Set forth below is the text of a comment that was recently posted to another blog entry at this site:
“This matter is settled. There is no valuations adjustment in those studies. ”
Absolutely — to both statements. It is so difficult to find anything either tangible or truthful in your painfully long screeds, so it’s worth pointing out such tiny nuggets, whenever they can be found.
Rob, for the thousandth time, let me try to gently nudge you towards sanity, and perhaps even a fruitful future:
Once, long ago, steam engines ruled the earth for train locomotion. While that was underway, there came along diesel/electric power. Let us pretend you alone had the franchise for diesel electric at that moment in history. You alone thought it up, you designed it, you built a working prototype, you perhaps even patented it. Perhaps you felt, with the strength of a religious zealot, that your way — the diesel/electric way — was surely the way of the future, dooming steam to become the relic we now know it to be.
Question: would a workable way to promote it, to foster the transition, to encourage adoption be more likely to be:
a) An attack on steam as unscientific, ungodly, an evil con job, a 100% unworkable method that could never transport a single passenger or package to anywhere (though people used it every day for decades with apparently wonderful and expected results), a method promoted by nasty bigoted horrible people bent on destruction, who were harassing and threatening you, a smelly approach that needed to be buried 100 feet underground… etc, etc, etc,
OR
b) To outline the workings of diesel/electric with specificity, clarity, and brevity. To then to illustrate it’s function by using it yourself in demonstration. To develop and then promote early adopters who had similar results to your own. To focus solely and exclusively on YOUR approach, on IT’S benefits, via POSITIVE-minded and directed activities?
To be even briefer still: Why not put down your anger, your pain, and your raging ego, and instead simply try to focus on learning truth and then (if you feel the need) promoting that truth; instead of dedicating all of your energies into attacking others, and what THEY may or may not chose to do with their own freedoms and ideas?
Briefer still: If your ideas had merit, they would be adopted of their own accord.
Evidence Based Investing says
In a recent article that you posted at Value Walk http://www.valuewalk.com/2015/06/applying-a-racheting-concept-to-safe-withdrawal-rates-makes-sense-but-only-if-valuations-are-taken-into-consideration/, I found the following brilliant comment
“The 4 percent withdrawal worked at all times in the historical record”
I couldn’t have said it better myself, well done.
Rob says
I don’t see anything particularly brilliant about it, Evidence. But I have learned over the years that it’s a wise policy to take compliments from you Goons wherever I can find them. So — Thanks for your kind words.
Rob
Anonymous says
You posted that “goon commentary” in what appears to be it’s entirety. Frankly, it’s analogy, it’s logic, and it’s approach satisfied me entirely. So here is the question: I must presume you both read it and thought it had some sort of value in order to place it as a new topic. Right? So what does it mean to you? What do you take from it? Do you agree with it’s premise and conclusion? Or is it flawed and evil and just another terrible attack on your genius method which all the world should be forced to follow? For once, Rob, I’m asking you to SPEAK! Not of goons and death threats and millions of board bannings and failed retirements (all mere unsupported imaginings by you, btw) but instead to critique, to answer, to attack, or perhaps even to adopt the arguments made in the post that YOU elected to provide your readers! You are a plumber, Rob! So, PLUMB!
Anonymous says
So Rob agrees with John Greany. Good to know.
x says
That’s all anyone who mentions the 4% rule ever says. That it has worked in the past. I have never seen anyone say that it’s guaranteed to work in the future. Your 13 year jihad is against people who do not exist. And yet you still seem to be losing.
Rob says
So Rob agrees with John Greany. Good to know.
I certainly agree with him on that point, Anonymous And always have. As you know.
Can Greaney acknowledge agreeing with me on lots of points?
He used to be able to do so.
Once I pointed out the error he made in his retirement study, that all came to an end.
I wonder why.
I don’t have to lie about anything to present my case. That’s the difference between us.
And of course once you lie about one point you are forced into a corner in which you must lie about other points to cover up the first lie. One day you wake up in a prison cell.
Not this boy.
Rob
Rob says
That’s all anyone who mentions the 4% rule ever says.
If that’s all the Buy-and-Holders were saying, there never would have been a single death threat or a single demand for a single unjustified board banning or a single act of defamation or a single threats to get a single academic researcher fired from a single job.
Because there has been 100 percent agreement re that point going back to the first day As you well know.
Rob
Rob says
I must presume you both read it and thought it had some sort of value in order to place it as a new topic. Right? So what does it mean to you?
I posted the blog entry because I think it will help readers of the blog come to a better understanding of what drives you Goons, of why you behave in the manner in which you do.
I don’t say that you Goons are evil. You Goons say that I say that. But it is not so.
I believe that you Goons are in emotional pain.
I am a huge fan of the project that the Buy-and-Holders initiated — the project of exploring the realities of stock investing in a systematic way through the use of peer-reviewed research. That’s a huge change from the past. Most investing analysis in pre-Buy-and-Hold days was subjective. It went around and around and around in circles. Bogle and the other Buy-and-Hold Pioneers are heroes in my eyes because they led us to the use of objective study of what works and what doesn’t. That was the only way that we were ever going to make real progress.
The fork in the road came in 1981. We learned through peer-reviewed research that the Buy-and-Holders had made a mistake. They did research testing whether short-term timing works or not and discovered that it never works (once expenses are taken into consideration). Unfortunately, they mis-stated their finding. They said that Fama’s research showed that timing in general does not work. Nothing could be further from the truth.
Shiller’s research showed that long-term timing ALWAYS works and is ALWAYS 100 percent required. So Bogle should have walked to the front of a large room in 1981 and said the words “I” and “Was” and “Wrong.” Had Bogle done that, no one would be going to prison today. Millions of people would not have lost their jobs in an economic crisis. Millions would not be on the path to suffering failed retirements. We would be in the midst of the greatest surge of economic growth in our history. We would all be retiring many years earlier. People who have never even considered buying stocks would now be enjoying the benefits of this wonderful asset class because the information they need to reduce risk by 70 percent would be available to them at every investing board and blog on the internet.
Bogle messed up. He’s human. He was excited about his genuine achievements and he didn’t want to own up to a mistake. He suffered cognitive dissonance. He went into cover-up mode. His friends should have talked him out of the cover-up. But the man has lots of money and lots of power and lots of connections and money and power and connections talk in this world. His friends thought that they would rather have some of his money and power and connections sprinkled on them in exchange for telling lies than to help out their friend Jack in a real and long-term way by asking him to kindly knock off the funny business.
It turns out that Buy-and-Hold is the purest and most dangerous Get Rich Quick scheme ever concocted by the human mind. That’s why you are in such pain. You started out with an intent to help people and you instead have destroyed millions of middle-class lives. It hurts to know that you did that. So you fight and fight and fight anyone who makes reference to the last 34 years of peer-reviewed research. I am your best friend in the world. But you convince yourself that I am somehow your enemy.
The blog entry argues that I should state my case for the first true research-based strategy without pointing out what’s wrong with Buy-and-Hold. That is impossible. The safe withdrawal rate was 1.6 at the top of the bubble. You don’t think that people are going to notice that that number is wildly different than the number (4 percent) advanced by the Buy-and-Holders? People notice that sort of thing.
Few of us dare to tell the truth about stock investing today because the peer-reviewed research in this field makes the Buy-and-Holders look very, very, very bad, criminally bad.
That not my doing.
I love my Buy-and-Hold friends. I am trying to help them out. I have been trying to help them out going back to the morning of May 13, 2002.
Once we open the internet to honest posting on the last 34 years of peer-reviewed research, all the ugly stuff comes to a complete and total stop. Whatever your prison sentence is on that day, that’s when it stops growing in length. Bringing our discussions within the confines of what is permitted by U.S. law is a win/win/win/win/win. There is not one person on Planet Earth who would not be helped by that.
You don’t want this wonderful learning experience to take place. Because you understand that it means you would go to prison. For less time than you will go if you don’t come clean until after the crash. But you don’t want to go to prison at all! So the ugly stuff continues. From your side. Never from my side. I have offered to do anything in my power to get your prison sentence reduced a bit.
If I had it in my power to get your prison sentence reduced to zero in exchange for your help in getting every board and blog on the internet opened to honest posting on the last 34 years of peer-reviewed research, I would take that deal in a minute. Why the heck wouldn’t I?
But I don’t have that power. I cannot speak for the millions of middle-class investors whose lives you have destroyed. I can put forward words aimed at putting your behavior in the best possible light. I can suggest an amnesty and work to get that passed by Congress. But I cannot say in advance how the millions of middle-class investors are going to react. It’s up to them. Your behavior has been shocking. They are going to see that when we all come clean. I cannot change that.
That’s where things stand, X. I will do anything that I can to help you out. But I cannot get to first base without your cooperation. So we are probably going to have to wait for the crash, after which I have a funny feeling that I am not going to experience any further difficulties in getting this important message out to the entire world.
What the heck do you want from me?
I have offered to do anything that won’t get me thrown in prison as well. I don’t want to cross The Felony Line myself for obvious reasons.
So what the heck do you want from me?
Rob