Set forth below is the text of a comment that I posted to another blog entry at this site:
Rob,
A community resource is some that is part of shared services, like a park. When you buy stock, you are taking ownership in a piece of a company. It isNOT open for consumption by the community at large. Instead, it is solely for the owners.
The last 33 years of peer-reviewed academic research produced KNOWLEDGE.
There are millions of people who are investing in stocks to finance their retirements and need access to that KNOWLEDGE to do so effectively.
When the Wall Street Con Men deny those millions access to the KNOWLEDGE they need, they destroy our ECONOMIC SYSTEM. We all have a vested interest in seeing that that ECONOMIC SYSTEM not be destroyed.
The ECONOMIC SYSTEM and the KNOWLEDGE produced by the academic research are community resources.
The Wall Street Con Men make a buck by destroying these community resources. These community resources do not belong to them. They have no right to destroy these community resources for their personal profit. We have adopted LAWS to protect us from this sort of behavior. These LAWS call for prison time for those who commit massive acts of financial fraud.
There are RESPONSIBILITIES that go with offering investing advice. It is not just about turning a buck by telling any lie that will get the marks to turn over their life savings.
My sincere take.
Rob
Thanks for the daily confirmation of your lack of understanding and continued lunacy.
You are being sarcastic. But you shouldn’t be, Anonymous.
You really should be thanking me for presenting a viewpoint contrary to your own.
There are two things that can happen when you hear a different viewpoint.
You can decide for yourself that it doesn’t measure up. In that case, you have suffered no loss. In fact, you have enjoyed a benefit. When your viewpoint stands up to scrutiny when challenged by another viewpoint, that permits you to have more confidence in your viewpoint. That’s a small plus.
The other thing that can happen is that you can be persuaded of the merit of the different viewpoint. In that case, an entire new world opens up to you.
So my refusal to post dishonestly no matter how much intimidation you Goons apply to me is a win/win/win/win/win. It’s a win for me. It’s a win for the millions of middle-class investors who need to hear about this viewpoint. It’s a win for my good friend Jack Bogle and all his Wall Street Con Men friends. It’s a win for you and your Goon pals.
So my response to your expression of thanks is —
YOU ARE WELCOME.
I will continue to do my best to open the entire internet to honest posting on safe withdrawal rates and scores of other critically important investment-related topics. You have my pledge. I can do no more and I can do no less.
My best and warmest wishes to you and yours.
Rob
How exactly is access to that knowledge restricted? AFAICT Shiller/Wade publish papers and Shiller has written some books. Seems like the knowledge is free flowing to me.
The only thing that has been restricted is your access to some pretty unimportant Internet message boards and it is basically because you are a big pain in the rear to deal with.
We need to have people talking about the implications of Shiller’s findings at every investing discussion board and blog on the internet, Laugh.
Shiller’s findings show that there is precisely zero chance that Buy-and-Hold can ever work for a single long-term investor. What percentage of the population do you think knows that?
I didn’t know it on the morning of May 13, 2002.
John Walter Russell didn’t know it when he and I began working together.
Wade Pfau didn’t know it when he and I began working together.
Wade has a Ph.D. in Economic from Princeton. You would sure think that he would know about an the work of an economist who won a Nobel prize, wouldn’t you?
But he didn’t. He had heard of Shiller. But he had never been in a discussion of the implications of Shiller’s work.
Why?
Because there are millions of people who have followed Fama’s work, not Shiller’s. Fama’s work takes one to a very different place. So those people are hurting.
And when people try to explore the implications of Shiller’s work, they get shouted down by the hurting Buy-and-Holders. So, no, information is not feee-flowing AT ALL.
We need to stop the shouting.
We need to stop the hurting.
We need to come to understand that we are all in this together and that we all should be working together to realize the benefits of Shiller’s amazing findings for ourselves and for all our fellow investors.
Internet boards are NOT unimportant. This new communications medium is very exciting. We can change the world by opening those boards to honest posting. My good friend Jack Bogle is a good man and a smart man. If we open those boards to honest posting, we will soon have Jack working with us. Jack has a lot of influence in this field. Once we get him working with us, things will get better and better and better. All of the negative energy will have been changed into positive energy.
I am NOT a big pain in the rear. I report on the peer-reviewed research of the past 33 years. We have seen the biggest advances in our understanding of how stock investing works ever achieved in history brought to light during those 33 years. The peer-reviewed research is NOT a big pain in the rear. The peer-reviewed research is our friend. The peer-reviewed research is trying to help us. The peer-reviewed research liberates us. It frees us to lead richer (in every sense of the word) lives than we ever before imagined that we might be able to live.
The research SEEMS like a pain in the rear end to a Buy-and-Holder because it shows us that the core premise of the Buy-and-Hold Model (the idea that price discipline is not necessary when buying stocks) is in error. The research that I co-authored with Wade shows us how to reduce the risk of stock investing by 70 percent while earning HIGHER returns. That ain’t no pain in the rear end. That’s investor heaven. That’s what we ALL want. Including Jack. Including you, Laugh.
I hope that helps a bit, old friend.
Rob