” I Would Prefer By a Factor of Ten to Let Too Much Goon Stuff in to Taking Too Much Pro-Buy-and-Hold Stuff Out.”

Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently posted to the discussion thread for another blog entry at this site:

You isolated yourself. You refuse to post at Bogleheads or anywhere else. And now your Value Walk columns no longer accept comments. Was that your doing? How long before you shut off comments here too?

I haven’t done anything to stop comments at the Value Walk site. I had a good back-and-forth discussion with a non-Goon last week. It wasn’t re the most recent column; it was one from a few weeks back. But he put his comments up a few days ago and I responded to them a few days ago. It sounds to me like the site administrator may be taking down Goon comments. But I don’t know that for sure.

My policy with comments here is that I am looking for material that people with an interest in the subject of stock investing can learn from. If one of you Goons puts up a death threat, I would probably leave it up the first time so that people can see what those of us trying to open the internet up to honest posting re the past 36 years of peer-reviewed research in this field are up against. It is possible that I would let a second death threat remain up just to show that the first one wasn’t a quirk. But I wouldn’t permit 10 deaths in a row appear at the site. That stuff takes us down. It is a negative. It has no place at a site about financial freedom.

There is stuff that you Goons have posted that have helped us. While you are Goons, you really are human investors too. So you have questions about the last 36 years of peer-reviewed research that Normals have as well. I think it is helpful for me to respond to those questions to the best of my ability. And sometimes you offer links to articles making the case for Buy-and-Hold that are helpful. I am always grateful when you bring those sorts of things to our attention. So I obviously leave that stuff up. There have been numerous occasions where something that one of you Goons said in a post or something I saw at a link that one of you Goons posted led to a column. So there is value there.

The judgment call is of course what to do when you mix in some words of value with a heavy dose of Goon garbage, which is most of the time. My rule is that, if a post is 90 percent Goon garbage and only 10 percent material of value, I will delete it; the stench of the garbage is so overpowering as to render the good stuff not useful — people cannot learn from the good stuff if they cannot breathe because the smell is so bad. If there is more than 20 percent stuff of value and only 80 percent Goon garbage, I vote for letting the post appear and focusing on the good stuff in response while pointing out that the heavy dose of garbage shows how emotional a strategy Buy-and-Hold is. In cases where the Goon garbage is more than 80 percent of a post but less than 90 percent of it, I look to whether the useful points being made are something fresh or points that have been many times before. If it is old, tired stuff, I delete the post. If fresh Buy-and-Hold material, I would vote for swallowing a lot of Goon garbage to be able to get that fresh material out to people.

Over time, you have less fresh material. So the percentage of comments being deleted should increase. I think that is generally the case. The curve ball is that, as you see more posts getting deleted, you might make more of an effort to get the percentage of useful material up a bit, so the deletion percentage might drop rather than rise. That happens from time to time. Overall, though, I would say that it is harder for you Goons to get a post to appear here today than it was a few years ago. And over time I expect that it will get harder still. But I will of course always be open to material that adds to the discussion rather than subtracts from it. And, if I am going to make mistakes, I would prefer by a factor of ten to let too much Goon stuff in to taking too much pro-Buy-and-Hold stuff out.

As for Bogleheads and other places that have permitted the use of criminally abusive posting tactics as a means of keeping the 15-year cover-up of the errors in the Buy-and-Hold retirement studies from becoming known to millions of middle-class investors, it is the entire United States that has adopted laws against financial fraud. I am a citizen of this country and I love this country. When I see acts of financial fraud take place before my eyes, I am required to point them out and to ask that they be brought to a full and complete stop. If I fail to point them out, I become part of the cover-up and I take the risk of being sent to prison myself in the days following the next price crash. No thanks, you know? I am 100 percent happy to help out at Bogleheads in any way that I can so long as it does not require me participating in any criminal acts. I am not going to say that I believe that John Greaney included a valuations adjustment in the retirement “study” he posted at his web site. I am not going to deny that there is 36 years of peer-reviewed research showing that valuations affect long-term returns.

Does that help?

Rob the Balanced Site Administrator