Set forth below is the text of a conversation that recently took place at the FinCon Community on Facebook:
Miranda Marquit: Also, I’m looking for a legit Boglehead. Any of you been (or still are) a Boglehead? Would like to know what it’s like to be on the “inside” as well as if there are some issues with being too fervent about it.
Doug Nordman: I’ve been a member of the Bogleheads forum since 2007, if that helps. I was also at the Vanguard Diehards forum with Morningstar when the first Bogleheads broke free to build a better forum. But I’ve never had any accounts with Vanguard or been to a Bogleheads’ meetup. Years ago I remember that Mike Piper had been to one.
The Bogleheads forum, like every forum, has its share of passionate zealots. It’s heavily moderated to stay on topic and avoid self-promotion, which its (remaining) members seem to prefer. Its wiki is also exceptional, and I’ve helped build out the military part of that.
It has a forum’s usual share of drama. It’s also produced several very good investing books and become a tremendous educational resource.
Tom Drake: Rob Bennett
Doug Nordman: Tom, I wouldn’t do that to Miranda.
Rob Bennett: Miranda knows me. We are friends. I am friends with Tom as well. And it has always been my hope to be friends with all Bogleheads (including you, Doug). The fact that some of my Boglhead friends do not view me as a friend is an unfortunate and sad reality.
Tom Drake: Miranda is looking for any issues, so I thought Rob would be a good addition to her post.
Rob Bennett: If I were asked by Miranda or anyone else about the Bogleheads Forum, I would say that it is an amazing resource populated by lots of smart and good people that has unfortunately suppressed discussion of the far-reaching implications of the 36 years of peer-reviewed research in this field showing that valuations affect long-term returns. I greatly enjoyed the time that I spent at the forum and learned a lot from the experience and made lots of good friends. But I was not willing to say either that the Buy-and-Hold retirement studies contain valuation adjustments or that such adjustments are not needed to get the numbers right. So I am no longer permitted to post there. It is my belief that I am not the only one who lost out as a result of that decision. Everyone who participates at the board lost out on a great learning experience. We all learn more when we permit our beliefs to be challenged in civil and reasoned discussions.
Congratulations on leaving your safe space, if only briefly.
Thanks for saying that, Anonymous.
And, yes, that was hard.
Miranda and I are friends. We have enjoyed meals together at earlier FinCon events and talked lots about both stock investing and lots of other stuff. She interviewed me by telephone following one of the earlier FinCon events and then wrote an article on Valuation-Informed Indexing that appeared at one of the sites she writes for. Why should she be put in the spot that she was put in by Nords making that unkind and uncalled-for comment?
Something like that should never happen. Fama created one school of academic thought as to how stock investing works (Buy-and-Hold). Shiller created another (Valuation-Informed Indexing). It is only the members of one of those schools of thought that employs death threats and demands for unjustified board bannings and thousands of acts of defamation and threats to get academic researchers fired from their jobs to make their case. Members of the other school behave in a civil and reasonable manner at all times.
It’s wrong, Anonymous. And, yes, it’s criminal. So long as members of both schools behave in a civil manner, it is left to the readers of the discussion boards and blogs to decide which school to follow when making their investing decisions. That’s how it is supposed to go under the laws of the United States. When members of one school behave in the manner in which we have seen you Buy-and-Hold Goons behave for 15 years now, any readers who lose money because the investing advice presented does not work have legal cases to bring against those who engaged in these low practices or who permitted those engaging in the low practices to participate in discussions at sites they own. None of us should be taking on those sorts of liabilities and none of us should be watching in silence (and fear!) while our friends take on those sorts of liabilities. And none of us should be tolerating a situation where our friends take on the risk of going to prison in the days following the crash.
We should be speaking up. The published rules that are supposed to govern discussion at all of our boards and blogs are good rules. And the laws against financial fraud are good laws. We should all respect those rules and laws and call out the b.s. of our friends with other investing views when we see them violate those rules and laws.
Shiller published his “revolutionary” (his word) research findings in 1981. Valuation-Informed Indexing should have won over a lot more than 10 percent of the population of investors in 36 years. Why has growth of belief in the first true research-based approach been so slow? Because we humans learn by talking things over and too many of us hold back from saying what we really believe about how stock investing works out of fear that the feelings of our Buy-and-Hold friends will get hurt if we tell them the straight story. Huh? What the f? I like to think that my Buy-and-Hold friends are tough enough to take a little hit, especially when they know that it was delivered with the best of intentions, to help everybody come to a better understanding of an important subject matter.
What Nords did to Miranda was wrong. The one incident is a small thing. But this is not a once-in-a-blue-moon kind of event. This sort of interaction takes place hundreds of times EVERY DAY at discussion boards and blog all across the internet. Not good. We created our boards and blogs to enjoy learning experiences. A small number of Buy-and-Hold Goons has made it impossible for the rest of us to use those boards and blogs for the positive and life-affirming purposes for which we created them. We need to pull together as a people and change that. We need to work up the courage to insist that those who are not willing to follow the rules they agreed to follow when they clicked the “I Accept” button beat a quick retreat from communities that do not need their business that bad.
That’s my sincere take re these terribly important matters, in any event.
My best wishes to you.
Rob
Just think. Once we have the giant stock market crash, you will take the #1 spot.
http://money.cnn.com/2017/10/27/news/companies/bezos-gates-billionaires/index.html
That’s not what I want today or what I have ever wanted, Anonymous.
I would be 100 percent happy to give up the #1 spot in exchange for being able to see millions of people avoid the pain they will be experiencing in a crash. Please tell me where I need to go to sign the papers on that deal.
We all have to play the cards that are dealt to us. None of us get to choose the cards.
I’ll take the money. I will say “thank you.” I certainly do not intend to offer any apologies for having done the hard work through which I earned it.
But I will take no pleasure in seeing the human pain that will be experienced as part of the process by which that money finds its way into my hands. If you go through the Post Archives, you will see that I have been aware of where things seemed to be heading going back to the first day and have always felt pain in my own heart at the thought of seeing all that pain being experienced by others. I did everything I could to steer us all down other paths, to no avail.
I’ll take whatever spot the cards reveal for me. It’s a theoretical possibility that we all go down and that I take the last spot, just everybody else. I am not going to dwell on that one because it would serve no good purpose to do so. Yes, it would be better by a factor of 50 million for me to take spot #1 and for millions of us to begin living lives far richer in every sense of the world than we ever before thought possible after having lives through some scary and hard times getting there.
I am one person. I have a part to play that may in the end indeed put me in a spot where I take over spot #1 for a time. I have no doubt that some whippersnapper will quickly come along and knock me off my perch. So be it. It’s the way of the world. I’ll enjoy whatever pleasures come from taking over the #1 spot. But I cannot say that those pleasures are much of a driver for me. It’s being true to my fellow community members, being true to all the good and smart people who built this country and who have a right to live in it without the financial fear that follows from the relentless promotion of a pure Get Rich Quick investing strategy, that is the driver for me. I will celebrate receiving the rewards that follow from that because the receipt of those rewards will affirm what we are as a people and will give us all hope for the future, hope that our way of life is a good way of life and that working together we can overcome these bumps in the road that have been known to appear before our eyes from time to time.
Millions of us will be hurting. And then millions of us will be living better lives. I didn’t create these circumstances. I did everything in my power to make the transition from Point A, a place where we found ourselves on the morning of May 13, 2002, to Point B, the place where deep in our hearts every last one of us has always longed to be, as smooth as possible for every last one of us. my Goon friends very much included and my millions of Normal friends certainly always in mind. We will be hearing horrible, horrible, horrible stories. Tell me some other amazingly great thing that ever happened in this world without some some of pain being associated with it. In the year when the Beatles zoomed to the top, the people who sold Perry Como records had small Christmas bonuses, you know? That mix of anguish and joy is part of The Big Guy’s (I don’t mean Bogle!) plan.
My best wishes to all of us who have to live though this to unlock all the wonders it will send out way in the days to come.
Rob