Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently posted to another blog entry at this site:
So you believe that you have never made a mistake.
And you also believe you are sane?
Here is something to think about. If you have never made a mistake why are you in the situation you are in? Blame everyone else, you aren’t responsible because you are perfect? Still think that sounds sane?
The words you write here make it sound like I am in some sort of bad situation. Huh?
I am in a situation more wonderful than anything I could possibly have imagined when I was a young man.
I have a $500 million settlement payment coming my way. I am the lead author on the most important piece of peer-reviewed research published in this field in the past three decades. My web site will soon be the #1 personal finance web site on the internet. My boys have a business available to them to work at if they choose to avoid the corporate world. I will be a highly sought-after author for the remaining years of my life. I will be giving kick-off speeches at the Financial Bloggers Conference and other such places for many years to come.
Should I be crying big tears into my pillow every night?
I of course understand that you are trying to place the focus on the negative stuff.
I’ve got one big problem — the abusiveness of you Goons. You don’t want me to be rich and famous. You hate the idea. I have been proven right about a very important matter and you have been proven wrong and you cannot stand the idea of the world learning about that. I don’t want to be intimidated. I can’t do my best work if I am being intimidated. I don’t want anyone else to be intimidated. People who are intimidated cannot produce the kind of work that I can learn from. So I will not stand for intimidation tactics. There’s no give re that one.
You have 13 years of history to look at. Your reliance on intimidation tactics has brought you lower and lower and lower. Now you are on your way to prison. It’s 100 percent insane. But here we are.
There’s nothing you can do to me to cause me to flip. If you get me the death penalty, that won’t cause me to flip. My guess is that you tell yourself that I am saying that for dramatic effect. I’m not. I am telling it straight. You’ll just have to learn that on your own time. I won’t flip. I will always act with love in my heart. I will do everything I can to make things go as easy for you as possible. But that won’t include letting intimidation tactics influence me. It would be an act of cruelty if I were to suggest that there is even the smallest sliver of a possibility that that could ever happen.
We all have beliefs about the meaning of life. I am a Catholic. I am not a pious person and I am no theologian. But I have some vague impressions about why life works the way it does. Maybe I am wrong about them. Wrong or right, I believe them. So these vague impressions determine how I respond to events that play out before me.
I obviously don’t like any of the Goon stuff. But I believe on a deep level that God let it play out the way he did for a purpose. I don’t know precisely what that purpose is. It could be that God feels that the world needs the drama of this story to be witnessed by people for them to finally give up their belief in Buy-and-Hold. It could be that God wants me to get that $500 million payment and He understood that there was no other way to get that sum in my pocket without having this massive cover-up play out before us all. It could be that God loves you Goons so much that he wants you to change your behavior before your days are done and he wants me to be an instrument to lead you to a better place. I could be that He wants the internet discussion board to achieve its potential as the communications medium of the future and that He feels that getting this story out before people will lead to the adoption of legislation that will make that happen.
I don’t know which of those it is. And of course it could be that my brain is not capable of seeing what it really is. I just have to accept that there is a good purpose being served by all this. I believe that. I believe that God works in mysterious ways. I believe that huge advances are sometimes achieved through actions that in the short term seem to be producing only bad stuff. I believe that God loves me and the millions of middle-class investors and Jack Bogle and you Goons and that we all just need to be sure to play our assigned roles to the best of our abilities. I know with 100 percent certainty that my role is to be the one who refuses to give in to intimidation tactics and to encourage others to stand with resolve in OPPOSITION to the use of intimidation tactics.
I don’t like the Goon stuff one little bit. But I am humbled to have been asked to play the role that I have been asked to play. I am going to give it my best shot. I will always act in love. But there are lines that I will never cross. I will never cross The Felony Line. I will never say that the retirement study posted at John Greaney’s site contains an adjustment for the valuation level that applies on the day the retirement begins. Thousands of people have looked at it. No one has ever found a valuations adjustment. That’s because none exists. I am sure.
I wish all of you Goons the best that life has to offer a person.
Rob
laugh says
So, if your efforts come to nothing. What then?
BTW, acting sort of crazy and then hoping God bails you out is probably not a great strategy.
Rob says
If my efforts come to nothing, then my efforts come to nothing, Laugh. Doesn’t that follow?
I don’t believe that my efforts will come to nothing. If I did, I would obviously engage in different sorts of efforts. That’s true of all of us. We get up each morning and we do what seems right, based on what we have come to believe from the life experiences that we have lived through. You do that. I do that. Everybody does that.
I don’t think that I am acting even a tiny bit crazy. I think it’s crazy to ignore valuations when setting your stock allocation. I think that Valuation-Informed Indexing is the rational approach and that Buy-and-Hold is the crazy approach.
I still love my crazy Buy-and-Hold friends, though. The fact that I think Buy-and-Hold is crazy doesn’t diminish the feelings of affection and respect that I hold for the people who follow and advocate the strategy.
Maybe they are right and I am wrong. That’s possible, right? Maybe they are trying to tell me something that I very much need to know. So long as there is even a tiny chance that that is so, I should be listening to them carefully and trying to figure out what it is that causes them to believe something about how stock investing works that is very different from what I believe about how stock investing works.
That’s my sincere take re this terribly important matter, in any event.
I naturally wish you all the best that this life has to offer a person.
Rob
Laugh says
I guess the difference is that most people 1) actually try to adapt and change their approach I.e. Learn from failure and 2) define parameters and limits on the extent of their efforts I.e. Limit their exposure and depth of commitment.
In the absence of these things you are likely to fail indefinitely with no recourse and look like a loon while persisting.
Rob says
I don’t see any failure here, Laugh. I see a success bigger than anything I imagined possible when I started doing this kind of work. 100 percent of the evidence supports Valuation-Informed Indexing. 0 percent supports Buy-and-Hold. The shift from Buy-and-Hold to Valuation-Informed Indexing is the most important shift in the history of personal finance. I am the lead advocate of Valuation-Informed Indexing. It doesn’t get any better than that.
You describe my work as a “failure” because it hasn’t produced a dime for me in 13 years. That’s not because of anything that I have done. That’s because of things that the Wall Street Con Men have done and things that their Internet Goon Squads (that’s you!) have done. So the only question is — Can they continue to get away with this massive act of financial fraud indefinitely?
I sure don’t think so. The next price crash is likely to bring on the Second Great Depression. Once we see that amount of human misery, even Bogle is going to flip. Once Bogle flips, everybody flips. No one is going to be afraid of you Goons once Bogle flips. I mean, come on.
I get the general idea of what you mean by “limiting exposure and depth of commitment.” I certainly acknowledge that I have elected high exposure and a great depth of commitment. But we have a tiger by the tale here!
I became a journalist for a reason. I love explaining things to people, helping people to better understand things they need to understand. I believe that I was put on Planet Earth to do that sort of work. Writing about this massive act of financial fraud and about what the last 34 years of peer-reviewed research tells us about how stock investing works in the real world is the most important political/economic story of my lifetime. Would you really think that I would walk away from that given my love for this sort of work?
I cannot walk away from that.
Others have. Lots of people who know at least in outline the true reason why we are suffering through an economic crisis keeps their mouths shut. I marvel at that. I like those people. They are good people and smart people. I accept that someone can be a good person and a smart person and not see this thing in quite the same light as I see it.
But I cannot see it the way they see it. The shift from Buy-and-Hold to Valuation-Informed Indexing is the biggest advance in the history of personal finance. The peer-reviewed research that I co-authored with Wade Pfau shows that we can reduce the risk of stock investing by 70 percent just by opening the internet to honest posting on the peer-reviewed research of the past 34 years. And we already have laws in place protecting our right to do that. We have laws making it a felony for you Goons to engage in the tactics that you have engaged in to block millions of middle-class people from learning what they need to learn to protect their retirement money from the Wall Street Con Men. Beat that!
When you talk about me not making money for the first 13 years of Our Debate About Permitting a Debate, you are referring to the dark side of this matter. There is indeed a dark side. The dark side is indeed very, very dark. But the bright side of this matter is 50 times more bright than the dark side is dark. We are seeing Jack Bogle’s dream come true before our eyes. Valuation-Informed Indexing is what Bogle was aiming at when he developed the Buy-and-Hold concept. This is the first true research-based investing strategy. This liberates millions of people to live better lives than they ever imagined possible in the Buy-and-Hold Era.
I love Jack Bogle. I love his vision. I love playing a big role in the effort to see his dream come true. I expect to be working side by side with Jack and lots of my other Buy-and-Hold friends when we all make it together to the other side of The Big Black Mountain.
I certainly don’t regret one second of the past 13 years. This has been my best moment (it’s been a LONG moment, to be sure). This is the thing that I hope and expect to be remembered by. This is the thing that I will point to when trying to explain to my boys what it means to be a man, to live a good life that you can look back at with pride and satisfaction.
We’ll see how it goes.
I hope that you can find it in your heart to wish me luck with at least a tiny portion of that Goon-infected mind of yours.
My best and warmest wishes to you and yours.
Rob
laugh says
Let’s say this ‘great moment’ extends to 30 years and you pass away completely unrecognized for whatever you believe you are due.
What then? Success or failure?
Rob says
That would be failure according to the world’s assessment of me and success according to my own assessment of me, Laugh.
It would not be possible for me to live with myself if I posted dishonestly re the numbers that my friends use to plan their retirements. It’s easy for those whose views are in accord with the views of the Buy-and-Holders. They can post honestly and be “successful” in the way that the world defines “success.” That’s not so for me and for other Valuation-Informed Indexers. For us, honesty demands that we point out the dangers of Buy-and-Hold. For us, the greatest “success” (at least in my eyes!) is to insist on our right to post honestly while making no money doing it.
I don’t like it that that is the state of affairs today. But I accept it.
I believe that that will change following the next price crash. But I cannot guaranty it.
Rob