Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently posted to the discussion thread for another blog entry at this site:
And I obviously am going to invest the $500 million pursuant to VII principles. So VII will be paying off for me for many years to come. Passion Saving principles (detailed in my earlier book) helped me earn that money and VII principles will help me to protect it and to grow it.”
You no longer believe this, correct? After all, you admitted that you need to go back to work.
I’d rather be looking forward to a $500 million settlement payment than to a long prison sentence, Anonymous. Call me madcap, you know?
I would have preferred it if we had never seen a single abusive post. That would have been better for me and for you and for Robert Shiller (one of my heroes) and for Jack Bogle (another one of my heroes) and for John Greaney (one of my friends) and for Mel Lindauer (another one of my friends) and for Wade Pfau (a hero friend) and for millions of middle-class investors. So I am obviously not saying that the way that things have been playing out for 17 years now has been ideal. But we are all still better off to be part of a society that is in the process of moving from the purest and most dangerous Get Rich Quick approach to stock investing ever concocted by the human mind to the first true research-based approach, no? I sure think so.
I am honored to be playing such a big role in making that happen. I hope that I miss no opportunity to continue pushing the ball forward, to learn, learn, learn, to teach, teach, teach, to make new friends, to discover new applications of the amazing peer-reviewed research of the last 38 years. We started moving forward in a big way when Fama published his research in 1965 and then we turbo-charged our forward movement in 1981 when Shiller published his amazing, revolutionary research and then I got involved on the morning of May 13, 2002, and did my thing and thousands of people evidenced the kindness and intelligence to help out along the way (including you Goons in your better moments!) and now here we are standing where we stand today.
Are we standing in a perfect place? We most certainly are not. No! Not a close call. We are standing in lots of darkness. I hate this place where we are standing today. Hate it, hate it, hate it! You got me re that one.
But compared to what, you know? Would I prefer it if we were going to head into the next economic crisis without the 17 years of material showing how this happened, how we did this to ourselves? I sure would not. We need to come to terms with what our Buy-and-Hold/Get Rich Quick impulse has been doing to us for as far back as stocks have been available for sale in the United States. And I believe to the bottom of my soul that we will do that. And that we will all live better lives from that point forward as a consequence. Gee, I wonder why I still see it as a plus for us to open every discussion board and blog on the internet to honest posting re the last 38 years of peer-reviewed research in this field?
What do people do when a baby is born and a new life is brought into this world? They cry, right? They are not crying tears of sadness. They are crying tears of joy. The baby is going to face lots of hard times, lots of terribly rough stuff. Only a fool would not understand that that is the reality. But the thought that most of us have is that the baby is also going to enjoy lots of fine moments, lots of triumphs, lots of days at the beach and lots of falling in love and lots of overcoming obstacles and getting lots of getting A’s in hard subjects and lots of seeing his or her favorite baseball team pull it out in the bottom of the ninth. That’s why we cry tears of joy. It’s not that we are blind to the bad stuff. It’s that we are aware of the good stuff and we have come to believe from our own experience of life that life is in a fundamental sense a positive, a trip worth taking. That’s how I feel about this amazing journey that we all are traveling to learn how stock investing works in the real world. We have encountered lots of setbacks and hurts on that journey. And we have managed to overcome lots of setbacks and hurts. And in the end each and every one of us will acknowledge that it was a trip worth taking 500 times over.
You Goons are going to acknowledge that on the other side of The Big Black Mountain, Anonymous. I am sure of it. You won’t admit it today. You will declare “I will always be a Goon, no matter what happens, I will never permit one iota of goodness to influence me in any way.” But I don’t buy it, you know? I didn’t buy it on the morning of May 13, 2002, and I don’t buy it today and I won’t buy it when we are looking back and laughing at the old days when we are enjoying a few nice cold ones on the other side of The Big Black Mountain.
We are friends whether you to choose to acknowledge it or not. You cannot deny your humanity in an entirely convincing way. Not in a way that persuades this boy’s eyes. We are all in the same boat. We all want the same things. You fell in love with Buy-and-Hold because you were looking for a way to invest more effectively and you will fall in love with Valuation-Informed Indexing in the days following the next price crash for the same reason. And you will be joined by millions of others, both Goons and non-Goons.
That’s my sincere take, in any event. I’m not God. I could be wrong. We will just have to wait and watch it all play out to find out for certain. I naturally wish you all the best that this life has to offer a person in the interim.
Hang in there, man. It gets better. I am sure.
Glad-to-be-Alive-and-Still-Learning Rob
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