation tactics that I am going to continue posting honestly because I love my country.
We clicked in the last piece of the puzzle re how stock investing works in 1981. Computer technology was around in 1981 but was not nearly as advanced as it is today. The most advanced game at the time was probably that Pong thing that bounced a ball from one end of the screen to another.
If you had told people that in 34 years we would be able to talk to our cell phones while we walked to the street and ask them to tell us the location of a restaurant that we wanted to eat it, people would have said what you say here: “I would like to be able to fly like Superman, have more money than Bill Gates and be able to look like I am 25 for the rest of my life but we can’t all expect our fantasies to be reality.”
We need to be cautious re outsized claims. I go along with that one 100 percent. I say that we can reduce the risk of stock investing by 70 percent anytime we choose to open the internet up to honest posting. That is very much an outsized claim. So I have zero problem with the idea of subjecting it to the greatest scrutiny possible. Our system calls for that. So that is 100 percent okay in my book.
That’s not what you Goons have done. You have not subjected the last 34 years of peer-reviewed research to scrutiny. You have flat-out banned discussion of it. You have made clear for 13 years now that anyone who discusses the implications of the last 34 years of peer-reviewed research will see his career destroyed for having done so. Everyone gets a choice. He can silence himself. Or he can see his career destroyed. No other options.
That’s not necessary scrutiny or appropriate skepticism. That’s financial fraud. That’s a felony. That’s prison time.
And for good reason.
The computer technology industry is different in an important way from the investing advice industry. The computer technology field was wide open in 1981. Steve Jobs could design a great computer or a great cell phone and sell millions of them and become very rich and change the world.
That’s not the way it works in the investing advice field. If there had never been an industry built around the promotion of Buy-and-Hold strategies, the two situations would be comparable. Had Shiller published his “revolutionary” (his word) research findings in 1961 instead of 1981, we would have seen the same growth in the investing advice field in the following 34 years that we have seen in the computer technology field from 1981 through today. That’s not the way the cards were dealt. The research that for a time appeared to support Buy-and-Hold was published in 1965 and an entire industry was quickly built around it and so when Shiller published his “revolutionary” research in 1981 there was an entire industry of “experts” already in place to tell him to take his revolutionary insights and go pound sand with them.
I don’t buy it, Anonymous.
Valuation-Informed Indexing is a dream come true. It is Investor Heaven. It is what Jack Bogle was trying to put together when he put together Buy-and-Hold. VII is JACK BOGLE’S DREAM COME TRUE.
There is 34 years of peer-reviewed research showing that. There are 13 years of internet discussion-board conversations showing that. There are HUNDREDS of experts (take a look at the slider at the top of every page of this web site) saying that. It’s all 100 percent amazing and 100 percent fantasy and 100 percent unbelievable and 100 percent true.
Our economic system is built around the idea of fantasies coming true every now and again and making all of us richer as a result. That’s the entire freakin’ point of our system!
Most fantasies do not come true. You’ve got me re that one. But some do. Letting the ones that can come true actually come true is important stuff. It is by permitting such fantasies to come true that we have been achieving that 6.5 percent real return for 140 years now. Keep everything the way it always has been, never permit a new idea to develop before our eyes, and you lose that 6.5 percent annual growth that permits us all to retire and live off our savings some day. Take away the possibility of fantasies coming true and nothing in this society works.
If you want to add a line to the bottom of my posts saying “This guy believes in ideas that offer such amazing benefits to every single person alive on Planet Earth today that it is hard for many of us to believe that these ideas are anything more than fantasies,” I have no problem with it. These ideas are so “revolutionary” (you know whose word that is) that I freely acknowledge that they strike many people as nothing more than fantasies.
We are on the same page up to that point.
Where we get on different pages is when you block people from learning about the ideas through the use of 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. If the ideas lack merit, they will be shot down in the court of public opinion without any need for the use of any such intimidation and deception tactics. if the ideas possess merit, widespread discussion of them will take us to a place where everyone in the field will be endorsing them in time and then working together with all the rest of us to promote them. That includes my good friend Jack Bogle. And Bill Bernstein. And Larry Swedroe. And Mike Piper. And Bill Shultheis. And on and on and on and on and on.
The advance we are talking about is so huge that it appears to be a fantasy.
But our nation is built on the idea that fantasies come true on a regular basis so long as we all follow the laws that we have enacted as a society to govern out interactions with each other. Putting a man on the moon was a fantasy. Until it wasn’t. Electing a black man President of the United States was a fantasy. Until it wasn’t. Curing polio was a fantasy. Until it wasn’t.
I like to see fantasies come true. Sue me.
Our system permits us all to do work helping fantasies to come true.
It’s hard work. We have to overcome a good deal of natural skepticism to make it happen.
That’s understood. That’s the way it works.
We do NOT have to overcome death threats. We do NOT have to overcome threats of unjustified board bannings. We do NOT have to overcome tens of thousands of acts of defamation. We do NOT have to overcome threats to get academic researchers fired from their jobs.
We have laws in place to protect us when Goons like you employ tactics aimed at stopping millions of us from enjoying the fantasy come true that took place before our eyes when Shiller published his “revolutionary” (his word again!) research showing us how to reduce the risk of stock investing by 70 percent.
I am driving the History Train and you Goons are lying in the tracks trying to block it from going forward. You will end up getting run over/sent to prison because this train isn’t stopping.
It can’t stop. There are millions of middle-class people investing in stocks to finance their old-age retirements. If this train stops, all of those people are thrown out in the cold without any money in their old age. That’s not an acceptable result. The train will continue on down the track.
Slowly as all get-out, it would seem! I hate that part!
But it will continue down the track all the same. We will make fantasies come true. As we have been doing in this country for 240 years now.
That’s the deal.
I love you all. I will do anything I can to help you starting the minute you agree to be bound by the laws of the country in which you live.
But I will not post dishonestly re the numbers that my friends use to plan their retirements. Going to prison is not on my bucket list. So you are going to have to find someone else re that one.
I naturally wish you all the best that this life has to offer a person regardless of what investing strategies you elect to follow.
Rob
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