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:
Yet again, you avoid answering the question.
The questions you want answered were advanced for the purpose of harassment, Sammy. My personal financial circumstances are none of your concern and are not the proper concern of other people reading this column.
I revealed a good bit of my personal financial history when I was posting at the Retire Early board because there it WAS relevant. We all told our stories and those listening in were able to better determine whether early retirement was a possibility for them too by noting how close their circumstances compared. After I posted honestly on the safe withdrawal rate question, you Goons changed some of the facts around to make my circumstances sound embarrassing to those who don’t know the full story and then followed me everywhere I went on the internet and demanded that I answer to your distorted presentations of the facts.
Huh?
That’s sick, man.
You are a real person inside even though you present yourself in public as a Goon. You are a person in pain. You see the case for Valuation-Informed Indexing and yet you cannot bear to hear it given voice in public.
There are lots and lots of others who want to hear that case given voice. They have told me so. I am going to continue to do what I can to help those people realize that little dream of theirs regardless of how brutally abusive you and your Goon friends are to me in your effort to punish me for choosing to spoil your Buy-and-Hold fantasy with explorations of the implications of the last 35 years of peer-reviewed research in this field.
If you have legitimate questions to ask here, please ask them and I will do my best to respond effectively.
I you have no legitimate questions to ask, my strongly held opinion is that it would be better for you to find other things to do with your time than to visit here and post nonsense comments.
If you mix up legitimate stuff and not legitimate stuff in your comments here, which is your most common practice, I will continue to respond to the stuff that is legitimate and ignore the stuff that is pure nonsense.
Regardless of your choices for yourself, I will continue to wish you all the best that this life has to offer a person. As one of the poor struggling humans, I think you deserve that much from me. Please just try to remember that the 20 percent of the population that wants to learn more about the dangers of Buy-and-Hold are poor struggling humans too and that they deserve my best efforts too and that I intend to help them out to the extent I can regardless of any pain that it causes you for me to continue to do so.
I hope that all of that makes at least a little bit of sense to you and to others listening in trying to make sense of this crazy set of circumstances in which we all find ourselves.
Rob
Anonymous says
Uh, Oh. The research shows that you are all wrong, Rob. Even Shiller agrees you are wrong.
https://retirementresearcher.com/mean-people-say-trump-rally-created-overvalued-market/
Juicy excerpt 1:
“But there are some issues to consider here. Yes, stocks go up and down. And yes, Monday morning quarterbacks can always pick apart what happened in hindsight (though not always – markets can be weird, especially in the short term). But it’s dangerous to think that knowledge of the past gives us some ability to predict what will happen next (there’s even a fancy name for such a logical error: post-hoc fallacy).”
Juicy excerpt 2:
“To be very clear, making changes to your asset allocation based on valuation signals is market timing, which, as we’ve said before, is a brittle strategy. If you don’t get both the signal and timing right, you can hurt yourself pretty badly.”
Juicy excerpt 3:
“So what does Shiller tell people to do? Quoting directly from his recent NYT piece, “Long-term investors shouldn’t be alarmed” In other words, keep doing what you’re doing. Don’t make any changes to your asset allocation based on this information.”
That is all bad news for you, Rob. The jury will not be happy when they read this information and then see how you have been trying to sell everyone on your get rich quick scheme of marketing timing that even Robert Shiller has been warning you about. It looks like you will be sitting in prison for a long time for your extensive fraud.
Rob says
I am grateful to you for providing the link, Anonymous.
There is obviously not one word in any of the excerpts that you provided casting even the slightest but of doubt on Valuation-Informed Indexing. The peer-reviewed research showed in 1965 that short-term timing does not work and there has been no peer-reviewed research published in the interim casting doubt on that important finding. I will continue posting honestly on safe withdrawal rates and on all other critically important investment-related topics.
I have a funny feeling that the fact that “defenders” of Buy-and-Hold feel compelled to play such desperate games reveals that even those who “support” this stuff lack confidence in it. That’s not a good sign.
We will see how things play out for us all following the next price crash, my good friend. It is my belief that we are going to be achieving some very big advances in our understanding of how stock investing works at that time. But I of course could be wrong. I think that we are going to have to wait to see how things play out to find out for sure.
My best and warmest wishes to you.
Rob