Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently posted to another blog entry at this site:
Are you going to talk about Wade, goons, death threats, prison sentences and lawsuits at FinCon? It would be dishonest and corrupt to avoid those topics when mingling with your fellow bloggers, since that is ALL you talk about here.
That is not all I talk about here, X.
I have five calculators here that exist nowhere else on the internet.
I have over 200 RobCasts and just about all of them are over one-hour long.
I have 200 articles focusing on different aspects of what the peer-reviewed academic research of the past 32 years says about what works in stock investing.
And I of course have links to the peer-reviewed research that I co-authored with Wade Pfau, the research that shows millions of middle-class investors how to reduce the risk of stock investing by 70 percent.
I will obviously be talking about as much of that stuff as I possibly can.
But, yes, I will also talk about you Goons and your death threats and your board bannings and your tens of thousands of acts of defamation and your threats to get academic researchers fired from their jobs.
Why?
Because the first question I get from just about everyone who I tell that it is now possible to reduce the risk of stock investing by 70 percent is — Why don’t we hear about this from every expert in the field, Rob?
The obvious answer to that question is that the Buy-and-Holders are not willing to admit the mistake they made and have been engaging in brutally abusive tactics to keep millions of middle-class investors from learning what the research says.
We know all we need to know on the substance side to bring the economic crisis to an end and to enter the greatest period of economic growth in our history, X. We are on the 99-yard line. The last yard is getting you Goons sent to prison. When your prison sentences are announced, the news will go viral and Buy-and-Hold will be a dirty phrase at every web site on the internet.
I talk about bringing an end to the ugly stuff because it is by bringing an end to the ugly stuff that millions of us get to experience the benefits of being lucky enough to be born at the greatest time to be investors in the history of Planet Earth.
Does all that make good sense to you, my good friend?
Rob, the Fellow Excited About Being Given the Job of Carrying the Football One More Yard and Making the 99-Yard Drive So Far Achieved Pay Off Big-Time for Every Single Person Involved
But, yes, I will also talk about you Goons and your death threats and your board bannings and your tens of thousands of acts of defamation and your threats to get academic researchers fired from their jobs.
Your FinCon presentation mentioned your bannings. But not a single word about goons, death threats, defamation or job threats.
No.
I only had five minutes. I fit as much about goonishness into the presentation as I possibly could given the time limit.
Take a look at the slides. Some of the stuff was pure hate stuff advanced by you Goons. You don’t think that made the point?
I made the point as clearly as it could be made in that amount of time. I can prove it.
Prior to the presentation, I talked with Jaime Tardy (who runs the Eventual Millionaire blog) about hiring her as a coach. She was in the audience with a number of millionaire friends. She told me that their reaction was that I sounded “bitter.” She wouldn’t have said that if I hadn’t made mention of the Goon stuff.
The entire story here is not Goonishness. I certainly needed to talk about what Shiller’s revolutionary findings and about the wonderful breakthroughs that the Buy-and-Hold pioneers developed and about the amazing research into risk reduction that I co-authored with Wade Pfua and all that sort of thing. But, yes, goonishness is indeed PART of the story and, yes, I included that in my five-minute overview of the first 11 years of explorations of the investing realities.
Don’t let the bad guys get you down, my Goon friend.
Rob
Bitter is an understatement. Your dive into the depths of mental illness began when you were tossed off the boards. You couldn’t handle it and you have been seeking your revenge ever since.
I don’t know about all that, Anonymous.
But Jaime did report to me that these people expressed the view that I sounded bitter. I am not even able to imagine any reason why she would lie about such a thing. So I am confident that she is shooting straight about what they said.
I can take it a step further. I believe that the people who told Jaime that I sounded bitter were expressing to her their true reactions to the talk.
Whachagondo?
Rob
So you barely mentioned your crusade against the goons and they thought you were bitter? Imagine what they would have said if you read off some of your own bizarre comments on your own website!
Imagine what they will say after the next price crash, Laugh.
There’s more than one way of looking at this thing.
Buy-and-Hold is the past. Valuation-Informed Indexing is the future.
I feel better living in the future than living in the past.
I wish you all good things.
Rob
They will probably say the same stuff as everyone else did after the past 10 ‘crashes’. No big whoop.
Unless you are singing the ‘this time its different’ song.
We only have good records going back to 1870, Laugh. In that time, we have had four secular bear markets.
The first was in the early 1900s. I don’t know much about it. But I have heard it described as a major economic crisis, something that put us close to falling into a depression.
The second was the First Great Depression.
The third was the stagflation of the 1970s.
The fourth is our current economic crisis, which is on path to turning into the Second Great Depression.
I have not heard a single responsible person describe any of those four crises (each caused by the promotion of Buy-and-Hold “strategies”) as “no big whoop.”
We have very, very different understandings of what constitutes “no big whoop.”
I will continue posting honestly on safe withdrawal rates and on many other critically important investment-related topics.
My best and warmest wishes to you and yours.
Rob
There is one sense in which it really IS different this time, Laugh.
This time we have 32 years of peer-reviewed academic research showing us what truly works for the long term.
That’s why I often note that we are the luckiest generation of investors ever to walk Planet Earth.
Hang in there, man. It gets better.
Rob
Rob,
You just don’t get it. Over the last 11 years, the market has gone up and down. Debates on investing strategy continue on the internet every day. Fortunately, a number of wise people chose to ban you from their sites so that people can actually have an open debate versus dealing with your poor behavior and attempt to dominate the conversation with your lengthy blathering, threats and fantasies. I suspect you haven’t learned from history and will continue to waste your time, just like you have for the last 11 years. Meanwhile, life will go on while you sink further into your mental darkness.
I say that it is you who don’t get it, Mr. Rational.
We are the luckiest generation of investors who ever walked Planet Earth. The peer-reviewed research that I co-authored with Wade Pfau shows us all how to reduce the risk of stock investing by 70 percent (by taking valuations into consideration when setting our stock allocations). I am proud of that research and I naturally want to share it with every investor alive on Planet Earth today.
You don’t want people to learn about that research. You want to live in the past, when people thought there was evidence that Buy-and-Hold strategies might work. I see too much pain in that path. It was the relentless promotion of Buy-and-Hold strategies that caused the economic crisis. Millions of people have lost their jobs as a result. I don’t feel even a little bit comfortable being associated with such smelly garbage.
I wish you all the best things that this life has to offer a person.
Can you say the same back in return?
Perhaps we can start working toward a more product dialogue by at least being able to say that we respect and feel affection for and feel gratitude toward the other party.
Can you do that much? Can you say that you feel respect and love and gratitude for me even though I have elected to follow a different investing strategy than you?
If not, why not?
Please reflect on that one and I think you will begin to see why I say that following Get Rich Quick strategies not only destroys your retirement portfolio, it also rots out your soul.
My best and warmest wishes to you in any event, my old friend.
Rob