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:
Fear and attacks are your game. You are the one calling people goons and con-men. You are the one telling people they are going to prison.
You haven’t accomplished a thing, unless you consider avoiding work an accomplishment.
Calling you a Goon makes me a Goon, Sammy. That makes perfect sense.
I sent an e-mail to the site administrator of the Motley Fool site in June 2002 asking that he ban John Greaney (the author of a Buy-and-Hold retirement study who failed to include an adjustment for the valuation level that applies on the day the retirement begins in his study) for threatening to kill family members of any poster who posted honestly on that study or on any other aspect of the Buy-and-Hold strategy. Had Greaney been banned, you obviously wouldn’t be worried about going to prison today. Take it up with Motley Fool, you know?
People should have been calling out the Buy-and-Holders on their b.s. all along. If people had called out Bogle beginning in 1981 when Shiller published his “revolutionary” (Shiller’s word) research findings, not one poster would have been shocked when I pointed out the error in Greaney’s “study.” The entire problem was caused by people being afraid to call out the Buy-and-Holders because the strategy has so much money behind it. Is any of that my doing? Did I spend hundreds of millions of dollars promoting Buy-and-Hold?
Each time someone calls out one of you Goons, he helps every person who works in this field and indeed every person who invests money to provide for his or her retirement. I have called you out THOUSANDs of time. There is no one who has called you out as frequently as I have. There is no one in a close second place.
But I am the bad guy here! Truly outstanding!
I don’t see it, Sammy. I wish you all good things. But I do not buy what you are selling. I would be grateful if you would try to find someone else.
If I had a time machine, I would take us back to May 2002 and I am 100 percent confident that you would vote for banning the guy this go around. You know what? I don’t have a time machine. I am playing the cards that I was dealt in the kindest way that I can possibly play them. The sooner you come clean, the shorter your prison sentence will be. I am calling for you to come clean by the close of business today! Is there something else?
Hang in there, good friend.
Rob
feed twitter twitter facebook