Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently posted to the discussion thread for another blog entry at this site:
Rob,
If these “goons” never existed, how do you think your life would have been different, other than the loss of mild entertainment?
That’s like asking an oncologist how his life would have been different if cancer had never existed. In one sense, it would have been better. The oncologist devotes his human energies to defeating cancer, just as I devote my human energies to defeating the Get Rich Quick urge that animates the Buy-and-Hold strategy. So there is a sense in which the oncologist sees cancer as the enemy. But he doesn’t avoid cancer in the way that he might avoid some other enemies. He goes looking for people who have cancer to see if he can help them. He reads all that he can about new developments in the treatment of cancer. He wants to know everything about cancer so that he can do a better job eradicating it (because he loves people and cancer hurts people). So do I want to know everything about goonishness/Get Rich Quick/Buy-and-Hold thinking because I want to eradicate it (because goonishness/Get Rich Quick/Buy-and-Hold thinking hurts people and I love people).
Does that help at all? I like you Goons as people, Anonymous. For all sorts of reasons. Because I learn from you, for one. But I believe strongly that, if you were thinking clearly, you would work hard to rein in your Goon inclinations. Because those Goon inclinations hurt you in very, very serious ways. You need to know how stock investing works. We all do. But you have made a decision never to listen to the 10 percent of the population that believes that Shiller’s research is legitimate research because those people say things that make you feel uncomfortable. I don’t apologize for making you feel uncomfortable. I think that there are circumstances in which we must live through a measure of discomfort to get to a better place and to experience lots of exciting, wonderful stuff. The words that I direct at you are aimed at helping you to find your way to that place or at helping others find their way to that place in the event that you elect not to go there and others elect to visit this site in the hopes of learning what they need to learn to find their way to that better place.
Does that help at all? I don’t like goonishness. But I appreciate that goonishness often resides within good and smart people who would disdain their own goonishness if they were able to see it. I cannot force anyone to see their own goonishness. But I can point it out to them and to others. And if they or the others reach a point where they are interested in seeing how the goonishness is a negative, they can benefit from seeing how it all works.
Goonishness/Get Rich Quick/Buy-and-Hold is bad. That’s my sincere take. I was once a Buy-and-Holder myself. That was because Buy-and-Hold was promoted as a research-based strategy and that’s what I was looking for. I think that Get Rich Quick emotions can hurt investors and I like the idea of teaching people what the research shows so that they can rein in those emotions. On the evening of August 27, 2002, when Greaney advanced his first death threat and 200 of my fellow community members endorsed the post containing it, I lost confidence in Buy-and-Hold. I cannot endorse a strategy that prompts people to go down that dark path.
Get Rich Quick investing is my cancer. I love the people who follow Buy-and-Hold strategies. I devote my human energies to showing them that that is a mistake. I love the people, I don’t love the cancer. My job is to remove the cancer, my job is to defeat the cancer.
If we lived in a world in which there was no Get Rich Quick/Buy-and-Hold urge, I would need to find something else to do with my time, just as an oncologist who was moved to a world in which there was no cancer would need to find something else to do with his time. I see no signs that Get Rich Quick investing strategies are going to disappear from our world anytime soon. So I intend to just keep doing what I can to help people overcome the Buy-and-Hold stuff. If I could wave a magic wand in the air and make the Get Rich Quick urge go away, I would do it. But I obviously don’t possess those sorts if powers. So I do what I do instead.
I hope that helps a small bit. I wish you all good things.
Cancer-Fighting Rob
More to the question, how would life be different? What would you be doing? Would you be like Shiller and be getting a Novel prize and /or in the media? Would you be managing portfolios and writing books like Berstein? Would you be at an investment firm and be a noted academic like Pfau?
I certainly wouldn’t be getting any Nobel prizes or managing any portfolios. I certainly wouldn’t be at an investment firm or in an academic setting. Zero chance re any of those.
The most likely scenario is that, if Greaney had never gone into freak-out mode, I would still be writing about effective saving strategies and I would be playing a role similar to the one that Mr. Money Mustache plays today. I would be helping to spread the word about how those who save effectively can retire early from the corporate world and do new and exciting things with their lives. That’s certainly the path that I was on when I ventured forth with that famous post of the morning of May 13, 2002.
I would be popular!
Imagine that!
It’s funny how things go, is it not?
Is that what you were trying to ask?
Passion Saver Rob
Why do you say your post in 2002 is famous, when it really isn’t? Does it have to do with your comment about wanting to be popular?
There’s never in the history of the internet been another post that generated so many responses, Anonymous. Reaction to that post dominated discussion at the Retire Early board for over a year and then dominated discussion at several other board communities for several years later. That post ultimately caused the death of the Retire Early board. It was a thriving community before the Greaney freak-out. Now there is no longer any discussion of early retirement there. The Bennett/Pfau research paper, which I think can fairly be described as the most important research published in this field in the past 30 years, would not exist if I had not first worked up the courage to advance that post. That post started it all. You Goons wouldn’t be going to prison if I hadn’t put forward that post. It was the message in that post that you felt you had to block that caused you to engage in all the intimidation tactics.
It was a simple post. It just asked a question: Should we be counting valuations when we calculate the safe withdrawal rate? The problem is that the obvious answer to the question is “yes” (why the heck wouldn’t we?) and yet the Buy-and-Hold answer is “no” (none of the Buy-and-Hold retirement studies contain valuation adjustments). So, if the question is permitted, Buy-and-Hold goes down. And bringing Buy-and-Hold down would be the biggest advance in the history of personal finance. It is because we cannot question Buy-and-Hold that we have not been able to advance in our understanding of how stock investing works for 37 years now. Bring Buy-and-Hold down and you open up an enormous learning experience for millions. That post and the reaction it provoked is eventually going to be the cause of every discussion board and blog on the internet being opened to honest posting on safe withdrawal rates and scores of other critically important investment-related topics. It would be pretty darn hard to top that.
You would never have written a single post here if you didn’t see the importance of that May 13, 2002, post, Anonymous. You’ve never gotten over it. It drives you to this day. You believe in Buy-and-Hold and it is an important part of your life. But that post implicitly questions Buy-and-Hold and there is no intelligent answer to the question that it poses but to abandon Buy-and-Hold (at least the dogmatic version of it that was responsible for the error in the Buy-and-Hold retirement studies).
So, yes, the post was a super, super big deal. It took me three years to work up the courage to write it. That’s why. I held back because I sensed the power that I was unleashing. Advancing that post was my finest moment. It is my job to create learning experiences like that and I went far beyond anything that I thought I was capable of achieving with that one. It was such a big wave that I created that instead of just enjoying a fun ride, I was knocked to the ocean floor and spun around head to toe about 500 times. So there’s been a scary side to the aftermath of that post, I am not saying different. I of course have not collected the $500 million yet. And we haven’t opened the internet to honest posting yet. And we haven’t gotten the textbooks rewritten and all that sort of thing. So we have not yet seen with our eyes the full impact of that amazing post.
But we have seen the beginnings. We have seen hundreds and hundreds of thousands of reaction posts. Those of us who are capable of thinking clearly about these matters can see where things are headed.
The answer to the post is that, yes, we should have been taking valuations into consideration all along. We destroyed millions of lives by failing to do so. And human psychology is such that we have been able to rationalize doing that for so long as prices remain high. That’s the story. Humans are capable of rationality. But we are also the rationalIZING animal. For so long as prices remain high, we will continue to rationalize and hurt ourselves and others. But we will accept what our rational minds tell us re these matters when prices drop and we are in a corner with no choice but to move forward in our thinking. And the reactions that we have seen from that post will tell us what we need to know. We have the negative reactions that reveal our human weaknesses. And we have the thousands of positive responses to the post that show us what we can do when we permit rationality to exist in our discussions of how stock investing works.
If it is true that the Buy-and-Hold retirement studies lack valuation adjustments, then Buy-and-old is dangerous. Every person alive in the United States today is affected deeply by that reality.
If there really are valuation adjustment in those studies, then I was wrong in what I said in that post. But that of course is not the case. You Goons would not have responded in the way you did if you truly believed that the Greaney study contained a valuation adjustment.
The story is still being told. That’s why we are still here. In the end we are going to determine as a society whether the study contained a valuation adjustment or not and move on with a much stronger understanding of how stock investing works than we ever possessed before. We are not there yet. But we are close. We are getting closer every day. And the post of May 13, 2002, generated a mountain of material that we can use to understand how we got off the right track and caused all this human misery.
I don’t say that I knew when I hit the “Submit” button. I didn’t. I knew that the post was important. I knew that it was going to create a stir. But I didn’t anticipate 1/500th of what we have seen. I was only slightly less in the dark than everyone else. I was still a Buy-and-Holder myself on the morning of May 13, 2002. I kick myself for it today. I don’t see why I hadn’t put the pieces together. If the retirement studies were so off, the entire model was suspect. But I didn’t see that then. It takes time for the human mind to let all these things in.
As a society we are still working through the process of letting it all in. But the post pointed us to the future. Not one Buy-and-Holder has been able to answer the question posed in that post honestly and effectively in 16 years. Should we be taking valuations into consideration when calculating the safe withdrawal rate? OF COURSE we should. And yet we still do not. Every abusive post that you Goons have advanced has been an effort to see that that remains the reality. And that’s a doomed effort. All of the board bannings in the world cannot change the reality bought to light by that post. If the Buy-and-Hold retirement studies do not contain valuation adjustments, they are in error and they have hurt millions of people in very, very serious ways. There is no more important public policy issue before us today than the need for us all to pull together and fix that.
I’m working on it! I’m working on it!
Whew!
No apologies for the post. That’s what I aim to do with all of them. It was not my intent to hurt anyone’s feelings. My intent was to help. If I had gotten a number wrong in a study, I would want one of my friends to point it out. So I did for my friends what I would have wanted them to have done for me. I think you Goons will see that one day. Not today, I know. But I believe that there will come a time when you will be able to get your heads around it. And we will all go out for a nice cold one and laugh about the crazy things that went down in the old days.
The post sure has not made me popular. I don’t think there has ever in the history of the internet been a post that caused a person to lose so many popularity points. In the long run, I believe that that will change. But I guess we are just going to have to wait to see. I could be wrong. It’s been known to happen.
My best wishes.
Unpopular (For Now!) Rob
“There’s never in the history of the internet been another post that generated so many responses, Anonymous”
Wrong again. I see longer threads than that every day. You think way to much of yourself.
It’s been 16 years and you are still here talking about it, Anonymous. That’s a long, long, long, long discussion thread. There’s never in the history of the internet been anything like it. There’s never in the history of the internet been anything that came even remotely close.
It’s not that I think too much of myself. I am proud that I eventually worked up the courage to advance the May 13, 2002, post, that much is certainly fair to say. But I possessed little understanding at the time that I put forward the post of just how big it was. This thing is a lot bigger than some guy whose only claim to expertise in this field is that he figured out how to push buttons so that his words would show up on the internet.
This is a turning point in U.S. history. Our stock market is a key element of our economic system. Millions of us invest our life savings in the stock market so that we will be able to retire someday. So getting stock investing right is a big deal, it’s very, very, very, very important stuff. The Buy-and-Holders got lots of stuff right. So they are super. But they got one very important thing wrong. The market is not efficient, valuations affect long-term returns, investors are not 100 percent rational but instead are highly emotional, risk is not constant but variable, the safe withdrawal rate is not always 4 percent but is a number that varies from 1.6 percent to 9 percent depending on the valuation level that applies on the day the retirement begins, exercising price discipline (long-term timing) is not unnecessary or a bad idea but 100 percent required for all investors — it is the key to long-term success.
The thing that I think a lot of is the United States of America. I love my country. If Shiller is right, the continued promotion of Buy-and-Hold strategies will sometime in the next few years bring on another economic crisis, one that could be worse than what we saw in 2008. I love my country and I care about the millions of people who live in it and who need access to honest, informed, accurate, research-based investment advice. I am proud that I have been able to make some efforts to help them all out and it is my intent to continue to do what I am able to do. I believe that we are going to see a much higher level of responsiveness from just about everyone involved (including my good friend Jack Bogle and even you Goons) in the days following the next price crash, when the flaws in the Buy-and-Hold Model won’t be something we will be seeing just in 37 years of peer-reviewed research but also in daily newspaper reports telling the story of millions of unnecessarily ruined lives.
I love my country, Anonymous. That’s the bottom line here. That’s always been the bottom line here. You know what? Jack Bogle loves his country too. He may be in a bit of a fog today because of the workings of cognitive dissonance on his ability to think clearly re these matters. But the man has shown me with a mountain of good works that he loves his country. That is going to come out in the days following the next price crash. I am 100 percent sure.
If I were self-absorbed, I would have dropped this stuff the first time that Greaney threatened to get me banned from the Retire Early board for posting honestly re safe withdrawal rates. I ignored his intimidation tactics because I love my country too much to keep quiet about this stuff even though it has hurt me personally in a very big way to speak up. I am country-absorbed, not self-absorbed.
But we’ll see, you know? I have gotten things wrong in the past. If it were happening again, I would probably be the last to know. Yes?
I do wish you the best of luck in all your future life endeavors, my dear Goon friend.
Country-Absorbed (NOT Self-Absorbed) Rob
“It’s been 16 years and you are still here talking about it, Anonymous. “
No, it is YOU talking about and everyone else tells you to move on.
LOTS of people have told me to move on, I’ll give you that one. But it is certainly not everyone who has told me to move on. I have had thousands of people tell me that my investing stuff is the most exciting investing stuff that they have ever read, that I am the first person who they have found who talks about stock investing in a way that makes sense to them. Those people matter. I will continue to do what I can to open up the entire internet to honest posting re these matters so that those people can gain access to the information they need to live better and fuller and richer (in every sense of the word) lives.
In any event, YOU are talking about the May 13, 2002, post this morning. You could be doing something else and you have elected to do that. You haven’t moved on yourself.
That’s the story here. When you Goons move on, the rest of us will be able to have the discussions that we have been trying to have for 16 years now. But you Goons have not been able to move on. I wonder why.
It hurts too much to say the words “I Was Wrong” or even the words “I’m Not Sure.” That’s why.
How do we as a nation solve that problem if everyone who sees the flaws in the Buy-and-Hold Model keeps quiet about what he sees? Moving on doesn’t get the job done. We need to dig in and take this in a positive direction, in a direction permitted by the laws of our country and encouraged by the social norms of our country that apply today in every field of human endeavor except in the investing advice field.
When someone discovers that he has made a mistake in a retirement planning study, he needs to fix that mistake, Anonymous. There is no other way. It is not the people who pointed out the mistake who need to move on. It is the discredited way of setting up such studies that needs to move on. In an ideal world, those studies would have been corrected in 1981, when we learned that valuations affect long-term returns. The crazy thing, of course, is that those studies did not even exist in 1981. They were published AFTER the peer-reviewed research was published showing that they are in error. Humans! Cognitive dissonance! You know?
I love you Goons. I wish you all the best. But I don’t do financial fraud. It doesn’t happen. It’s a non-starter.
Our country is going to find a way to get those studies corrected. It has to happen. So it will happen. Sooner or later. A lot later than I would have liked, obviously. But so long as it remains the case that the studies are in error (and not one person in 16 years has been able to identify a valuation adjustment in the Greaney study), it remains the case that they need to be corrected. We cannot as a nation of people move on from that reality. It hurts us all in too serious a way. Safe withdrawal rates matter. We wouldn’t have spent every day discussing them back at the old Retire Early board if they didn’t matter.
In every post that you direct to these matters, you are still talking about the famous post of May 13, 2002, Anonymous. You are trying to pretend that you have moved on. But it’s a transparent fiction. If you moved on, there would be no further death threats or demands for unjustified board bannings or thousands of acts of defamation or threats to get academic researchers fired from their jobs. When you really move on, things will be Normalized at every discussion board and blog on the internet. When you really move on, we will not only be permitting honest posting, we will be encouraging it, When you really move on, you will not be angry anymore. When you really move on, we will be friends.
I mean, come on.
I haven’t moved on because I love my country. You haven’t moved on because you cannot bear to say the words “I” and “Was” and “Wrong.” You pretend that you have moved on to make yourself feel better about what you have done but the studies are still out there destroying more lives with every day that passes and they are not corrected. The studies have not moved on. Buy-and-Hold has not moved on. The Ban on Honest Posting has not moved on. That’s what matters.
That’s my sincere take re these terribly important matters, in any event.
I wish you all good things.
Slow Moving Rob
“I have had thousands of people tell me that my investing stuff is the most exciting investing stuff that they have ever read,”
Really? Where are these thousands now? If what you said was so famous, important and exciting, these people would be here on your board commenting.
We should be discussing what the last 37 years of peer-reviewed research teaches us about stock investing at every discussion board and blog on the internet, Anonymous. I certainly do not say different. It pains me that we are not doing that today. It pains me a LOT.
I’ve made the comparison to our civil rights struggles before, right? When those struggles were in their early days and Martin Luther King was saying that people with black skin should be able to drink from the same water fountains as people with white skin, was every person who thought he made sense speaking up about the matter? Things would have gone a lot easier if every person who was persuaded spoke up. But they didn’t speak up. Have you ever wondered why?
They didn’t speak up because the change that was being contemplated was a huge change. It was a revolution. Going from the place where we were to the place where we needed to be meant tearing up an entire society. That scared people. So people hung back for a long time. We had to make the move forward. So eventually we went through all the turmoil and got to the other side. But it took some time for us as a people to work up the courage to speak up and brings those changes on. That’s how revolutions work. That’s the nature of the beast. Even the most positive of revolutions are scary things.
You have no doubt noticed how I praise John Bogle to the skies. I say that he is a hero or mine. I say that he is the second most important person in the field (I rank Shiller first). I say that he changed the world in dozens of very important and positive ways. Why do I do that? Partly, just because it’s true. It’s a good thing to tell the truth. But also because I want this revolution to go down as easy as possible, I don’t want my Buy-and-Hold friends to feel threatened. I want them to overcome their defensiveness, focus on all the good that we could be achieving together and get with the revolutionary program.
Revolutions are scary things. The Shiller Revolution is a 100 percent positive. It’s good stuff piled on top of good stuff piled on top of good stuff. But it is not perceived as a 100 percent positive by a lot of the people affected by it. People who have written books rooted in the Buy-and-Hold Model are going to need to rewrite those books. Their first reaction to hearing about the revolution is to block it because it seems like it is going to cause a lot of trouble for them. Some people will be getting sued. Some people will be going to prison. Some people will see their reputations damaged. Some people will see their expertise questioned. There are lots of powerful and wealthy and well-connected people who would like to see this revolution die in the crib. That’s what we’re up against.
You are talking mostly about Normals. The Normals don’t have as much at risk as the people who earn their livings working in this field. But the Normals are deferential to the Experts. They are not inclined to trust some guy whose only claim to expertise in the field is that he figured out how to get his words posted to the internet. So I need endorsements from experts to persuade the normals that I am the real thing. I’ve gotten those, lots of them. But of course you Goons don’t want the normals to trust me and so you intimidate the experts who endorse my stuff and thereby keep me from catching on with the normals.
You’ve gone so far as to engage in criminal behavior in your efforts to hold me back. That’s not a sign of confidence, that’s a sign of desperation. If you thought that you could persuade people that the Buy-and-Hold retirement studies were accurate without engaging in criminal behavior, you would take it that way. But you know as well as I do that there is no way to pull it off. You’ve got 37 years of peer-reviewed research showing that Buy-and-Hold is rooted in the biggest mistake ever made in the history of economics (the idea that the stock market is efficient).
We need a story on the front page of the New York Times reporting on all of the financial fraud stuff. When we have that, everyone who works in the field will be abandoning Buy-and-Hold and the normals will be flocking to my site to learn the realities. I didn’t cause this weird situation. It is the 37-year cover-up that did that. The proper way to go would have been for Bogle just to have acknowledged his mistake when it was uncovered by Shiller in 1981. If that had happened, we all would be friends today. There would be no problem.
People don’t like to see the death threats and the demands for unjustified board bannings and the thousands of acts of defamation and the threats to get academic researchers fired from their jobs. When that stuff goes away, I will have the biggest personal finance site on the internet, no problem. But that stuff has to go away for me to get to first base. It should be easy to make it go away since much of it runs afoul of the laws of the United States. But you Goons have friends in high places. Most site owners are Buy-and-Holders. So most site owners are sympathetic to your cause. So we have a mess on our hands.
We overcame the civil rights mess, right? It was hard. But we made important strides once we put our minds to it, once we saw that we had no choice.
It will go the same way with this Buy-and-Hold mess. After the crash, we will be able to get a story published on the front page of the New York Times. And then the thing will just spread and spread. Bury all the criminally abusive garbage 30 feet in the ground, and we just don’t have a problem. We all are in the same boat. We all want to know how to invest effectively. We just need to figure out how to get from Point A, where we are stuck today, to Point B, where we all deep in our hearts want to be tomorrow.
My job is to steer us to that better place. I love my Buy-and-Hold friends and my Wall Street Con Man friends and yes, even my Goon friends. But I also love the millions of middle-class investors who are trying to make use of the internet to learn about safe withdrawal rates and scores of other critically important investment-related topics. I think that the next price crash will open up some big opportunities for forward progress. But we will just have to wait a bit to find out for sure.
Viva la Revolution!
My best to you and yours.
Revolutionary Rob
You didn’t really answer the question. Where are these thousands and why are they not commenting here on this board?
I did answer it.
Why didn’t every person in the United States speak out in support of Martin Luther King when he said that people with black skin should be permitted to drink from the same water fountains as people with white skin?
All of the people who agree with me want to be able to comment here at this site or elsewhere without seeing death threats and demands for unjustified board bannings and thousands of acts of defamation and threats to get academic researchers fired from their jobs appear before their eyes. They are not used to seeing that sort of thing. We are talking about criminal behavior. It’s scary to them. We need to rein that stuff in if we want all of those great people to participate in our discussions.
Drop all the Goon stuff and I guaranty that you will see lots and lots of participation. Look at what happened at every board at which I participated. We always saw hundreds and hundreds of people saying that my stuff sparked the most exciting investing discussions that they had ever seen. Then we saw the criminally abusive stuff and those people got quiet. People don’t like that stuff. They hate it. We need to rein it in if we want to have good discussions. There is no other way.
The majority are Buy-and-Holders, to be sure. The Valuation-Informed Indexers are 10 percent of the population. But we could easily get that 10 percent up to 20 percent if we didn’t have the criminally abusive stuff. And then we could get the 20 percent up to 40 percent. It sure won’t happen if the Valuation-Informed Indexers continue to censor themselves and walk away. We all need to insist on our right to post honestly. And then all the magic of our wonderful system takes place. Our laws against financial fraud are good and necessary laws.
My sincere take.
Financial Fraud Critic Rob
“I did answer it.”
No, you still have not directly answered it.
I did the best that I could, Anonymous.
It amazes me that I do not have lots of people posting here every day. If you want me to say that, I am happy to say it.
The reality is that the only non-Goon who posts here is Max. You asked why and I think it is a fair question and so I tried to offer an explanation.
Sometimes I think we are living under a spell. Like Arnott has said, this stuff is a matter of “simple math.” But most people truly do not get it. It’s not just you Goons. You Goons advance the abusive stuff, which obviously hurts. But most people are not Goons. And if most people spoke up when you got abusive, you couldn’t get away with it. So I need to try to understand why most do not speak up. That’s a big part of the story.
A simple but dumb explanation is that we are under a spell. A slightly more sophisticated explanation is that people cannot bear to think that they need to divide the amount on their portfolio statement by two to identify the true value of their life savings. I think that’s a big deal. People close their minds to things that they do not want to hear. That’s cognitive dissonance. It’s a real phenomenon. It sounds crazy, It’s completely illogical. But the psychology literature shows that it is a real thing.
An even more sophisticated explanation is that people do not like to be outside of the social mainstream. We are social animals. We don’t like to be perceived as weirdos. If people saw others participating here and saying positive things about Valuation-Informed Indexing, the would do it too. So it is a chicken-and-egg thing. People don’t come here because people don’t come here. How do you change that?
The only way that I can think of to change it is to have an article on the front page of the New York Times in which big names like Bogle acknowledge that Buy-and-Hold was a mistake. That would change everything. It would launch a national debate. People would no longer think that there was anything weird about saying that Buy-and-Hold was a mistake once they heard Bogle say it. So I think that’s the answer.
Bogle is probably not going to say it prior to the crash. I get that. But I think that the crash could change things. I think Bogle is a good man., I think that, if he sees that he has set some bad stuff in motion, he might make that speech that we all need to hear him make and get it written up on the front page of the Times. I think that would change things quickly.
I don’t think that I would be helping the cause by keeping quiet or by going away or whatever. It’s that sort of behavior that got us into this mess in the first place. Every time someone goes quiet, it makes it worse for all the rest of us. I want to see things get better. So I try to do my part.
That’s the best explanation that I can offer, Anonymous. I don’t think that your question is a bad one. But I do know from my time at the various boards that there are many, many people who want to know more about Valuation-Informed Indexing. It is only 10 percent of the population but 10 percent of the population is millions of people. So we need to be trying to find a way to make those people feel comfortable talking about this stuff. I feel that if I want others to do positive things that I need to do positive things myself, So I try to do my best each day not to go quiet and not to go away.
I hope that helps a small bit.
The Quiet Man (Not!) Rob
“I did the best that I could, Anonymous.”
You need to try and make a short, direct response that gives an answer versus telling story.
You need to try and make a short, direct response that gives an answer versus telling story.
No. These are important questions that merit honest answers. The circumstances are strange. So in many cases there are no short, direct responses that make any sense.
In ordinary circumstances, there never would have been any abusive posting. So there would be thousands of people here everyday. Those are not the circumstances that apply. My job is to give the best answer possible. In some cases that may involve telling a bit of a story. If that’s the reality, then so be it.
My sincere take.
Story-Telling Rob
Normal people can give a short and direct response.
Not in these circumstances they can’t, Anonymous.
In ordinary circumstances, I would say that the reason why people weren’t showing up at a web site was that they did not see value in the material. But I have had thousands of people tell me that my stuff is the best investing stuff that they have ever seen. I have had people tell me that my stuff is the best investing stuff that they have ever seen and then ban me from their web site in the same e-mail. That was Carl Richards. Explain that one in a short and concise statement! I had never heard of such a thing until it happened to me. If someone else told me that story, I am not sure that I would believe it. But I was there. I have the e-mails. So I know that it really happened.
Carl was the main speaker at one of the Financial Blogger Conferences that I attended. So he had thousands of people listening to him and applauding him and talking to him afterwards and all this sort of thing. If Carl said during that talk what he told me he thinks of my work — that is is of “huge value” — I would have thousands of people coming to the site everyday. That is how you make that happen. Somebody says something like that and then dozens of other bloggers invite you to lunch and then they invite you on podcasts and tell their readers about you and the thing just grows and grows and grows.
Why didn’t Carl do that? Why did he instead ban me from his site? He told me that his readers were upset by what I was saying when I commented at his site. He said that he read everything he could get his hands on about Valuation-Informed Indexing. He said that his opinion is that my work has “huge value.” But most of his readers are Buy-and-Holders because that is all that they have ever heard about. So he can make an easier buck just letting them continue to believe in the long-discredited strategy and keeping them safe from hearing about the one with “huge value” that he knows in his heart is the future.
That’s the story of why there are not thousands of people here. Buy-and-Hold came first and Valuation-Informed Indexing is such a huge advance that site owners don’t want people to hear about it. It makes them look bad when people hear about it because they have not been promoting it, they have been promoting Buy-and-Hold. So I get cut out.
And the readers get cut out. The readers would be fine with Valuation-Informed Indexing if they could hear about it in an environment free of all the abusive stuff and if they could ask all their questions and if experts could comment on it in a reasonable and honest way and if all of the ordinary things that happen in all other cases happened in cases in which Valuation-Informed Indexing was being discussed. The Buy-and-Holders don’t want to say the words “I” and “Was” and “Wrong” and so we keep people from learning about the far superior strategy. And we hurt everyone by playing it that way.
Is that a short and direct response?
There is no short and direct response that makes sense in these circumstances. We have social norms that we follow in this country that are not followed in discussions of Valuation-Informed Indexing. And we have laws that are not followed in discussions of Valuation-Informed Indexing. It’s a weird situation and it is not one that I created, it is one that I am trying to overcome.
If you want to know why people don’t come here, look at your own behavior.
I think it will change in the days following the next price crash. I wish that we didn’t have to wait. I wish that we could all pull together and make it change tomorrow. But I don’t think that’s likely to happen, given what I have seen over the past 16 years.
I don’t want to lie to people about the numbers that they are using to plan their retirements, Anonymous. The Buy-and-Holders don’t want to correct their retirement studies and so I have to be cut out and the result is that people don’t come here. Either things will change following the next crash or they will not. My only option is to wait for whatever changes are coming because I cannot bear to lie to my friends about the numbers that they are using to plan their retirements. That’s not in me. That’s not what I am about.
I will make a prediction. I believe that in the days following the next price crash, Greaney will look back and wish that he had never insisted that anyone lie about the numbers that people are using to plan their retirements. And that Lindauer will do the same. And that Bogle will do the same.
We’ll see, you know? If that happens, I will do everything in my power to pull us all together so that we all can do the best work that we can do and so that we all can live the best lives that we can live. That much I can do and that much I will do. I won’t lie about the numbers that my friends are using to plan their retirements. I won’t say that I believe that the safe withdrawal rate is always the same number. I don’t believe that it is so and I am not going to put up any posts saying that I believe that it is so. It would be fraud for me to say that. It is not a reasonable thing for one person to ask of another.
We’ll see how it goes. You know perfectly well why people don’t come here because you engaged in all the abusive behavior that made it a reality. I don’t like it that people don’t come here. But I would like it less if I lied about the numbers that my friends were using to plan their retirements. I couldn’t live with myself if I did that. So, no thanks.
We’ll see how it goes. I wish you all good things. I feel that I can do that and still live with myself. So I do that. But that’s as far as I can take it.
I hope that helps a small bit.
Short and Direct (Not!) Rob
I prefer buy and hold instead of get rich quick timing schemes.
You’re in good company, Max. There are millions of people who believe with their hearts, minds and souls that Buy-and-Hold is the answer. These are good and smart and hard-working people. And they will tell you that Buy-and-Hold has done right by them. My father was a Buy-and-Holder. I was a Buy-and-Holder for a number of years. John Bogle is obviously a Buy-and-Holder and he is a giant in this field.
If there is anyone reading these words who is considering dropping Buy-and-Hold solely because of my words about it, please know that I believe that someone who would do that is a darn fool. I believe that Valuation-Informed Indexing is superior. But my aim is to use my words to get people thinking about that possibility. If you become convinced as a result of my words that there might be a case for Valuation-Informed Indexing, you then need to check things out for yourself or talk things over with people you trust. I don’t want to think that there will ever be one person who will make investment decisions solely based on things I say. I don’t possess expertise in this field. I am a journalist. I report stuff. I find Shiller’s work compelling and so I report on the many far-reaching implications that follow from it, according to my understanding. I do no more than that and no less.
My best wishes to you, my dear Buy-and-Hold believing friend.
Your Valuation-Informed Indexing Friend, Rob