Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently posted to another blog entry at this site:
“The Buy-and-Holders say that the safe withdrawal rate is 4 percent “over and over.”
I dont think this is true. Tilting at windmills.
The errors in the Old School retirement studies should have been corrected within 24 hours of the moment that they became public knowledge. That was the morning of May 13, 2002. The studies have not been corrected to this day.
Yes, there have been dozens of articles in all the leading publications pointing out that the retirement studies are in error. That’s a good. That’s a positive.
But we still need corrections.
And we need to figure out how we are going to compensate the millions of investors who are on the way to suffering failed retirements because they believed that the studies were legitimate and planned retirements based on that belief.
And we need to have a national debate re how it is that these studies remained uncorrected for so long. The reason is obviously the fraudulent behavior of the Buy-and-Holders. Financial fraud is a crime, a felony. We have not yet seen criminal charges brought against those who posted in “defense” of Mel Linduaer and John Greaney and Jack Bogle. Why not?
That’s the next step, Laugh. We need to see criminal prosecutions and we need to see civil suits being brought. That’s how you penalize the intimidation tactics we have been seeing for 13 years now.
And then we need to see financial rewards for all those who put their necks on the line by pointing out the criminal behavior of the Buy-and-Holders when doing so took a lot of courage and when those doing so were suffering financial hits as a result of doing so. These are the people who will be building the first true research-based model for understanding how stock investing works. We want to reward those people to the greatest extent possible. It is by rewarding the people who give honest investing advice that we get to see more of it. And that of course benefits each and every one of us.
The investing advice field became 100 percent corrupt during the Buy-and-Hold Era. We want to flip that. We want to see the same ethical standards that apply in every other field of human endeavor coming to apply in the investing advice field as well. We all need to pull together to make that happen.
You Goons grow weaker by the day. This is no time for those of us who love our country to slow down. We want to see prison sentences announced. Once your prison sentence has been announced, I am 100 percent sure that there will not be one investing site on the internet advocating Buy-and-Hold “strategies.” Give me a friggin’ break.
People who work in this field are like the people who work in every other field of human endeavor. They want to do good work. They want to help people. They want to be honest. They want to be able to feed their families. They don’t want to see their careers destroyed because they posted honestly re safe withdrawal rates or re some other critically important investment-related topic. We need to let everyone in this field know that the deeply corrupt Buy-and-Hold Era has come to an end and that in the future everyone is going to be giving honest investing advice and not holding back from doing so because of the intimidation tactics of the Wall Street Con Men and their Internet Goon Squads. We send that message by enforcing the laws against financial fraud that we so smartly adopted as a people long before the Buy-and-Holders ever came on the scene.
That’s my sincere take re these terribly important matters in any event.
My best and warmest wishes to you and yours, Laugh.
Rob
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