Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently posted to the discussion thread for another blog entry at this site:
“I’ve got the entire site, Anonymous.
I’ve got five calculators that exist nowhere else on Planet Internet. I’ve got over 200 articles. I’ve got over 200 one-hour-long podcasts. I’ve got thousands of blog entries. I’ve got close to 200 Guest Blog Entries. I’ve got 350 entries for one weekly column and over 100 entries for a second and over 100 entries for a third. I’ve got endorsements from thousands of my fellow community members and from a good number of the most respected names in the field. I’ve got my name on the most important piece of peer-reviewed research published in this field in over 30 years. And I’ve got a Nobel prize awarded to the fellow who showed that what I said in my famous post of the morning of May 13, 2002 — that valuations affect long-term returns — is so. And of course I’ve got laws stating that financial fraud is a felony in the United States, punishable by imprisonment.”
So how is this all worth anything? What I mean by that question is how do you monetize this? Are you going to put a pay wall in place and charge people to access the information? What is the plan to turn all of this into money?
I’m a journalist, Curious. My job is to get the story out.
The transition from Buy-and-Hold to Valuation-Informed Indexing is the biggest advance in the history of personal finance. My job is to tell two huge stories: (1) why this advance has been delayed for 36 years; and (2) how middle-class people should invest for their retirements given what the last 36 years of peer-reviewed research tells us about how stock investing works in the real world.
There are so many ways to monetize this once every discussion board and blog on the internet has been opened to honest posting on the peer-reviewed research that I wouldn’t be able to count them all. I can’t say that the question of how to monetize is one that I have worried about for more than 15 seconds over the past 15 years. There are so many exciting possibilities that it is silly.
My job is to get the word out re what the research says and to bring an end to the abusive stuff so that all the thousands of others who have doubts about Buy-and-Hold feel comfortable expressing those doubts openly and plainly; there’s huge leverage in that because thousands of other people are obviously going to be able to bring things to the table that I am not able to bring to it. This should be an easy thing to pull off; we have laws against financial fraud. But in this particular case it has obviously been a very, very difficult thing to pull off. But once that part of the job is done, there is just no limit to the good stuff (including financial rewards to the pioneers) that follows.
I could write books, I could record CD sets, I could put advertising on the site, I could give speeches, I could do consulting on an hourly basis and on and on and on. And of course lots of other people could too. I certainly don’t mean to suggest that it is only going to be me making millions. There are going to be thousands of us making millions.
This is a paradigm change. All of the textbooks are going to need to be rewritten. Do you really not see how much money there is to be made living through a time when all the textbooks on investing are being rewritten? The authors of textbooks get paid big money to offer their advice in their area of expertise. It is very hard to get to be an author of a textbook. But when a field is revolutionized, amazing opportunities spring up. The opportunities available here are equivalent to the opportunities that were available on the internet in the first six months of its existence. Have you ever heard of Amazon? Facebook? Google? That’s the kind of opportunity we are looking at here. There are going to be people who make the sort of dollars that were made by the people who founded Amazon and Facebook and Google.
That’s why the resistance is so strong. The people who are making money under the old paradigm do not want to give up their turf. The flaw in their reasoning is that, if the last 36 years of peer-reviewed research is legitimate research, our economic system will not be able to survive unless we open the internet up to honest posting. The pressure to give people access to the thousands of investing insights that we all should have been mining together over the past 36 years is going to be too strong for turf defenders to continue to hold things up. Once people in this field see a break in the wall, there is going to be a rush to be among the firsts to develop the new paradigm. A process that should have taken place gradually over several decades will take place in the space of a few months or perhaps a few years.
I don’t have any worries whatsoever about monetization. My biggest worry is that the next crash will bring on an economic crisis so severe that it wipes us all out. In which case all of my monetization dreams amount to nothing. My second big worry is that people will be so angry when they learn what has been done to them that we will see a political explosion.
I try to address the second one by explaining to people the pressure that those in this field are under to keep this under wraps and by showing them the opportunities for a better future that will be available to all of us if we keep our cool and declare “victory” when the floodgates open rather than getting caught up in recriminations that serve no positive purpose.
I try to address the first one by developing the Valuation-Informed Indexing concept to the fullest extent possible prior to the opening of the floodgates. We can keep the economic crisis from getting out of hand if we get the word out about what works because it is by dropping to P/E10 levels far below fair value that we really hurt ourselves economically and drops that low are every bit as irrational as the price jumps we saw in the late 1990s. My hope is that we will never go to a P/E10 of 8 again or that, if we do, we will only stay there for a short time.
Those are my thoughts, in any event. That was an interesting question, Curious.
Rob
“My job is to get the story out.”
And you’re getting the story out by not going to FinCon. And by not posting at other blogs. And by not posting at finance boards. And by not posting at political sites.
Your job is to get the story out. But, you say people don’t want to hear the story. So you just stay here, in your own little safe space. And pretend you’re doing something.
“I could write books, I could record CD sets, I could put advertising on the site, I could give speeches, I could do consulting on an hourly basis and on and on and on. And of course lots of other people could too. I certainly don’t mean to suggest that it is only going to be me making millions”
Why aren’t you doing all of this nowto make money?
I write the column that appears at the Value Walk site every week, Anonymous. And I respond to the comments put forward by you Goons at this site and then turn the most interesting responses into new blog entries. That’s most of what I do today.
That’s not nothing. The column that appeared yesterday explained how a minority of people can control what the majority gets to hear about a subject. That’s what has happened in the investing realm. You Goon comprise about 10 percent of the population. But you are far more intense than the 90 percent who are fine with hearing about Valuation-Informed Indexing but who are not sufficiently excited about it to speak up in opposition to death threats and all that sort of thing. That’s an important insight. That helps people trying to figure out what has been going on here in a big way. So that’s not nothing. I tell new pieces of the story regularly through the column entries and through the blog entries here.
It’s true that to an extent I am staying in a safe space. That’s regrettable. Sure, I would like to be at FinCon, talking over hundreds of possibilities for getting the word out with smart people who are friends of mine. That would be awesome. I would like to be doing lots of different stuff. So we certainly have no argument there. You Goons have held me back in a major way. I acknowledge this 100 percent.
What do you want me to do about it? That’s always the rub. You don’t want to say. You must have something in mind or you wouldn’t show up here every day. But you won’t do anything more than hint at what you want. What I pick up from the hints doesn’t sound too good to me. So I make clear that there are lines that I won’t cross. And the signals that you send back indicate that you want a lot more than I am willing to even consider giving. So we are at a standoff.
On the morning of May 13, 2002, all that I wanted to do was to stand up for the integrity of the Retire Early board. My post was about safe withdrawal rates but my primary motive was to respond in some effective way to Greaney’s smear campaign against Wanderer. I was right to work up the courage to post honestly re safe withdrawal rates. But the full reality is that I probably would have continued rationalizing my inaction on that subject if Greaney had not driven Wanderer off the board. I loved that community and I felt that I needed to do something to stop him from driving all of our best posters off the board. So I did what I did. I didn’t even say in that first post that the numbers in his study were wrong. It was implied. But all that I really did was ask a question. I asked — Should we be considering valuations when calculating the safe withdrawal rate? The rest of the board community took it from there with its excited reactions, both positive and negative.
If you tell me what you want from me, I can tell you whether I can help you out or not. That would be a quicker way to proceed. I am 99.9999 percent sure that I cannot give you what you want. So I hold out virtually no hope that speaking in a more direct fashion will solve anything. But at least you could stop beating around the bush and perhaps spend the time you have between now and when the crash arrives in a more productive fashion. If you elect to continue on with the hinting stuff, that’s your call. I will respond to the best of my ability and things will play out as they play out.
I believe that valuations affect long-term returns. I obviously am not the only one. Shiller’s book was a best-seller. It is carried by most libraries. There are obviously lots of people who believe that valuations affect long-term returns. We all need to be talking things over with all those who share our views and the internet is obviously a good place for us to go to connect up with such people. That’s where I am coming from. That’s what I am about. That’s my story.
I’ve been blocked from making this happen. You Goons hold different views on how stock investing works. You don’t want us Valuation-Informed Indexers to get together and share ideas with each other. You want to block that. But you have no legal means by which to do so. So you have turned to illegal means. And that has “worked” for you, in your interpretation of events. Your efforts have been a horrible failure in that they have placed you in circumstances in which you will probably be landing in prison cells in the days following the next price crash. But in your eyes they have been a success because you have blocked the Valuation-Informed Indexers from having the conversations that they want and need to have with each other.
Okay. What do you want me to do about it? Tell me in clear terms what you want and I will tell you whether I can do it or not. If what you want is on the right side of the felony line, I am going to say “yes” without asking anything in return. That’s why I know that you are not going to ask something that I can give. If you were going to do that, you would have asked a long time ago and I would have said “yes” a long time ago. If you were to say what you wanted, it would be something that I would not be able to give because it would be on the wrong side of the felony line because it would involve some sort of statement on my end that would aid the 15-year cover-up. I am not freakin’ interested in aiding the 15-year cover up!
Wade Pfau said a number of years back that Valuation-Informed Indexing is the future, that he had checked it out carefully and that it works and that it is far superior to Buy-and-Hold in every possible way. You Goons threatened him and he doesn’t say that anymore. He still does good work, it’s just not 100 percent honest work, he doesn’t tell us all that we need to know. I presume that you are looking at some similar sort of deal from me. I don’t want to go there. I told Wade when he told me that he was flipping that I thought that he was “insane.” I of course knew why he was doing it. He didn’t want to take the hits that he saw me taking on a daily basis. Anyone would want to avoid that. So he now gets to do all the exciting and fun stuff that I do not get to do and I suppose that one could say that he made a good choice.
I don’t see it that way. I wish Wade all the best. He had made huge contributions and I think that anyone alive could feel sympathy for why he did what he did. Maybe he will not go to prison when this all comes out following the crash. But maybe he will, you know? He doesn’t know for sure. You don’t know for sure. I don’t know for sure. Why take the freakin’ chance? If you had asked Wade at the time he put forward his first post to an internet discussion board whether he would ever do anything that would cause even a tiny chance that he would later go to prison for financial fraud, he would have said that you were out of your mind. Yet here we are. He talked himself into it because he didn’t like what was behind Door Number Two, an endless smear campaign by a bunch of internet Goons. I don’t like what is behind Door Number Two either, but I also don’t like what is behind Door Number One, good times for a few years before there is a crash and then a possible prison sentence in the days following that. What the f?
I am just going to let things play out. I am confident that I will get to do all that exciting and fun and lucrative stuff on the other side. I have a funny feeling that I am not going to have any problems getting to speak at FinCon events in the days following the next crash. I will do it that way. Any plus that you would offer me for being willing to join your massive act of financial fraud, I will get on my own and honestly by just waiting you out. So that one is covered. I can stay within the limits set by U.S. law and do just fine. Since I love my country and believe that I should thus be willing to follow its laws, that course sounds like the right one to me.
There’s a problem. The crash will deepen the economic crisis, perhaps by enough to bring on a Second Great Depression. I shouldn’t be staying in my safe space given that possibility. I should be working my tail off at that FinCon convention to see that that doesn’t happen. I do agree with you re that much. The problem is that I worked the first five FinCon conventions as hard as I could. I did what you are suggesting here. I gave my heart, mind and soul to the project. I would be happy to do it again if I could convince myself that my efforts were going to turn the key. But I have seen a lot of rejection over the past 15 years. A mountain of it. I am a stubborn kind of fellow but I am not Superman. The constant rejection hurts. So I have pulled back a bit in recent years. That’s the sad and somewhat shameful reality of the matter.
I don’t rule out the possibility that I could break through prior to the crash. I think that might happen. I certainly hope that it happens. But I wouldn’t bet money on the possibility, you know? It may be that that is just not in the cards. I have to recognize the realities, as painful as it may be to do that.
If the odds are that I am not going to break through prior to the crash, then I have to accept that that may be how it will play out. So I try to do that. I don’t like it one tiny little but. But I don’t run the world, you know? Perhaps you’ve noticed.
Anyway, that’s where things stand from my end. If you tell me what you want from me and it is something that does not involve aiding this 15-year cover-up of the errors in the Buy-and-Hold retirement studies in any way, I am in in two seconds without you needing to ask a second time. If it means aiding the cover up and running the risk of going to prison in the days following the next price crash, I would be truly grateful if you would try to find someone else, dear Goon friend.
I hope that helps at least a tiny, tiny bit. Probably not. But hope springs eternal, no?
Rob
Your comments have been out there for over 15 years. Everyone has access to them. You just can’t handle the fact that people don’t agree with you. It really isn’t surprisin* that people grew tired of you hijacking threads and repeating 5he same things after they feel it had already been addressed years ago.
Why aren’t you doing all of this now to make money?
Because the Goons!
Or, if you want to come at it from a slightly different angle, you could say “Because the complacency of the non-Goons!”
We are complacent because we all have Goon within us. I didn’t speak out about the errors that I saw in Greaney’s study from May 1999 through May 2002 because I was afraid that my friends would get mad at me if I did. That’s the story here, Anonymous.
Those price gains of the late 1990s were insane. Any fool could have figured out that they weren’t real and most of the people who work in this field are not fools by a long shot. So why did so few speak up?
Those who saw that those gains were phony were humans and they wanted the other humans to like them. That’s the entire deal. If we accept that reality, we all get to live far richer (in every sense of the word) lives from that point forward. It’s there sitting on a plate for us if we want it. And of course each and every one of us wants the goody part of the deal. But each and every one of us worries about that part where we need to tell all our friends and readers and customers that they need to take that number on their portfolio statement and divide it by two if they want to engage in effective financial planning. That one is not the ticket to winning friends and influencing people, it would be more than fair to say at this point in the proceedings.
I think we need to move forward as a people. The stock market has become more important to the functioning of our economic system in recent times. So I don’t think that we have any choice anymore as to whether or not to speak up. I think that our choice is to speak up or go down. When enough of us see that that is the choice (this has not happened with the posting of words showing it to be so but I believe that it will happen with the appearance of articles in newspapers referring to a Second Great Depression and all the human misery that follows from that), we will figure out a way to do what we need to do. The reason why I love my country in the first place is that we always manage to figure things like that out once we are given absolutely no option to evade the question at hand.
Money is not the problem here. My message is worth more money than I can count. And the number of people who long to hear this message set forth in great detail is in the millions even in these days prior to the crash. So the money part is taken care of. It is the making our friends feel bad by telling them that they need to divide the number on their portfolio statements by two part that is giving us all a hell of a ride at this moment in time.
I am happy to soften the message a bit to help it to go down easy. But saying “Greaney’s study really did contain an adjustment for valuations, I just was too blind to see it all these years” isn’t softening the message, it is outright deception, it is fraud, it is a felony, it is prison time. That’s the line. Saying things in a charitable way is on the right side of the line. Violating U.S. law is on the wrong side of the line.
My sincere take.
Rob
“I am happy to soften the message a bit to help it to go down easy. But saying “Greaney’s study really did contain an adjustment for valuations, I just was too blind to see it all these years” isn’t softening the message, it is outright deception, it is fraud it is a felony, it is prison time. That’s the line. Saying things in a charitable way is on the right side of the line. Violating U.S. law is on the wrong side of the line.”
Has there ever been a 30 year period where a 4%withdrawal rate has not worked? If not, would we not have to see that happen before you have a case?
Your comments have been out there for over 15 years. Everyone has access to them. You just can’t handle the fact that people don’t agree with you. It really isn’t surprisin* that people grew tired of you hijacking threads and repeating 5he same things after they feel it had already been addressed years ago.
And Greaney’s retirement study has remained uncorrected for 15 years since the posting of my May 13, 2002, discussion-board message. Everything that you can say I can say right back at you coming from the other side of the table.
You Goons have won every procedural battle. I have won every substantive battle. The basic pattern has never changed for a moment.
The only thing that I can think of that could change it is a price crash. That could cause people to open up to some new ideas and to become less complacent re the garbage that you Goons pump out to generate your procedural wins.
If you want to say that you don’t think there is going to be a crash or that, even if there is one, it won’t change things, you can say that. I cannot stop you.
But I am not more able to say today that Greaney included a valuations adjustment in his study than I was able to say that on the morning of May 13, 2002. I kinda, sorta (by implication) said it from May 1999 through May 2002. But I was ashamed of myself in those years for failing to speak up. And nothing that I have seen since has made me feel less ashamed of my cowardice. The reality is entirely to the contrary. Each abusive post that I see makes me feel more certain that I was right to finally work up the courage to post honestly re these matters.
If you have some bright idea that has not occurred to me, I’d like to hear it, Anonymous.
It is my sincere belied that we are just going to have to wait for the crash and see how things play out then. I still hold out a small hope that good things can happen before then. But it is only a small hope at this point in time. That’s why I don’t work it as hard today as I did a number of years back (before Wade Pfau flipped — that was the turning point re my emotional state).
I wish you all good things while we are waiting it out, you know? Does that help at all?
Rob
“And Greaney’s retirement study has remained uncorrected for 15 years since the posting of my May 13, 2002, discussion-board message. ”
I haven’t seen Greaney hijack threads. I have seen Greaney make prison threats. I haven’t seen Greaney make the death threats you claim.
Has there ever been a 30 year period where a 4%withdrawal rate has not worked? If not, would we not have to see that happen before you have a case?
If he claimed to have identified the historically surviving withdrawal rate, that would be so. He didn’t make that claim. He claimed to have identified the safe withdrawal rate.
There is no other field of human endeavor where a choice that historically has brought horrible, horrible results on every occasion on which it has been tried but left people who took it one inch from death would be referred to as “safe.” There’s a reason why in the investing realm we use definitions of words that are entirely different from the definitions those words are given in every other field of human endeavor. It’s the mountain of money there is to be made by engaging in deception in the investing realm at times when prices are sky high and stocks are the most dangerous investing class out there.
I don’t want to be a part of it, Anonymous. I care about the people whose lives are in the process of being destroyed.
If Motley Fool had told me on the day I signed up to post at the Retire Early board, that I would need to agree to participate in an effort to destroy as many middle-class lives as possible in as short a time as possible in order to be granted admission, I would have politely declined. That’s not what they told me. They told me a very, very, very different story. I loved putting lots of my time and energy into achieving the purposes that Motley Fool said they were pursuing with that board. The purposes that it has in fact pursued since the day when Greaney elected to cover up the errors in his retirement study rather than correct them are not my particular cup of tea. Not by a long shot.
But you knew all that, right?
Does it help you in some way to hear it said for 1,000th time?
It’s always been the same story. I will post honestly re the numbers that my friends are using to plan their retirements or I will not post at all. No, there has never been a time when a 4 percent withdrawal rate failed historically. And, no, there is no way on God’s green earth that a 4 percent withdrawal rate is safe for retirements beginning at the valuation levels that have applied in recent years.
That’s my sincere take in any event.
And I naturally wish you the best that this life has to offer a person regardless of your views on whether it is Fama or Shiller who got the stock investing thing right.
Rob
I haven’t seen Greaney hijack threads. I have seen Greaney make prison threats. I haven’t seen Greaney make the death threats you claim.
Everything that has happened over the first 15 years of The Great Safe Withdrawal Rate Debate has been documented in great detail and depth at this site, Anonymous. Any middle-class investors who are unhappy with the losses they have suffered in the next price crash will be able to come here to see who they should sue in civil proceedings or who they should ask prosecutors to pursue in criminal proceedings.
That’s how our system works. Bernie Madoff denied any wrongdoing as well. He said that he was trying to help people. A jury looked at the matter and came to a different conclusion and Saint Bernie sits in a prison cell today.
I cannot stop you from saying what you say. But a jury can. A jury acts with the power of the U.S. government behind it. That’s a lot of power.
I am not inclined to go up against it.
I wish you the best of luck with it. But that’s as far as it goes, you know?
My best wishes, Goon friend.
Rob
You haven’t convinced anyone that something needs to change with Greaney’s work. Wade Pfau even agrees. Get over it already.
Wade described the Buy-and-Hold retirement studies as “dangerous.” I put that word within quotation marks because that’s Wade’s word, not mine.
Are you saying that Wade no longer believes that those studies are dangerous? I don’t think that’s right. I don’t think he uses that word today. He is trying to stay on the right side of you Goons. But he still believes that the Buy-and-Hold retirement studies are dangerous. I think he should be telling everyone he knows. That’s an important matter for everyone living in the United States today. If Wade is keeping that one hushed up, he is very, very, very, very much in the wrong. In my humble opinion, to be sure.
I tell everyone I know everywhere I go that those studies are dangerous. No apologies whatsoever.
I love my country. I am not over it. It’s not even remotely a close call.
I do wish you all good things, however. That far I can go and that far I am happy to go.
But I do believe that the Buy-and-Hold retirement studies are dangerous, and I do think that lots of the people who work in this field know this or at least suspect it and I do think that everyone who knows it or suspects it should be coming out in support of opening the entire internet to honest and civil and reasoned debate re the matter. No death threats, no demands for unjustified board bannings, no thousands of acts of defamation and no threats to get academic researchers fired from their jobs.
As it was in the beginning, it is now and ever shall be, forever and ever and ever, Amen.
Rob
Wade wrote a whole article as to how Greaney was right and you were wrong. He also said his job was never threatened. Are you saying he is a liar?
Yes, I am.
He’s a guy who showed a lot of courage by writing to the authors of the Trinity study asking them to correct the errors they made in the study.
But, yes, be broke down in the face of the pressure imposed by you Goons when he saw Bogle give his implicit consent to the criminally abusive behavior of Mel Linduaer when he learned about it and failed to speak up against it.
I don’t want to see the Wade Pfau’s of the future being afraid to tell us what they truly believe about how stock investing works. We all benefit when the Wade Pfau’s of the world post their sincere beliefs about the subject. So, yes, I say that Wade lied when he came out in support of you Goons and I say that you Goons will be going to prison (some of you for a very long time indeed) when this is all written up on the front page of the New York Times in the days following the next price crash.
I wish you all good things. But no financial fraud for this boy. Not in 15 years, not in 15 billion years. No way, no how. It ain’t gonna happen.
My best wishes.
Rob
“That’s not nothing.”
No, but it’s darn close.
“What do you want me to do about it? That’s always the rub. You don’t want to say.”
That should be obvious, even to you. Follow through on something. Anything. Any of the countless things you said you were going to do, but never did. Do you really need a list of those things?
If you say Wade is a liar, then nothing he says is reliable. Therefore, you should no longer refer to his work.
Follow through on something. Anything.
I’ve followed through on lots of things, Anonymous. I sent e-mails to 30,000 academic researchers. There is no one else alive on Planet Earth who has done that. I haven’t done as much as I would like to be able to say that I have done. I can give you that much. But I have done more than anyone else alive and whoever is in second place is not in a close second place. So I am hardly in a place where I should be getting down on myself re how hard I have worked this thing.
I hope to work it harder next year. I would like to do even more. I think that would be best for every single person concerned, including you Goons. But we are just going to have to wait to see whether that happens or not. There has never before in U.S. history been a situation like this. There are no comps that we can look at. The work I do is hard work. There is nothing harder than setting one’s self up for emotional abuse and rejection. And yet I soldier on to the best of my ability day after day, year after year.
It will be interesting to see how it all plays out, Anonymous.
I wish you the best of luck with it, in any event.
Rob
“I’ve followed through on lots of things, Anonymous. I sent e-mails to 30,000 academic researchers. There is no one else alive on Planet Earth who has done that.”
Many people, including you, have done that. We call you “spammers”
If you say Wade is a liar, then nothing he says is reliable. Therefore, you should no longer refer to his work.
We do not agree, Anonymous. Wade is a Hero of the First Order in my book. He called Lindauer out on his abusive garbage at the Bogleheads Forum, with all his Goons in the room. I have never seen anyone else except yours truly do that. I don’t forget things like that. Wade went to bat for the American people in a big, big way. He knew he was putting his career on the line when he did that and he went ahead and did it anyway.
I don’t rank Wade quite as high as Shiller and Bogle. But I rank him very high. He helped us all out in a huge way. And he will get credit for his many positive contributions in days to come, if I have anything to say about it. I will testify that he put his neck on the line for all of us when no one else around had the guts to do so. It will be easy in the days following the next crash to say that Buy-and-Hold is a big pile of smelly garbage. It wasn’t such an easy thing to do back in the days when Wade was doing it.
The stuff that Wade said in the days before he flipped is HIGHLY reliable, in my book. It’s some of the best stuff out there, in my assessment. Please mark me down as saying that Wade Pfau was one of the most highly reliable figures in the field of investing until threats were made to destroy his career and he became worried that if he continued doing honest work in this field he would no longer be able to provide for his family. I don’t think Wade did the right thing when he flipped. But I am highly sympathetic to a man who does the wrong thing because he loves his family and he can see no other way out of a tight spot.
As always, this is my sincere take re these terribly important matters.
My best and warmest wishes to you.
Rob
Many people, including you, have done that. We call you “spammers”
I received numerous warm and intelligent responses and wrote up the e-mail correspondence with the people who sent those responses as blog entries at this site. I think it would be fair to say that none of the people who engaged in warm and intelligent e-mail correspondence with me re these matters viewed my initial e-mail to them as “spam.” If we are going to expose this massive 15-year cover-up of the errors in the Buy-and-Hold retirement studies, we are going to need to reach out to other humans and tell them about it. No apologies whatsoever.
I intend to send follow-up e-mails to those 30,000 researchers in the days following the next price crash. How much do you want to bet that I see a HIGHER response rate on the second mailing? It’s a little odd that a second mailing of spam would net a HIGHER response rate, no?
My best wishes to you, good friend.
Rob
“I intend to send follow-up e-mails to those 30,000 researchers in the days following the next price crash.”
Yet another thing to add to the no-follow-through list. Those 30,000 emails were sent ages ago. You were an entirely different person. Energetic Rob. Today’s Burnout Rob can’t even muster a comment to a finance board. Funny how no one says “hocomania” anymore.
Bring Back Hocomania! Bring Back Hocomania!
I’m with you re that one, Anonymous. What the world needs now is hocomania, sweet hocomania. Where has all the hocomania gone, long time passing? Get back, Rob, get back to where you once belonged! At least we can all agree re that much.
Take care, man.
Rob
What do you do with all your spare time while waiting for the big crash?
I work this stuff, Anonymous.
I have pulled back from public interactions a bit because of the emotional pain that comes from being rejected by investors who want to believe that the numbers on their portfolio statements are real, that they do not need to divide by two. But I haven’t pulled back from thinking about this stuff even a tiny bit. I think about it every day. I try to solve puzzles that are presented to me by arguments that I hear, by articles that I read, by actions that I see taken.
I process everything through a filter that says “valuations affect long-term returns, prices are driven by investor emotion, gains that are generated by excessive valuations are cotton-candy nothingness that always disappear in thin air in the long run.” Most people don’t apply that filter. Most people apply a filter that tells them that “the market is efficient, price changes are caused by economic developments, the numbers on portfolio statements are real and lasting and can be counted on when engaging in financial planning.” So I come to different conclusions than most people on just about every question that I examine.
And of course I think over how I can get the message out. given the intensity of the resistance to it among some Buy-and-Holders and the widespread complacency re the behavior of those Buy-and-Holders among the Normals, people who do not take dogmatic positions re either of the two schools of thought re how stock investing works.
It’s a rare day when I don’t go to bed thinking about this stuff and when I don’t wake up thinking about this stuff.
Does that help?
Rob