“Greaney Helped a Lot of People. He Told People That the Safe Withdrawal Rate Was 4 Percent. If He Had Not Been Saying That, I Am Confident That a Lot of the Posters at the Old Motley Fool Board Would Have Been Putting Together Retirement Plans Calling for a 7 Percent Withdrawal. So Greaney’s Study Was a Plus in a Very Important Sense.”

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 are literally a very sick man, Rob. Sick meaning ‘in need of medical attention and treatment’. I recently saw you posting at some obscure blog where you tried to ingratiate yourself to the blog-owner, exactly as you tried to do with Greaney on Motley Fool, exactly as you did Wade Pfau on Mstar or wherever you tracked him down at… it’s part of your standard M.O: it always begins with treacly praise and fawning bows and over the top accolades to the person you are targeting and ‘buttering-up’. But it never lasts long! You need to look up the meaning of the word obsequious in the dictionary. You are disgustingly and stupidly transparent with that behavior, and not one soul is ever taken in by your false flattery and ridiculous ‘me-too-isms’. You should consider why you are so fawning to people, only to later throw them ALL under the bus when they chose not to tout you and your bizarre brand of insanity. Todd Trelander? Mel Lindaur? Arrette? Promethius? Raddr? Motley Fool? Bogleheads? etc etc etc. I thank the stars that (to date at least) your particular brand of mental illness has not manifested itself into actual violence (as far as is known publicly). I do fear though, that your level of financial destitution and mental instability could easily lead you to eventually become unhinged enough to actually try to harm yourself or others. So, Please. Please. Get help, Rob. I genuinely hope you will, before your ongoing years-long decline eventually turns into a full blown mental health crisis. Think about it seriously. Talk it over with the wife. And/or a trusted physician. Get a mental health wellness referral. As you often ask: “What’s the downside?”

I love my Buy-and-Hold friends, Hopeful. None of the positive stuff that I say is fake. It is all 100 percent sincere. I view Bogle as a giant in this field. The only person I have learned more from is Shiller. To be second to Shiller is to be a giant in the field. Greaney helped a lot of people. He told people that the safe withdrawal rate was 4 percent. If he had not been saying that, I am confident that a lot of the posters at the old Motley Fool board would have been putting together retirement plans calling for a 7 percent withdrawal. So Greaney’s study was a plus in a very important sense. And on and on and on. We would not be where we are today if not for the good work of the Buy-and-Holders. There would be no Valuation-Informed Indexing had Buy-and-Hold not come before it. Valuation-informed Indexing is the fulfillment of the Buy-and-Hold dream, which was a very, very life-affirming dream indeed.

I love the Buy-and-Holders. And one of the things that I most love about them is that they argue that investors should use the peer-reviewed research in this field as guidance on how to invest effectively for the long run. It’s because I believe in that Buy-and-Hold idea that I believe that we should open every discussion board and blog on the internet to honest posting re the last 38 years of peer-reviewed research in this field. On safe withdrawal rates and on scores of other critically important investment-related topics as well.

Does all of that not make perfect sense, my dear Goon friend?

Nearly Unhinged Rob