“The Problem Is That a Bunch of Buy-and-Holders Have Become So Defensive About an Error That They Made Many Years Ago That They Are Willing to Do Absolutely Anything to Keep the Word from Getting 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:

“The article explains who I am and how I came to be the world’s leading expert on the 37-year cover-up of the dangers of the Buy-and-Hold Model.”

So you wrote a long winded article about how great you think you are with an expectation that someone might be interested in publishing your self promotion of your greatness.

That’s certainly not how I see it, Anonymous.

I have made an amazing contribution to the field, there’s no question about that. People use safe withdrawal rate studies to plan retirements. A failed retirement is a serious life setback. There are thousands of people who have looked at the Greaney retirement study over the past 16 years. Not one has been able to identify a valuations adjustment in his study. So what I said in my famous post of the morning of May 13, 2002, has stood up to scrutiny. A LOT of scrutiny.

So, yes, I have done something great. Good for me, you know? But I sure have not ever done anything to try to negate the huge accomplishments of lots of other great people. I have said all along that Greaney’s study was a big advance over the safe withdrawal rate analyses that came before it. So Greaney is also great, no? I have said that I learned about the error in Greaney’s study by reading Bogle’s book and that there would be no Valuation-Informed Indexing without Bogle’s many amazing contributions having come first. So Bogle too is also great, no? My aim in opening every discussion board and blog on the internet to honest posting on the last 37 years of peer-reviewed research in this field is to bring more attention to Shiller’s Nobel-prize-winning research. So I obviously think that Shiller is great too, no? I told Wade Pfau that he was “insane” to work with you Goons because he was well-positioned to be awarded a Nobel prize for the research that I prepared with him. So I obviously think that Wade is great too. no?

Lots of people are great. So why do we see friction in our discussions and why did we recently live though an economic crisis although we now have available to us the research findings that would permit us to put economic crises behind us if only we would explore their implications? It’s because some of us (you Goons!) so much want to be sure that no one recognizes my greatness that you were willing to burn numerous discussion board communities to the ground and to bring on another economic crisis and even to go to prison to stop that from happening. Huh? What the f?

The problem here is not that I did something great in pointing out the error in the Buy-and-Hold retirement studies. The problem is that a bunch of Buy-and-Holders have become so defensive about an error that they made many years ago that they are willing to do absolutely anything to keep the word from getting out. And it is of course going to get out anyway. When the next price crash arrives, we are going to see millions of people lose 50 percent of their life savings. Do you seriously think that they are not going to ask questions? I think they are going to ask question. And I think that you Goons are going to look back then and wonder what drove you to engage in such insane behavior.

I don’t apologize for discovering and then pointing out to people the error in the Buy-and-Hold retirement studies. I think it would be fair to say that that was my finest moment. It took a lot of courage to do that. And it is something that very much needed to be done. If Greaney had been thinking clearly, he would have thanked me. If he had been thinking clearly, he would have recalled that his reason for creating his study was to help people and that he obviously was not helping people by getting the number so wildly wrong. So he would have been grateful to me for pointing out the error and helping him to get it right.

I did something great. Lots of people did. We all should celebrate that. We should all resolve to do everything in our power to bring 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 to a full and complete stop by the close of business today and then to just celebrate our collective greatness in doing our part to create and develop and promote the first true research-based model for understanding how stock investing works. Yes?

My sincere take.

The Truly Great (and the Happy and Full-Throated Recognizer of Other True Greats) Rob