Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently posted to another blog entry at this site:
Rob,
I think it comes down to something as simple as this. You have stated what you think are problems. People have responded as to how they disagree. You, in turn have responded how you think people are wrong to have disagreed with you. People continued to respond in disagreement. The cycle continued on for some time. Many people grew tired of the cycle and went away. Others eventually got angry because of repetitive comments going in circles. Others decided enough was enough and had you banned.
Your jury will see the posts of the thousands who expressed a desire that honest posting be permitted.
Your jury will see the published rules of all the sites where you violated the published rules thousands of times.
Your jury will see the death threats.
Your jury will see the demands for unjustified board bannings.
Your jury will see the tens of thousands of acts of defamation.
Your jury will see the hundreds of posts in which Wade Pfau showed his growing excitement over Valuation-Informed Indexing as he did more research and learned more about it.
Your jury will see the peer-reviewed research that I co-authored with Wade, research that can fairly be described as the most important research published in this field in the past three decades.
Your jury will see the posts in which Wade expressed his growing fear that you Goons were going to destroy his career and the lack of reaction by Jack Bogle when I asked for his help.
Your jury members will have lost most of their life savings in the crash.
Your jury members will be chosen from a society of people on its way or already in the Second Great Depression, a Great Depression that could have been avoided had you honored your promise to follow the site rules at the boards and blogs at which you posted.
Your jury will be hearing testimony from people like Robert Shiller and Rob Arnott and Michael Kitces, who will be backing me up by reporting on the many acts of intimidation directed at them over the years.
Your jury will see that I was so sure of what the peer-reviewed research says that I contacted 30,000 academic researchers, knowing that none of them would be able to identify any flaws in the Valuation-Informed Indexing concept.
Your jury will hearing from the professor at George Washington University who offered effusive praise for the VII concept and said that he would be in the future teaching it in his classroom and giving me credit for the concept.
Your jury will be bearing from the professor at Columbia University who said that VII follows from Shiller’s research and that he could see how it might work out very well indeed.
Your jury will be seeing the analysis done by Schenkler (a Goon!), who said that VII looked rock-solid and important.
Your jury will be hearing from the posters at the Bogleheads Forum who said that my work challenges basic premises of Buy-and-Hold in a very serious and exciting way.
Your jury will be hearing the threats you directed to Wade Pfau that I don’t even know about yet, the ones that were made in secret.
Your jury will be looking at any e-mails that Wade sent to friends at the time he was thinking of flipping to the dark side because of the threats you made to destroy his career.
Your jury will be looking at the comments made by hundreds of posters at the Diehards Forum when you Goons became so afraid of losing control of that board as a result of your use of insanely abusive tactics that you moved the entire board community to a place where it could be controlled by Goons.
Your jury will be looking at e-mails transmitted among the lawyers at Morningstar.com at the time when you Goons were demanding that I be banned and they couldn’t find a single abusive post in my file while finding thousands and thousands put forward by you Goons.
Your jury will be looking at any e-mails sent by Mel Lindauer and other Goons to Jack Bogle and any e-mails that Bogle sent back.
Your jury will be looking at my e-mail exchanges with Mike Piper in which he said that he would like to permit honest posting but was too afraid of what his readers would do if they learned how big the difference was between the Buy-and-Hold strategy that he endorsed and what the last 34 years of peer-reviewed researc tells us.
Your jury will be looking at how you followed me from site to site, threatening to destroy any board community that permitted honest posting on the safe withdrawal rate issue.
Your jury will be looking at how you burned numerous board communities to the ground because they permitted honest posting for a time.
Your jury will be looking at how the owner of the NoFeeBoards.com site pleaded with his long-time friend Ataloss not to burn his site to the ground and at how Ataloss refused to listen to those pleas.
Your jury will be looking at how John Walter Russell was universally recognized as the best numbers guy at any of our boards by all non-Goons and at how you Goons were so consumed with hate for him once he posted honestly re the SWR issue that you laughed at him on the day he died an early death.
Your jury will be looking at the e-mails that I exchanged with John Greaney in the days before I put forward my famous post of May 13, 2002, in which I asked him to co-author a book with me and he told me that was a bad idea because everyone who ever got to know him well concluded that he was the biggest asshole who ever walked Planet Earth.
And on and on and on and on and on and on.
Good luck with getting a short prison sentence with all that and more being told to your jury, Anonymous.
I think I will stick with my decision to avoid crossing The Felony Line now and forever.
Holy moly!
Rob
Anonymous says
“…you laughed at him on the day he died an early death.”
Ah, good times.
Rob says
We disagree re this one, Anonymous.
But I naturally wish you the best of luck in all your future life endeavors all the same.
Take good care, man.
Rob
x says
You don’t get enough comments anymore to sustain these daily posts. What happens when that well runs dry?
Rob says
At one time the backlog of My Conversations With Goons posts was large enough to provide blog posts for seven months into the future. Today that is down to a bit over two months. So, yes, you are correct that that well is indeed gradually running dry.
It will take close to three months to get entirely caught up. I also post links to my weekly column at the Value Walk site; those take up some spaces. And it is possible that, even with the greatly reduced volume of posts from you Goons, there might be a tiny number of new Goon Conversation items. So my guess is that it might be March 1 before I am actually caught up.
There are about four months worth of e-mail items that I have not been able to get to because the Goon Conversation items have been taking up all of the available slots for a long time now. For example, I have responses from my e-mails to the 30,000 academic researchers in the SSRN group that I want to post here. That takes us to perhaps July 1.
At that point, I will need to look to new sorts of items. It could be that we will see the next price crash by then. In that event, my guess is that I will have tons of new visitors asking tons of new questions and that there will be no shortage of blog material whatsoever.
If not, I might add another weekly column or two. I have long wanted to do one in which I run a different scenario on one of the five calculators each week and report the results. I believe that after the crash I could put together a book focused on the results obtained from the five calculators when they are asked to provide answers to various strategic questions.
I also would like to do a column focused on the political side of these matters. That was what I did at the Death by 1,000 Papercuts site. That column was my favorite of the three that I did at the time. It stopped only because the site was shut down. I would like to see if I could get another political site to feature a weekly column on the political side of the The Buy-and-Hold Crisis. I believe that that aspect of the question is important and has to be addressed before we will all be freed to address the economic aspects of the question.
If I were to add two columns to the current one, that would fill up three slots each week. I could see filling up one slot each week with commentary on an article about investing posted at some other site. And I could see filling up the fifth slot with articles that would collect some of the materials already posted here into easier-to-research collections. For example, there have been a good number of blog entries and columns and articles focused on what Shiller believes about how stock stock investing works. I think it might help to have one article or blog entry that would provide a survey of the insights offered in all of those materials, with links to the original articles or blog entries or podcasts or whatever that would provide more in-depth treatment of particular questions. I could probably write 20 of those.
Given all these possibilities, it is my expectation that I will continue to post daily blog entries at least through the end of 2016. And at some point we will have the price crash and things will explode here.
None of this is locked in. I’m just offering my current-day take on what is likely to be on tap for the next year or so. It’s of course hard to see too much farther into the future than that. But I don’t think there’s ever been a time when I was more sure than I am today that the blog will continue to be updated on a daily basis for a long time to come. My take is that the Valuation-Informed Indexing concept grows more promising and more exciting and more multi-faceted and even somewhat more accepted and popular (I can say things today that I didn’t dare to say five years back) with each passing day.
I have hopes that a day will come when I can spend significant time promoting my book on money management. And I have plans to write a third entry in my trilogy of personal finance tomes — a book that will be titled “The Self-Directed Life” that will focus on career growth. But my guess is that the investing stuff will remain my focus for a good number of years yet.
I hope that that helps a bit, X. My best and warmest wishes to you and yours, my long-time Goon friend.
Rob
laugh says
Do you think the fact that the ‘goons’ no longer find you interesting is a good or bad thing?
Rob says
I have mixed feelings about the fact that you Goons post here much less frequently than before.
I think that the hundreds of Goon Conversations posts are important. I have learned a lot from my conversations with you. I obviously do not approve of the abusiveness and the trickery. But that is not all that you Goons bring to the table. You have a sincere belief in Buy-and-Hold. Lots of non-Goon Buy-and-Holders are not willing to engage in debate. You Goons block debate at other places but you have participated in discussions here. I have learned a lot about the psychology behind Buy-and-Hold through my conversations with you and I believe that lots of others will learn things when they take time to review the posts that I have written re our conversations. Presumably, this will happen after the next crash.
I miss those learning experiences. That’s a negative.
But the learning experiences were probably close to coming to an end in any event. We had covered most of the questions that can be addressed. Things were getting repetitive. So having the conversations come to an end is probably for the best.
Also, I believe that your decision to stop posting here (or at least to dramatically cut back your participation) is a change that we had to get through to continue our gradual working out of the issues that we need to work out to open the entire internet to free discussion of the implications of the last 34 years of peer-reviewed research in this field. I don’t expect that we are going to get there next week or next month or probably not even next year. But I continue to believe that we are making slow progress. Please note — I have been saying that since May 14, 2002!
I see this development as a tiny advance in the working out of the issues. It shows a lack of confidence in your position that you no longer feel inclined to post here, in my assessment.
So I see a mix of negatives and positives. I would say that the positives slightly outweigh the negatives. But I don’t see this as a huge advance or anything like that.
I hope that helps a bit, Goon friend. Please take good care.
Rob
Anonymous says
” It shows a lack of confidence in your position that you no longer feel inclined to post here, in my assessment.”
What a liar. You have MANY TIMES stated that “goons” (eyeroll) posting here is strong evidence that they don’t believe in their own publicly given positions. Now you say that if they get bored of your crap and finally walk away, then *THAT* is proof that they don’t believe their own positions.
Typical Crank-logic.
Rob says
No, that’s not so, Anonymous.
What I’ve said many times is that your Goon ABUSIVENESS is evidence that you lack confidence in Buy-and-Hold. People who have confidence in their strategies don’t behave the way you do. Not ever. No exceptions.
You behave the way you do because you are in pain. You DO follow Buy-and-Hold strategies. To that extent you believe. But you lack confidence that they will work out because they defy common sense (price matters with everything else you buy — you cannot figure out any reason why stocks would be different except that stock salesmen say so). So honest and accurate reports of what the peer-reviewed research says cause you psychic pain.
You cannot come up with a reasoned response to the research. So you just strike out with threats of violence and with name-calling and abusiveness.
And you are not walking away because you are bored. You never tried to participate in a learning experience. You just vented. You were in pain and felt a need to holler at someone. You no longer get satisfaction from that. You no longer hold out hopes that the peer-reviewed research will stop saying what it says if you just yell loud enough.
You are slowly coming around to acknowledging that you made a mistake in ignoring the research and putting all your confidence in the Wall Street Con Men (who obviously have a financial incentive to mislead you). But you have obviously not come to full acceptance of the realities. I would say that your decision to stop posting here shows that we have advanced one step in what has proved to be a long process of moving from a very bad place to a very good place. I don’t want to make more of it than it is. But I do believe that it represents a small positive.
I wish you all good things, Anonymous.
Rob