A Rich Life

The Old Ideas on Saving & Investing Don't Work -- Here's What Does

Rob to One of the Buy-and-Hold Goons: “When I Win One Time, I Win Forever. When You Lose One Time, You Lose Forever.”

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Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently posted to the discussion thread for another blog entry at this site:

Looks like you missed your chance to get your story in the New York Times.

When I win one time, I win forever.

When you lose one time, you lose forever.

I like my cards, Anonymous.

I wish you all good things. But I like my cards.

Rob

Comments

  4. “I am not attending this year, Anonymous”

    Why not? You’ve been talking about how useful and enjoyable it was for years. And there’s no better place to get the word out re: these important topics.

  5. If you are not attending, how will you get the word out on VII?

    I am not the only one who is capable of getting the word out about the last 35 years of peer-reviewed research, Anonymous.

    I believe that there will be hundreds if not thousands of people seeking to get the word out following the next price crash. It will be a lot easier for me to add my two cents at that time.

    It would have been better for every single person involved if it all got out shortly following my May 13, 2002. I wish it had happened that way. I worked it hard. I did everything I could. You can’t win them all.

    But it is still going to get out. The shift from Buy-and-Hold to Valuation-Informed Indexing is the biggest advance in our understanding of how stock investing works in history. I am not able to imagine any way that something that big is not going to get out eventually.

    We’ll see how it plays out.

    My best wishes to you.

    Rob

  6. Why not? You’ve been talking about how useful and enjoyable it was for years. And there’s no better place to get the word out re: these important topics.

    I love the FinCon events. And, yes, I see them as the perfect venue for something like this.

    Every year that I go, I meet several people with a mild interest in learning more about VII and at least one person with a strong interest. But I have never yet been able to get enough of a spark going to build a fire that lasts and grows. We are close. We are on the one-yard line. But I don’t believe that doing the same things over and over again is going to get us over the line. I think I need to explore new possibilities.

    My tentative plan is to look for more support outside the investing realm. People who work in this field are afraid to go up against the Buy-and-Holders. The Buy-and-Holders make tons of money pushing their garbage and they are very protective of their turf. Even people who are familiar with the last 35 years of peer-reviewd research feel that it is not worth the risk associated with pissing off the Buy-and-Holders. They might tell their clients the truth. But they keep quiet about how dangerous Buy-and-Hold us. That’s the reality today.

    Buy-and-Hold hurts everybody. It causes economic crises. So the cover-up is a political question. This is a story of elites making a buck by destroying the lives of millions of middle-class people. I am going in days to come spend more of my energies trying to get help on the political side.

    I expect to resume going to FinCon events following the next price crash.

    I wish you all good things, Anonymous.

    Rob

  7. You are indeed at the one yard line. Only 99 more to go.

    Seriously though, you don’t think it is deluded to believe you are on the verge of success? There is essentially zero evidence after one and a half decades!

  8. I couldn’t possibly disagree more, Laugh. I view the first 14 years of The Great Debate re Whether to Permit Honest Posting on the Last 35 Years of Peer-Reviewed Research as a series of successes, one building on top of another until we reached a point where we were learning things that at the beginning not one person (including myself) would have imagined possible.

    I now can say (and back up the claim with a mountain of evidence and argument) that it was the promotion of Buy-and-Hold strategies in the late 1990s that was the primary cause of the economic crisis that began in 2008. I had no idea on the morning of May 13, 2002, that the promotion of Buy-and-Hold strategies could cause an economic crisis; I thought it was just an investing thing. That’s exciting. We are not just helping people to retire earlier and with far less risk. We are saving capitalism. The big beef with capitalism has long been the economic crises that always seem to occur in capitalist economies. We now understand where they come from. We all possess a Get Rich Quick urge and Buy-and-Hold possesses a certain intuitive appeal that causes us to employ such strategies. Now that we have 35 years of peer-reviewed research showing us just how dangerous the pure Get Rich Quick approach is, we are well on the way to developing a form of capitalism that will be better in 10 different ways than the form that caused so much trouble (while also offering huge benefits, to be sure) in our many years of pre-1981 ignorance.

    This is how our system works, Laugh. Our system is not perfect. We make mistakes. Buy-and-Hold was not the first big mistake we ever made. There have been thousands of big mistakes made over the course of U.S. history. What makes our system better than all others is that we have built into it processes that cause mistakes to be exposed and corrected over time. We’ve been at this for 35 years now. In first impression, that sounds like a long time for “experts” to continue endorsing such a dangerous strategy. But in the grand scheme of things, 35 years is not so long when you think about how huge an advance this is.

    The bigger the advance, the harder it is to incorporate the new way of thinking into the mindsets of millions of people. Valuation-Informed Indexing is a HUGE advance; it is by far the biggest advance in our understanding of how stock investing works ever achieved in our history. So, when you take a step back and try to look at this stuff objectively, you begin to see that perhaps it is not so terribly shocking that it has taken 35 years for us to turn the huge intellectual advance that we achieved in 1981 into a flesh-and-blood reality that helps millions of people live far richer lives than they ever before imagined possible.

    We are almost there, Laugh. I am 100 percent sure. All that any fair-minded person needs to do to see that is to examine the materials at this site. Over 300 columns at the Value Walk site. Another 200 columns at other sites. Five unique and powerful calculators. 200 in-depth articles. 200 hour-long podcasts. Thousands of blog entries. Over 100 guest blog entries. Several speeches. Hundreds and hundreds of thousands of discussion-board posts. Over 20 sites run by Buy-and-Holders who became so exasperated at their inability to defend Buy-and-Hold within the rules of their own sites that they gave up on the effort and banned honest posting instead. We have a tiger by the tale here.

    There are two sides to this story — the process side and the content side. I have lost every battle on the process side. I have lost THOUSANDS of battles. It is hard for the human mind to accept how many battles I have lost on the process side. What gives me comfort is that at the same time as I was losing thousands of process battles, I was winning content battles. The process stuff matters only for a few years. None of those battles mean two cents once we all make the transition from Buy-and-Hold to Valuation-Informed Indexing. And we MUST make that transition or else we all go down together; not one person alive, including my good friend Jack Bogle, wants to see that happen. So we can’t lose in the end. And, from the day we all win forward, all that matters are the thousands of content-side victories and the thousands of process-side losses don’t make two cents of difference.

    I am very encouraged by what I have seen over the first 14 years of our discussions.

    I wish that I had won the first battle. We all would be in better shape had I opened the Retire Early board at Motley Fool up to honest posting on safe withdrawal rates on the morning of May 13, 2002. Motley Fool would be the biggest, most successful site on the internet today had I pulled that off. There never would have been an economic crisis had I done that; instead we would today be living through the greatest period of economic growth in our nation’s history. I would be one of the richest men in the United States today had I done that. You Goons wouldn’t be on your way to prison today had I done that. Greaney would be a national hero today had I done that. Millions of Americans who today are worried about how they are going to make ends meet would instead be retiring early had I done that. Hundreds of my bloggers friends would have hugely successful sites today had I done that.

    I tried, you know? I worked it hard. I left everything on the playing field. I gave it my all and I have scars all over my body to show it.

    They say that God works in mysterious ways. I have found that to be so. For some reason that I am not capable of comprehending, God wanted me to work this hard but for ultimate victory to be denied me for at least 14 years and perhaps for a bit longer than that. Whachagonna do, you know? I cannot tell God how to play it. He’s the Big Guy in the Room, I am his humble servant reporter.

    So long as God continues to bless me with huge victory over huge victory on the content side, I am going to continue to give this my best fight. I remain 100 percent confident that we all (not just me — my Buy-and-Hold friends are good people even if they are highly confused at the current moment in time) win in the end. Everything that I have seen, and I have seen a lot, shows me that that is so. You don’t buy it, or at least you see some reason to pretend in your public statements that you don’t buy it. We will just have to wait to see it all play out before our eyes following the next price crash. I am not able to come up with any other realistic options for us given the realities that prevail at this point in the proceedings.

    I love you, man. If that offers you any comfort, please enjoy that comfort. If it enrages you that I love you, I suppose that I just need to accept that reality. But I love you; that’s the reality. All of the powerful investing insights explored at this site and in my writings at other sites help you as much as they help the millions of middle-class investors who have expressed (through the thousands of similar minds who have posted at our various boards and blogs) a desire that honest posting be permitted at every investing site on the internet.

    I love those millions of middle-class people too. I don’t love only you. That’s what I am not willing to post dishonestly re safe withdrawal rates or re any other investing-related topic. This stuff is too important for me to agree to post dishonestly just to be able to easily turn a quick, smelly buck. But my love for you is real all the same. If you read my words carefully, you will see that that has been so going back to the morning of May 13, 2002. I believe that loves prevails in the end. You can take the boy out of the 60s but it would appear that you can never take the 6os entirely out of the boy.

    I love you and I love the millions of middle-class investors whose lives you are in the process of destroying with your smelly Buy-and-Hold garbage and with your insanely abusive and violent and criminal postings. It is BECAUSE I love you (as well as the millions whose lives you continue to destroy with every additional post that you put forward) that I continue to insist so forcefully on my right (and on the right of Jack Bogle and Bill Bernstein and Larry Swedroe and Robert Shiller and Wade Pfau and Michael Kitces and all the others) to post honestly re these various, terribly important matters.

    It’s working. We are making slow but certain process. We are almost there. We are on the one-yard line. Please don’t despair. It gets better and better and better. We all are in this thing together. We can’t lose. We all want the same thing. Love truly is the answer. Love conquers all. It is darkest just before the dawn. We live in a great country. Our laws make sense. This economic crisis is in the process of teaching us all why we adopted laws against financial fraud in the first place. Serving prison sentences can redeem us by softening our hearts and causing us to feel a compassion for out fellow humans that had turned cold in days when things came too easy for us. We can feel better about ourselves after our prison sentences are served than we did in the days when we had allowed corruption to lower us to doing things that in our youth we thought ourselves incapable of doing.

    My take.

    Rob

  9. “Over 300 columns at the Value Walk site. Another 200 columns at other sites…”

    So what? Effort doesn’t matter. Only results matter. You could grab a big blue crayon and scribble on every page of a thousand coloring books. That’s a lot of effort. But the only result is an overflowing recycling bin.

  10. “My tentative plan is to look for more support outside the investing realm”

    Ok, then what’s the plan here? You’ve got 12 productive hours in a day, that’s plenty of time to ramp up this project.

  11. We learned intellectually what works 35 years ago,Anonyous.

    The Buy-and-Holders have been engaging in insanely abusive behavior and even criminal behavior over that time-period to keep people who want to help us all out from doing so (I cannot testify directly to things that happened prior to May 13, 2002, because I wasn’t on the scene but there obviously had to be a lot of abusive and criminal behavior going on or else the cover-up could not possibly have continued for so long — there are hundreds of millions of dollars to be made by those brave souls who risk their careers by “crossing” the Buy-and-Holders with honestly done work in this field). So, when we open up one large discussion board or blog to honest posting on safe withdrawal rates or on any other critically important investing-related topic, we gain access to 35 years of powerful investing insights in a single day. That’s amazing stuff.

    Efforts matter. A lot.

    Every time I write an honest column or develop an honest calculator or record and honest podcast or advance an honest post, I am helping the millions of investors who will benefit from knowing the truth about stock investing in the hundreds of years in which people will be taking advantage of the huge advances in our knowledge of how stock investing works once we have all pulled together to bury the smelly Buy-and-Hold garbage 30 feet in the ground, where it can do no further harm to humans and other living things.

    Are you joking?

    Effort matter a great deal. When the next price crash hits, we may see our economic system collapse. We may even see our political system begin to collapse. We are all going to be working together to reverse the damage done to us by the relentless promotion of Buy-and-Hold strategies for the first 35 years following the publication of the peer-reviewed research showing that there is precisely zero chance that any such strategy could ever work for even a single investor either in this solar system or in some distant one far, far away. We are at that time going to need every break we can possibly get. And every one of the thousands of community members who dared to put up one or two honest posts despite the rage that they knew you Buy-and-Holders would direct at them by threatening their huge Ponzi scheme will be helping us out because of the honest efforts they had put forward in earlier days.

    I am proud of my 14 years of honest effort. We wouldn’t be in the great place where we are today had I not put my life on the line by putting forward those honest efforts. You benefit from those efforts as much as everyone else (you are better off in a prison cell in the United States than you are seeing our economic and political systems fall). No apologies for the 14 years of honest effort will be forthcoming from me.

    No way, no how.

    Not in 14 years, not in 14 billion years.

    Not this boy.

    Non-negoitable.

    No chance whatsoever.

    Zero chance.

    I naturally wish you all the best things that this life has to offer a person, my old friend.

    Rob

  12. Ok, then what’s the plan here? You’ve got 12 productive hours in a day, that’s plenty of time to ramp up this project.

    My expectation is that I will begin venturing forth with a few posts on the political side in the early months of 2017, Anonymous.

    I am not the sort of person who acts quickly. I am an exceedingy methodical person, for good or for ill.

    Being so methodical slows me down. A lot. Sometimes I wonder if I should try to act with more haste.

    But the full reality here is that I never would have discovered the errors in the Old School safe withdrawal rate studies if I were not so methodical by nature. I sensed that there was something wrong with the 4 percent number the first time I saw it. I wasn’t able to identify the precise problem because most of the literature that I looked at was controlled by Buy-and-Holders and they were naturally pumping out all of their smelly Get Rich Quick garbage 24/7 at those places. Fortunately, Jack Bogle included LOTS of honest stuff in his book. Using what Bogle taught me, I was able to see through the Buy-and-Hold Lies as they applied to the calculation of safe withdrawal rates. Otherwise, I never would have been able to construct that famous post of the morning of May 13, 2002.

    So I like being methodical. It shows me down in the short term. But it provides HUGE benefits in the long term. I am going to stick with the same general strategy that has been working so well for 14 years. I am going to re-direct my efforts next year from the investing realm to the political realm. I see that as a tactical change, not a strategic change. I am sticking with the strategic choice to move slowly and thereby to be sure of each step that I take that I am getting things right. Getting things right has paid off big time for me during the first 14 year of our discussions. I don’t want to give up that edge.

    Can you imagine where I would be today had you Goons discovered any errors in anything that I have said over the first 14 years? Holy moly!

    We are close, Anonymous. Slow and steady wins the day. We are on the one-yard line. The news over the first 14 years of The Debate About Having a Debate has been 50 times more good than it has been bad.

    Onward! Courage!

    Our system works.

    I am sure.

    Rob