“Wade Pfau Should Have Been Posting From the First Day That He Got Interested in Valuation-Informed Indexing. He and I Would Have Written That Paper a Lot Sooner Had He Done So. And We Might Have Done an Even Better Job Because We Would Have Had That Entire Community Feeding Us Ideas. We Might Have Even Gotten Jack Bogle Involved! Wouldn’t That Have Been Something?”

Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently posted to the discussion thread for one of my columns at the Value Walk site:

According to your previous posts, you said you needed the windfall or you would not have enough. Was this a lie or are you lying with this latest post?

The rest of your post is nonsense.

In the time that I was posting at the Bogleheads Forum (about 18 months), Wade Pfau was reading my posts and thought that Valuation-Informed Indexing was incredibly exciting. He had never learned about it when he was earning his Ph.D. in Economics at Princeton but he could see that it all made sense and that the entire historical record supported it. He was afraid to post because you Goons were injecting healthy doses of abusiveness into every thread. But he kept reading. After I was banned, he contacted me and told me that he would like to prepare research on VII with me. The research paper that resulted was published in a peer-reviewed journal. I think it would be fair to describe it as the most important research published in this field in the past 35 years.

There were people telling me at the time that I was crazy to keep posting because your abusiveness ruined every thread. Lots of smart and good people wanted to participate in constructive discussions. But they weren’t doing it and so lots of people told me that I should just give up, let the lowest members of the community have veto power over what the rest of us said. That didn’t seem right to me. In the end, those posts had more value than any posts I have ever advanced. Wade was quietly reading them and they ended up producing this amazing research paper that will be helping investors invest more successfully for many decades to come.

Do you see what I am getting at, Sammy? It’s an ill wind that blows no good. We know as a society that certain sorts of posting are helpful and certain sorts are not. That’s why we have rules at every site prohibiting the tactics that you Goons employ. We need to tune you Goons out and just proceed with our business. It is important business and we should not permit the lowest among us to hold us all back.

Wade should have been posting from the first day that he got interested in Valuation-Informed Indexing. He and I would have written that paper a lot sooner had he done so. And we might have done an even better job because we would have had that entire community feeding us ideas. We might have even gotten Jack Bogle involved! Wouldn’t that have been something.? Please don’t dismiss the idea. If we could get Wade involved, we could get Jack involved. They are both smart people with a desire to help others learn how stock investing works. What grounds do we have to believe that Jack would not respond in ways similar to how Wade responded if the circumstances were right?

When you put one foot in front of the other and just do what you know is right, good things happen down the line. That’s my sincere belief, Sammy. I have seen things like what happened with Wade happen HUNDREDS of times during these past 15 years. We all just need to hang in there and let the process play out. The Goon stuff is nasty as all get-out. But it is ultimately trivial. You Goons act the way you act because you are in pain to see that you made a mistake when you fell for the Buy-and-Hold marketing slogans. We can use your experience to learn how Get Rich Quick strategies can become addictive and we can use what we learn to help others not to make the same mistakes.

That’s my sincere take re these terribly important matters, in any event.

My best wishes to you and yours.

Rob