Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently put to another blog entry at this site:
“I intend to take over control of the Bogleheads Forum and set it up here as a sub-domain.”
The owners of the Bogleheads forum will not sell or give you the forum.
They are not going to give it to me today, Evidence. I think that much is more than fair to say.
I am talking about after the next crash. The next crash changes things.
You have to come to an understanding of some basic realities to figure out where things are headed.
I do not believe that the current owners of the Bogleheads Forum are bad people. And I certainly do not think that they are dumb people. I think that they are smart and good people. Okay? That’s my core premise. Everything else I say follows from that belief.
I believe that the owners of the Bogleheads Forum are wrong about the need for price discipline (long-term timing) when buying stocks. Smart and good people sometimes get things wrong, no? That’s what I believe has happened here.
Those smart and good people suspect that they may be wrong re price discipline (long-term timing). They are not sure that they are wrong. In fact, they still follow Buy-and-Hold strategies themselves. So I think it would be fair to say that they think it more likely than not that following Buy-and-Hold strategies will produce good long-term results. They are sincere in their advocacy of Buy-and-Hold. But they are not without inner doubts. That’s why we have seen so much friction. Their doubts trouble them. They very, very much want to silence those doubts. And this Rob Bennett fellow won’t shut the heck up about them. That’s why they are not so crazy in love with this Rob Bennett fellow at this particular moment in time.
What happens after the crash?
After the crash, the floodgates open. People will give up their feelings of embarrassment and shame and become determined to get things back on the right track. It won’t just be the Valuation-Informed Indexers who will do that. It will be the Buy-and-Holders doing that too. We are all on the same side. We are all in this together. We all need to know the realities of stock investing. After we experience the next crash, we are going to see that. Everything is going to change. The Buy-and-Holders did not intend to cause the Second Great Depression and, when they see that that is where we are headed, they are going to change their behavior in whatever ways are required to pull us back to a good place.
At that point the owners of the Bogleheads Forum are not going to be resisting my efforts to take over the forum. They are going to be encouraging them. They are going to be asking me to take over the forum. We are going to be friends. We are all in this together. We all want the same things. There is no reason why we shouldn’t be friends. It makes no sense to play it any other way.
I say that I am going to take over the forum because I am trying to help.
Say that we open every investing board and blog on the internet to honest posting following the crash. That’s going to be a huge step. But we are not instantly going to know the answer to every possible question. There are questions that I have not been able to answer in these 13 years. There are almost without a doubt things that I have gotten wrong. There are questions that have not even occurred to me. We are going to need to be exploring all those questions.
The Valuation-Informed Indexers cannot do the job alone. We need the Buy-and-Holders helping us out. The Buy-and-Holders have different beliefs and different life experiences. We need to add those to the mix to make sense of things. I am uniquely qualified to run a board that permits and encourages honest posting from both sides. I have been arguing for 13 years that the Valuation-Informed Indexers must be permitted to post honestly. But I have for that entire time-period also made a point that the Buy-and-Holders must be permitted and encouraged to post their honest views. I am the only one who can say that, Evidence. It’s not my intent to brag. I am just explaining where things stand re this matter.
When we are speaking as friends, we will be able to talk about all sorts of questions in a very different spirit. It could be that we will all participate in a discussion in which it would become evident that I am not the best person to run the board. Perhaps I will be too busy with other things or something. If that happens, we will make a different decision. Good for us! We will do what we think is right. What else can we do?
The point that I am making when I say that it is my intent to take over the Bogleheads Forum is that I think that the board community there must be permitted to work its will. The board community has made clear on numerous occasions that it wants honest posting to be permitted. It is an act of financial fraud for the current owners to reject that 100 percent proper demand. When honest posting is banned, the board becomes a corrupt enterprise. That must change. That will change. That’s the point.
Once the owners of that board committed financial fraud, they set a trap for themselves that they cannot escape. I have been trying to help them out to the extent that they can be helped. I will continue to do that. I cannot force them to help themselves. If they are bound and determined to completely destroy themselves, I guess we are going to see them completely destroy themselves.
But you are never going to see me endorse their acts of self-destruction. I want to help in any way that I can. I want to help the owners of the board. And I want to help the board community to which they have done so much harm. That’s where I am coming from and that’s why I have formed an intent to take over that board following the next price crash. When I take over operation of the Bogleheads Forum, I help every single person involved. I naturally want to do that. So I intend to pursue that goal with a good bit of determination.
I hope that helps you to understand things a little bit better.
I naturally wish you all the good things that this life has to offer a person.
Rob
Why the boglehead forum versus any other forum?
There are a lot of smart people at the Bogleheads Forum, Anonymous. There were hundreds of people there who expressed a desire that honest posting re the last 34 years of peer-reviewed research be permitted. I find that a perfectly reasonable request. I believe that we should not only permit it. I believe that we should encourage honest posting re the peer-reviewed research in this field. Why the heck not?
The purpose of the forum is to explore Bogle’s ideas. Bogle is one of the godfathers of Valuation-Informed Indexing (Shiller is the other). I learned about the errors in the Old School safe-withdrawal-rate studies by reading Bogle’s book. I incorporate all of his ideas on investing except for the one that he got wrong and has not yet corrected. So this is Bogle’s baby. It seems appropriate to explore Bogle’s baby at a forum with Bogle’s name on it. No?
I owe a lot to the people who comprise that forum. I was a daily poster there for about 20 months. My interactions with people there helped me develop the Valuation-Informed Indexing concept in important ways. So I owe the board community something.
It’s an extremely well-populated board. That’s another big plus.
There are a good number of big names who post there. That’s another plus.
Wade Pfau learned about Valuation-Informed Indexing by lurking there in the days before I was banned. I think it would be fair to describe the peer-reviewed research that Wade and I co-authored as the most important investing research published in the past 30 years. The Bogleheads Forum played a big role in making that research possible by posting the comments that helped Wade learn about my work.
And I don’t mean at all to suggest that we would be permitting honest posting ONLY at the Bogleheads Forum. I want to see honest posting permitted (and encouraged!) at every investing board and blog on the internet. Again — Why the heck not? But given the points made above, I think it makes perfect sense to make the Bogleheads Forum the headquarters of efforts to further develop the VII concept.
Are you able to think of any reason why the Bogleheads Forum should NOT be the VII Headquarters once the LindauerHeads and the Greaney Goons are residing in prison cells where they belong?
Rob
I’ve thought of another one.
The Lindauerheads and the Greaney Goons have evidenced a brutal viciousness in their efforts to keep millions of middle-class Americans from learning what they need to know about what the last 34 years of peer-reviewed research teaches us all about how stock investing works in the real world. When we overcome you Goons, we send a powerful signal to the entire world about how this powerful new communications medium can be put to positive use by liberating ordinary people to make use of it in the manner in which they prefer to make use of it (as demonstrated in the published rules of every site on the internet).
In that way we flip the abusiveness of you Goons, transforming it from something very, very twisted into something very positive and constructive and helpful and life-affirming. What better place to do that than at Ground Zero of GoonLand?
That’s pretty darn cool stuff, in my assessment.
Rob
So it is really about Mel and John.
Yes and no.
Everyone benefits if we move forward. Everyone. We all want the same thing.
That’s the good news. And the good news is very good indeed.
The bad news is that we didn’t always know everything. So lots of people were given bad information. And those who have come to understand this are afraid to speak up because people are going to be angry when they learn what has happened.
Once we educate people, nothing that you Goons do will make any difference. People handle internet Goons all the time.
But until people are educated re the last 34 years of peer-reviewed research, you Goons have enough power to keep us all from moving forward.
If it were not for you Goons, we wouldn’t be experiencing an economic crisis. You Goons have destroyed millions of people’s lives.
But, no, it isn’t all about you Goons. If Motley Fool had honored its word to deal with you, you could never have done what you have done. And of course it is the same with Bogle. Had he behaved responsibly, you Goons would have been taken out of the story a long time ago.
So, no, I would not say that it is entirely about Mel and John. The Wall Street Con Men played a big role. They failed to honor their responsibilities. And the journalists in this field played a big role. They should have asked Bogle a lot of hard questions that they have failed to ask him for 34 years now. And even Shiller has played a role in permitting this cover-up to go on so long. He should have included a chapter in his book pointing out how dangerous Buy-and-Hold is. That would have made a difference.
I played a role. I was afraid to speak up from May 1999 until May 2002. That was cowardly. I’m like everyone else. I don’t like to tell people things they don’t want to hear because they won’t like me if I do.
Everyone played a part.
But we wouldn’t be where we are today but for Mel and John. We had enough people who wanted to move forward that, but for Mel’s and John’s criminal acts, we would have all moved forward a long time ago.
Mel and John did lots of bad stuff and they need to be held accountable for us to put the ugly side of this to rest. But I don’t think it is fair to say that it was only Mel and John who messed up. This was a society-wide mess-up. Mel and John did worse than just about anyone else. But their behavior was not entirely inconsistent with behavior we have seen from lots of others in higher positions of responsibility.
That’s my sincere take, in any event.
I hope that helps a bit.
Rob
If they won’t even let you post on the site, what makes you think they would consider giving you the site?
The “they” you are referring to are a small group of Goons, Anonymous.
The vast majority of the board community are Normals, not Goons. The Normals are not going to be happy with the Goons after they have lost most of their retirement money.
If the Goons want to keep the board going, they will work something out with the Normals. The Normals are going to want to see ethical people put in charge of the place.
Theoretically, the Goons could elect to shut the place down. It would be just like them to do that! It also would be terribly sad. I hope that they don’t do that.
I think the Goons will want to work something out. What I actually believe is that even the Goons are going to be pissed off at the Wall Street Con Men following the next crash. So they will try to work something out.
I don’t know everything. I don’t have a crystal ball. I just don’t think that the current situation is viable in the long term. We can’t have a country where workers have been told to invest to provide for their own retirements yet we provide no means for them to access accurate and honest information re the last 34 years of peer-reviewed research. I expect that Bogle will flip following the next crash. When Bogle flips, no one will be afraid to speak out re the realities anymore. So there will be all kinds of changes in all sorts of places.
We will just have to wait and see, Anonymous. If it doesn’t happen, it doesn’t happen. I am certainly happy to help out in any way that I can. If the majority of the community didn’t want me to take over as site administrator, I would of course be happy just to be a regular poster. But I believe there will be a desire to have someone who favored honest posting all along in that spot. I’m a community guy. I will go along with whatever the community as a whole wants (so long as the community is able to express its true preferences free of the intimidation tactics that you Goons have employed to control the board up to now).
We are just going to have to wait and see how things go. We all want the same things. We are all on the same side. I guess it seems hard for me to believe that we won’t figure out a way to work together once most of us have lost most of our retirement money. I really don’t see how anyone with even a lick of sense would be able to speak up in support of Buy-and-Hold at that point. And I don’t think that even you Goons would deny that I have been speaking out in the strongest terms in OPPOSITION to Buy-and-Hold for a good number of years now.
Anyway, that’s where I am coming from. I hope that helps a bit.
Rob
What kind of probability would you put on these fantasies coming true? 10%? 1%?
I don’t trust my ability to come up with good probabilities re this sort of thing anymore, Laugh. If you had asked me on May 13, 2002, what were the probabilities that Motley Fool would ban the fellow who discovered the errors in a retirement study while nominating the fellow who got the numbers wrong and then threatened to kill family members of anyone who continued to point out those numbers for Poster of the Year, I would have put them at one million to one. I guess the joke was on me re that one, no? And of course the joke has been on me re lots of other developments we have seen in this never-ending saga.
That said, the probabilities that matter most to me are the following three:
1) The probability that I will ever be able to say that John Greaney included an adjustment for the valuation level that applies on the day the retirement begins is precisely zero;
2) The probability that I will ever be able to say that there is not 34 years of peer-reviewed research showing that a valuation adjustment is required is precisely zero; and
3) The probability that I will ever be able to say that Greaney corrected his study within 24 hours of learning of the error he made in it is precisely zero.
I couldn’t live with myself if I lied about the numbers that my friends use to plan their retirements. So that’s that.
Do I believe strongly that everyone else will come around? I do. We are the luckiest generation of investors ever to walk Planet Earth. Valuation-Informed Indexing is the fulfillment of Jack Bogle’s dream as a young man; it is everything that he once hoped Buy-and-Hold could become plus a lot more. I believe that the next price crash is going to flip Jack and that, when Jack flips, lots of people who are afraid to come forward today will be coming forward. The line of resistance will break and we will all proceed into a future of investing analysis a whole big bunch brighter than what we have experienced in the recent past.
But I’m not making any guarantees re anyone else. I can make a guaranty only re Rob Bennett. Rob Bennett loves his country and he cannot betray it. That can never be. The rest will have to take care of itself. When Jack asks me for his help in making the transition go as smoothly as possible , I will be there for him to help out in any way possible. Of that I am 100 percent certain. The rest is out of my hands despite my continuing optimism.
I hope that helps a bit, my Goon friend.
Rob