Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently posted to the discussion thread for one of my columns at the Value Walk site:
Rob,
I am happy to answer your points, even though you usually fail to answer anyone else’s questions.
You stopped using the common sense button around many years ago when you quit your job without sufficient savings. With a failed retirement plan, you started your long campaign of blaming everyone else for your problems,
If you really know how stock investing works, you wouldn’t have a retirement plan that has fallen short.
Your 13 years have been wasted time and you have been predicting a 65% crash year after year, continuing to push out the predicted crash date. Nothing changed for you during the downturn in 2008/2009.
The abusive posting comes from you. You are the one with the prison threats. You are the one that made a death threat (yet claim others did without showing any proof). You are the one that sent out over 30,000 emails about Wade Pfau, despite Wade asking you to stop as you were causing him great harm. You are the one that has slander d many we’ll know experts, including Jack Bogle.
As for board banning so, you were banned from those boards long before I even knew who you were. I have looked into the history of those banning a and I agree with the board owners. You behavior is horrible. It is one thing when 1 or 2 board owners decides to ban you. However, when we see this consistently done by dozens of board owners, it shows a pattern that cannot be disputed. Simple Google searches tell the story. We can read your words and see your poor behavior ourselves. It is so bad, people created a board to document your bad behavior.
Setting all that aside, here is the bottom line. We spend our lives saving and investing in order to support our families and secure our retirements. We have all had a front row seat to our public comments on your plan and watched it fail miserably. You seem to reject the idea of going back to work and pin your hopes on some kind of fantasy of a financial windfall. That is why people cannot take you seriously.
You are certainly right about the pattern you cite, Sammy. I have not been banned at one or two places. I have been banned at at least 20 different sites. That is a significant fact. I don’t deny it. Everyone trying to figure out what is going on here needs to know that fact and to try to make sense of it.
It could be that I am just a nutcase, as you argue. That’s one explanation. It’s an obvious possibility. I think it would be fair to say that it is the most likely possibility if all that you have to go on is that one fact.
But that’s not al that we have to go on.
I became famous on the internet as the result of a post that I put to a Motley Fool board on the morning of May 13, 2002, saying that the 4 percent rule set forth in the Old School safe-withdrawal-rate studies is in error. No one else was saying that at the time and many Buy-and-Holders attacked me for saying it. Hundreds of people encouraged me to continue posting because they said that the discussion that I launched was the most important discussion re stock investing that they had ever seen. But the Buy-and-Holders were in the majority and they demanded that the site owners ban me and most of the site owners eventually did go along with those demands. A number sent me apologies for doing so, saying that they personally thought my work had huge value. But the Buy-and-Holders told them that they would destroy their sites with abusive posting if they did not ban me and they eventually did indeed do so.
It’s now 13 years down the line. Every major publication in this field has run an article saying that the 4 percent rule is in error. That includes the Wall Street Journal, the Economist magazine, Smart Money Magazine, the Financial Mentor site, and on and on. None of the studies that we now know to be in error have been corrected. The Buy-and-Holders have not apologized for the error they made or offered to compensate the millions of people who will be suffering failed retirements as a result of that error for their financial losses. But there is a universal consensus that the studies indeed were in error (they contained no valuation adjustments).
That’s odd. That’s weird. That’s strange.
I don’t think that I am a nutcase, Sammy. If I were, I probably would not see it. So, if someone wants to conclude that I am, I cannot say with 100 percent certainty that they are wrong. But I think that something else is going on here. There is too much weirdness for the answer here to be just that there is one nutcase saying crazy things.
What I think happened is that the Buy-and-Holders published peer-reviewed research in 1965 showing that short-term timing never works. They didn’t even check on long-term timing because index funds were not available yet and long-term timing works only with index funds. Vanguard made index funds available in the mid-1970s and then Shiller was the first researcher to test long-term timing in 1981. He found that long-term timing always works and is always 100 percent required for investors seeking to keep their risk profiles roughly constant. The Buy-and-Holders ignored Shiller’s “revolutionary” (his word) finding and continued pushing the now-discredited strategy ruling out both forms of timing. I took issue with them starting in 2002. I have argued that Shiller is right and that his finding requires the exercise of price discipline (long-term timing). The Buy-and-Holders have demanded that I be banned at every web site on the internet and have threatened the site owners who have been reluctant to go along until they submitted to their abusive demands.
I think this will all flip following the next price crash. Millions of people have been hurt by the error at the center of the Buy-and-Hold strategy. Those people are going to insist that this all be brought out into the open once they see how much financial harm has been done to them as a result of this 34-year cover-up.
But I obviously cannot say for certain. We are just going to have to wait for the crash to see how things play out.
I love you guys. I think that Valuation-Informed Indexing is the future and there would be no Valuation-Informed Indexing if not for the amazing work that was done by the Buy-and-Hold Pioneers. So I certainly am going to do all that I can to pull everybody together. We all want the same things. We all should be working together to spread the word re what the peer-reviewed research in this field really says. I intend to do my part, both by exposing the 34-year cover-up and by telling people about all the wonderful insights that have been generated by my Buy-and-Hold friends and about all the pressure that they feel to continue the cover-up given how much destruction it has caused and how bad they feel about the idea of people learning how they have contributed to it.
I hope that helps a bit.
Please take good care, my long-time Goon friend.
Rob
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