Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently posted to the discussion thread for another blog entry at this site:
Yes, you’re great at imagining. Not so great at actually doing. When is the last time you posted at any other blog?
I don’t recall. It’s been a long time.
But I certainly expect to be doing so in future days.
After the next crash, I am certain that I will be posting at lots of places. It will be a lot easier then. Emotions will have turned. I will not then be up against the emotional resistance that I have been up against for the past 15 years.
Would it be a good idea to do more posting at other blogs BEFORE the crash? I think it would be a good idea. But it’s hard. There’s an emotional toll that has to be paid for telling people what the last 36 years of peer-reviewed research tells us about how stock investing works in the real world.
Do you see anybody else doing it? Can you point to anyone else who has done as much of it as I did in earlier years?
There’s a reason why no one else goes there. It’s hard work. Taking constant emotional hits is the hardest kind of work there is.
I am proud that I have done as much of that kind of work as I have. I want to do more. I believe that I can do a lot of good by doing more. But I am not inclined to get down on myself for not doing more when I have already done more than anyone else out there. I am not super-human. I am made of flesh and blood like everyone else. I need to push myself as hard as it is reasonable to push myself but no harder. Pushing myself too hard would just make things worse. It would lead to me doing less of this kind of work instead of more.
These are my sincere thoughts re these terribly important matters, in any event.
My best wishes to you.
Rob
Anonymous says
To clarify, it is what YOU think the research says. Others would differ.
Rob says
There’s certainly a difference of opinion. The New York Times article reporting on the awarding of a Nobel prize to Robert Shiller pointed this out. The article noted how strange it was that Shiller and Fama were both being awarded Nobel prizes on the same day despite the fact that he two have completely opposite understandings of how stock investing works and so one of them must be wrong.
I don’t deny the difference of opinion, Anonymous. And I have great respect for the Buy-and-Holders. I believe that they have made huge contributions and that they are smart and good people.
However, I object strongly to some of the tactics that have been employed to keep Buy-and-Hold dominant. Shiller’s research was published 16 years after Fama’s research was published. So Buy-and-Hold was dominant at the time that Shiller published his “revolutionary” (his word) research findings. For Shiller’s model (I call it “Valuation-Informed Indexing”) to become dominant, it has to be explored at every discussion board and blog on the internet.
The published rules of every site permit this. The laws of the United States prohibit the use of abusive tactics to intimidate people from saying what they truly believe re these matters. I say that the publised rules and the laws of the United States should be enforced so that we can begin moving forward as a nation in our understanding of how stock investing truly works.
It is theoretically possible that the debate will show that I got something wrong or even that I got everything wrong. I don’t think that will happen. But if that is what happens from the working of our system, I am good with it. That’s the beauty of our system. That’s why I love my country.
But I do want to see every site opened to honest posting on safe withdrawal rates and on scores of other critically important investment-related topics. I believe that we will see that happen in the days following the next price crash, after you Goons have been placed in prison cells where you belong.
Rob
Anonymous says
“But I do want to see every site opened to honest posting on safe withdrawal rates and on scores of other critically important investment-related topics.”
Right. You just said you’ve made no effort to post to any site in “a long time”, as in years. What are you waiting for? An engraved invitation? Do you want them to beg you to participate? When they beg you, will the fee for your comments be in the millions of dollars?
Rob says
I don’t charge any fees for my comments.
The job of getting the word out about what the last 36 years of peer-reviewed research teaches us all about how stock investing works is a job that every last person in the United States should be participating in. It affects all of our futures, does it not? We all profit if as a nation we enjoy a huge learning experience. So it seems fair to me to expect all of us to be involved in the effort to make good things happen.
So, no, I do not charge a fee. I am 100 percent happy to do what I can re a teaching role without charging a fee. But I do expect the laws of the United States to be followed at every site at which I help out. When one of you Goons posts a death threat, I expect the site administrator to take effective action. Do you think that that is asking too much, Anonymous? I sure don’t. Why have published site rules if you don’t enforce them in a reasonable manner? Why have laws against financial freedom if they are not going to be enforced in a reasonable manner?
It’s the same with demands for unjustified board bannings. And with thousands of acts of defamation. And with threats to get academic researchers fired from their jobs. And with all the other garbage that you Goons have thrown at us over the first 15 years of The Great Debate on Whether Or Not to Permit Debate on the Last 36 Years of Peer-Reviewed Research in This Field.
I have done my part. And then some more on top of that. And then some more on top of that.
I believe that we will as a nation be working up my courage to stand up to you Goons in the days following the next price crash. When those days come, I will be Johnny-on-the-spot. I will be posting at every investing discussion board and blog on the internet. Perhaps at all of them on the same day on some particularly exciting days!
I’ll do my part, Anonymous. I have always done my part. I am in first place and there is no one even in a close second. There are Post Archives.
I seek no engraved invitations. But I do insist on minimal levels of civility. If my good friend Jack Bogle believed that Buy-and-Hold could stand up to informed criticism, he would be insisting on minimal levels of civility right along with me. Gee, I wonder what’s going on there? I wonder why Jack Bogle permits his name to be used at a board that tolerates posting by the sorts of “individuals” who have put up posts in “defense” of Mel Linduaer while Rob Bennett very much does not?
Don’t let the bad guys get you down, Goon friend.
Rob
Anonymous says
“There are Post Archives.”
What does that even mean? Why do you capitalize it? Jeez, you’re a weirdo.
So to summarize, you intend to do something, someday, after other unnamed people do some vaguely undefined stuff. In the meantime, you intend to continue doing exactly what you’ve been doing the last several years: nothing at all.
Rob says
I’m a weirdo who loves his country, Anonymous. Sue me.
I’ll do what I see as the right thing to do at each given moment in time. And we will see in the days following the next price crash how things play out.
None of this was my idea of fun. I didn’t ask you Goons to wage a Campaign of Terror against our board and blog communities. I am some fellow who figured out how to post stuff to the internet who has given the job of picking up the pieces left from your massive act of destruction of both self and millions of others. So I endeavor each day to do my bit.
We’ll see how it plays out, you know? That’s where we are. It’s not a terribly good place. But there’s a mountain of good hidden within it. Our country has a way of taking bad situations and turning them into good ones over time. I have a funny feeling that that might be what we end up doing in this case. But we are just going to have to wait a bit to see if I am on the right track or not.
Weirdos of the World Unite!
You Have Nothing to Lose But Your Campaigns of Terror!
I believe in the system’s ability to heal itself, Anonymous. You could say that the entire Great Experiment that is the United States is weird as all get-out if you wanted to. That’s why I love it so.
You know what’s weird? Freakin’ early retirement is weird.
Sometimes weird is what works.
My sincere take.
Rob
Anonymous says
“I’ll do what I see as the right thing to do at each given moment in time.”
And for every single given moment in recent years, the right thing to do has been: Nothing.
There’s this word, “inertia”. It’s in the dictionary next to your picture.
Rob says
Okay, Anonymous. I’ve done nothing.
I wish you the best of luck with it, in any event.
Take good care, my old friend.
Rob
Anonymous says
If I sat around making posts about what I thought about the last 36 years of research, would you consider that to be a job?
Rob says
I would if there were thousands of people who thanked you because you were the first person they had ever heard talk about investing in a truly sensible way and if a Ph.D. in economics co-authored research with you that showed millions of investors how to dramatically increase their long-term returns while also dramatically diminishing risk and if there were a gang of internet Goons who felt so threatened by what you said that they felt a need to get you banned from every large investing site on the internet.
If you were just talking about Buy-and-Hold, I wouldn’t think of it as a job because you would be just doing something that thousands and thousands had done before you. If you were talking about the first true research-based strategy, a strategy that millions of investors very much needed to learn about but which they couldn’t learn about because of a massive act of financial fraud, then., yes, I would say that you were engaged in the most important work of anyone alive in the United States.
Does all of that not make perfect sense, Goon friend?
Rob
Anonymous says
“I would if there were thousands of people who thanked you because you were the first person they had ever heard talk about investing in a truly sensible way and if a Ph.D. in economics co-authored research with you that showed millions of investors how to dramatically increase their long-term returns while also dramatically diminishing risk and if there were a gang of internet Goons who felt so threatened by what you said that they felt a need to get you banned from every large investing site on the internet.”
If that is the definition, then I don’t see anyone that truthfully fits that description.
Rob says
Okay, Anonymous.
Please take good care.
Rob
Anonymous says
What you do isn’t a job. A job pays money. It’s not an internship, because you don’t learn anything or get any college credit. It’s not a volunteer position – if it was, someone would say “thank you” (a real person, not your”thousands” of imaginary admirers, none of whom seems to have a name or any other sign of their existence.)
No, what you do is best described as killing time. It’s in the same category as drinking beer or picking your nose. Everybody kills some time. You just decided to kill all of it.
Rob says
So you say, Anonymous.
We couldn’t possibly disagree more.
I expect to make hundreds of millions of this. If your definition of a job is “something you do that earns you money,” my job is one of the most important jobs in the United States, perhaps the biggest of all. If you were doing work that seemed highly likely to result in a payoff in the hundreds of millions, would you walk away from it? You wouldn’t. No one would.
Wade Pfau knows a lot more about stock investing than you do. He thought that Valuation-Informed Indexing was the most exciting thing he had ever seen. He told me that he couldn’t sleep at night because he was so excited about what he was finding with his research into Valuation-Informed Indexing. He didn’t say that one time, he said it on numerous occasions.
Robert Shiller was awarded a Nobel prize. Do you think they just hand out Nobel prizes like candy? To win a Nobel prize is a big deal. The people who gave him that prize think that his finding that valuations affect long-term returns is a very, very big deal. I think they are right. I think we should have thousands of people developing these ideas. But it seems like I was elected to do the job. No one else is willing to stand up to you Goons.
We couldn’t possibly disagree more re the importance of this work. But of course you don’t truly believe what you say. If you didn’t see great power in my work, you never would have sought a single board banning. If you didn’t see great power in my work, you wouldn’t be threatened by it. If even you Goons detect great power in my work, who am I to say otherwise?
If someone had done this work many years ago, we wouldn’t be in an economic crisis today. Stock prices are self-regulating so long as all investors are aware of what the last 36 years of peer-reviewed research teaches us about how stock investing works in the real world. There is no more important work that I could be doing. If I were able to live 500 lifetimes, I wouldn’t be able to do work as important to as many people as the work that I have done over the past 15 years.
Now it’s just a question of getting prison sentences announced for you Goons so that the rest of our nation can begin in a practical sense reaping the benefits of the “revolutionary” (Shiller’s word) advance achieved intellectually by Shiller 36 years ago.
My sincere take.
Rob
Anonymous says
“my job is one of the most important jobs in the United States, perhaps the biggest of all.”
So YOU say. The problem (for you) is that I have people who agree with what I say. You don’t.
Rob says
You don’t have anyone who has enough confidence in your position to publicly urge an end to the Campaign of Terror against our board and blog communities. If your position had merit, there would be lots of people arguing that honest posting should be permitted at every discussion board and blog on the internet. I demonstrate enough confidence to be okay with honest posting. But I do not agree with you.
How many Buy-and-Holders do you think there would be today if we had been permitting honest posting at every board and blog for the past 15 years? Would there be any?
What I have supporting me is 36 years of peer-reviewed research. You cannot intimidate the peer-reviewed research into pretending to agree with you. I put more confidence in research, which cannot be intimidated into agreement, than in vulnerable humans, who can be compromised by the sorts of threats that you Goons employ on a daily basis. I’ve got 100 percent of the research on my side, you’ve got zero percent on your side. That should tell you something.
After the crash, people will work up the courage to call you out on your b.s. and you will be sent to prison. Then the problem will be behind us and the number who follow research-based strategies will grow and grow and grow. Strategies that can only be defended through the use of criminally abusive tactics are strategies that are not long for this world, in my assessment.
Rob
Anonymous says
“You don’t have anyone who has enough confidence in your position to publicly urge an end to the Campaign of Terror against our board and blog communities.”
There is no campaign of terror. It is just something you made up.
Rob says
Okay, Anonymous.
Rob
Anonymous says
“my job is one of the most important jobs in the United States, perhaps the biggest of all.”
Does anyone else, including your wife, agree with that statement?
Rob says
Wade Pfau certainly agreed. He told me that he couldn’t sleep at night when he realized that Valuation-Informed Indexing completely checks out.
John Walter Russell certainly agreed. Again, he spent a lot of time studying the numbers. The more time you spend working the numbers, the more you see how important this is.
There was a fellow who was a huge skeptic at first but who agreed to read all the materials at the site in exchange for my promise that he could report his conclusions here at the site who ended up agreeing. This fellow called me several times and we talked this stuff over for hours. He wanted to get venture capitalists involved. He saw this as something that would help resolve the state pension crisis.
Those are three who studied the matter in great depth and then agreed. There were thousands of others who were sufficiently convinced that they expressed a desire that honest posting be permitted. Those people wouldn’t say today that this is the most important job in the United States. But I bet that they will say it in the days following the next price crash.
The members of the committee that awarded Shiller a Nobel prize must believe it. It’s a big deal to give someone a Nobel prize. They wouldn’t have done that if they didn’t believe that his findings were a very big deal.
Most people have not thought it through enough to see that it is the most important job in the United States. We need to lift the Ban on Honest Posting so that they can explore all the angles. Then they will come to that conclusion. I wouldn’t have said that it is the most important job in the United States on the morning of May 13, 2002. Because I obviously had not explored all the angles myself at that time. But I have now. And so I see it now and I say it now. The deeper you get into this, the better it looks.
Given what I know today, it would be financial fraud for me to say that I believe that Greaney’s study contains a valuations adjustment. I know today that thousands of people have looked at his study and not one of them has found a valuations adjustment. So I don’t have any choice but to post honestly re these matters at this point in the proceedings. Even if this were not the most important job in the United States, I would be compelled to insist on my right to post honestly,
But I do sincerely believe that it is the most important job. And, as noted above, lots of smart people agree with me. And that number is going to skyrocket in the days following the next price crash. I am highly confident that even some of you Goons will agree with me in the days following the crash. So we are just going to have to wait to see how it plays out, you know?
YOU agree with me, Anonymous. You won’t publicly say so. But, if you did not think this matter was of huge importance, you would not have spent 15 years of your life trying to keep the word from getting out. Your own behavior tells the tale here. This is a matter of huge import. There is no more important job in the United States today than the job of opening every investing site to honest posting on the last 36 years of peer-reviewed research in this field.
Try calculating the dollar amount of the losses we will suffer as a society when we experience a 50 percent price drop. We are talking many trillions of dollars. We are talking about living through a social catastrophe the likes of which we have never experienced before when we see millions of failed retirements. Much of the political frictions we see today have their roots in the economic crisis of 2008. The next crash will be worse than that because the new losses will be coming on top of the old losses and of course they will remain in place much, much longer.
The work that I am doing is truly important work.
In MY assessment. That’s obviously all that I can advance here.
But that is my sincere take. (In fairness, however, I don’t believe that my wife feels nearly as strongly re the importance of the work as I do. I don’t believe that she would say that this is the most important work being done in the United States.)
Rob
Rob says
I am going to add a little bit to that response.
The click experiences come at different times for different people. I have had more click experiences because I have been working it so hard and for so long. It’s not reasonable to expect everyone who was exposed to the discussion to have had the same number of click experiences. If the discussions continued, more and more would have those click experiences over time. But it takes a good bit of time for some insights to hit and different sorts of insights hit at different times for different people.
This is why it is so critical that fully honest posting be permitted at every site. I didn’t know Wade Pfau when this started. So, if I had not soldiered on through a good number of years of abuse before meeting him, I would have missed out on all of his insights. And so would the rest of the world because Wade never would have looked into these questions if he hadn’t learned about my work at the Bogleheads Forum.
Learning new things is a process of discovery. And you just never know what sort of person is going to say things in just the right way to cause a click experience for you. Say that Wade had been awarded a Nobel prize for the research that he co-authored with me a number of years back. Other academic researchers would have noticed that and that would have caused them to develop an interest in exploring new angles of the Valuation-Informed Indexing concept. So today we would all be benefiting not only from Shiller’s insights and from my insights and from Wade’s insights but also from the insights of these other academic researchers who we cannot even name today because we elected to shut down honest posting all across the internet.
There is HUGE leverage in opening every site to honest posting. The thing grows and grows and grows as more people get involved trying to further develop the concept. That’s a big part of what makes my work so important. It is not just that I will be able to spread the word re the hundreds of powerful insights that I have developed over the past 15 years. It is that we will be getting hundreds and hundreds of other smart people involved and those people too will be generating hundreds of powerful insights and thereby helping us all out.
Your abusive posting is like a dam that has been holding up the flood of knowledge of how stock investing works for 15 years now. I am trying to knock a hole in that damn. Once we knock a hole in the dame, we are going to see all kinds of wonderful stuff that we cannot even imagine today. Life is just going to keep getting better and better and better for all of us for many years into the future.
This is our system. This is how freedom works for all of us. This is what the United States is all about — progress for all through the exercise of freedom. This is why I love my country.
Deep in your hearts, I feel confident that you Goons have some affinity for the freedom concept and the progress concept and the research concept although you of course will vehemently deny that this is the case in the safe-withdrawal-rate realm. I believe that you will change your tune following the crash, when the appeal of the pure Get Rich Quick approach will quickly evaporate into thin air.
Rob
Anonymous says
“In fairness, however, I don’t believe that my wife feels nearly as strongly re the importance of the work as I do. I don’t believe that she would say that this is the most important work being done in the United States.”
I’m sure you’re right. Very few people are that nuts. But what’s this you “don’t believe”? Haven’t you asked her? This is your wife. How can you not know exactly how she feels about your life’s “work”? What kind of marriage is this?
Anonymous says
Please provide a link to where any of these people say that what you are doing is a job and that it is also one of the most important jobs in the United States.
Rob says
I’m sure you’re right. Very few people are that nuts. But what’s this you “don’t believe”? Haven’t you asked her? This is your wife. How can you not know exactly how she feels about your life’s “work”? What kind of marriage is this?
She has said: “I am certain that you have done work of great importance.” She has offered quotes of that nature on numerous occasions.
If I were to go solely by that quote, I would say “my wife agrees that the work I am doing is the most important work being done in the United States, or at least something close to it.”
I don’t think that quite hits the mark, however. She is sincere in what she says in the quote, I have no doubt about that. But I also believe that there is something missing in her understanding of what my contribution has been. I believe that, if I were to ask her to describe the contribution, she would not describe it in the same way that I would describe it. Her understanding of the nature of the contribution is not fully formed. So I don’t believe that she truly appreciates the importance of the work.
If she took a lie detector test and was asked whether she thought my work was important, she would say “yes” and would pass the test. But if she was asked whether my work is the most important work being done in the United States today, she would either say “no” and pass the test or say “yes” and fail the test.
That’s my sincere assessment of her views, in any event.
Rob
Rob says
Please provide a link to where any of these people say that what you are doing is a job and that it is also one of the most important jobs in the United States.
The entire site is the link that you are asking for, Anonymous. Start reading somewhere and then just go where your fancy takes you. In time things will click for you.
This process won’t work if you have a Goon brain (which of course you do). Goons have an emotional attachment to Get Rich Quick. They view the peer-reviewed research of the past 36 years as their enemy. There is no link that could ever change that.
Reasonable people can learn all that they need to know by following the process outlined above. It’s all there many times over for anyone with an open non-Get-Rich-Quick-polluted brain.
My best wishes to you.
Rob
Anonymous says
Your talking about her like she just another anonymous commenter. Haven’t you ever sat her down, looked right in her eyes, and asked her to say EXACTLY how she feels about how you’ve spent the last 15 years?
Obviously the answer is No, which is truly sad.
Rob says
If we lived in heaven instead of Planet Earth, all of us would understand everything perfectly and there would never be any misunderstandings or miscommunications. That would be great.
In the world we live in, people understand various things to different degrees, depending on the life experiences that inform their understandings of the world around them. You Goon have had different life experiences than I have had. So your understanding of the past 36 years of peer-reviewed research in this field is greatly limited.
My wife possesses a better understanding of the realities of stock investing than you Goons. But I don’t think her understanding is deep enough for her to fully appreciate the importance of the work that I have done. She gets that it is work of great importance. But I do not believe that she appreciates it enough to sincerely say that she views it as the most important work being done in the United States today.
We have had talks about it. I would like her understanding to be deeper. But the reality here is that many people have a mental block re this stuff. There is something that people find highly counter-intuitive about the idea that stock returns are predictable in the long-term but not in the short term. My wife is like lots of other people in that respect. I felt that in fairness I should say that since that was part of your question.
I hope that helps a small bit, old friend.
Rob
Rob says
The moral here is that none of us can learn what we need to learn from a single discussion, even an honest one. We need to be immersed in honest discussions, with lots of people coming at the various issues from lots of different perspectives, and those discussions need to continue for a long time. Eventually, things start to click for us. From that point forward, our understandings gradually grows deeper and deeper and deeper.
My understanding is much deeper than anyone else’s (including Shiller’s). Not because I am smarter than other people. My understanding is deeper because I have been working this harder and longer than anyone else and thus I have naturally had many more click experiences and have been able to build on them to a greater extent than anyone else.
We humans learn by talking things over with other humans. I believe strongly that we need to give ourselves permission to talk over the implications of the last 36 years of peer-reviewed research. I am 100 percent confident that not one of us will ever look back in regret once we take that fateful step of opening every discussion board and blog on the internet to honest posting re safe withdrawal rates and scores of other critically important investment-related topics.
My best wishes.
Rob
Anonymous says
So you’re saying the only issue is that she doesn’t understand and appreciate you enough.
Frankly you sound like a incredibly insensitive and selfish husband. Which I’m sure you’ve heard before, and will hear again. And it will continue to bother you not one bit. Because insensitive and selfish people can’t be bothered by such things.
Rob says
Makes sense!
Take care, man.
Rob