I’ve posted Entry #475 to my weekly Valuation-Informed Indexing column at the Value Walk site. It’s called There Are Things Other Than High CAPE Values That Cause Recessions But They Are the Biggest Factor.
Juicy Excerpt: So economists and business executives and journalists and policymakers trying to figure out where the economy is headed should be focusing less on inflation and interest rates and consumer sentiment and more on CAPE levels. When the CAPE level gets super high, a recession is on the horizon. When the CAPE level gets super low, an economic boom should be anticipated. Is all of that not so? I ask the question because this line of thinking makes perfect sense to me but I have never seen an article written by someone other than me cite it.
A little blast from the past from Wade Pfau:
“Hi Rob,
I forgot that I was still saying things like this even 2 weeks after the initial incident.
This was more than a year ago now, but I am thinking that I was just trying to explain politely to you that I’d rather have you quit writing about me, or at least stop using my name. I suppose that I figured the only way you might understand why is if I explained it in terms of your favorite conspiracy theories.
I will make one more attempt at a reality check for you. You go on and on about how I allegedly lack personal integrity because I allowed the Goons to threaten me into silence.
The reality is that though I may have for a brief moment got a bit too caught up in YOUR drama, I do not have any fears about the Goons.
The reality is that you are causing me 1000x more career damage than the Goons ever could have by filling Google with so much nonsense about me, and sharing embarrassing private details such as my overly ambitious journal submission strategies, etc. Those in particular are highly private. People don’t publicly share where they submit articles to unless those articles are accepted. You’ve violated my trust in so many countless ways and yet you still proclaim to be my friend.
And the further reality is that if I *did* lack personal integrity, I could have made this all stop just by saying the meaningless sentence you want so desperately to hear: “I think the errors in the traditional safe withdrawal rate studies must be corrected by using Rob’s analytically valid method.”
But I don’t believe that. I do not believe you have offered a valid correction to the safe withdrawal rate question. And I believe that retirement income strategies go much further than the question of a safe withdrawal rate. And so that is why I’ve had to endure your ongoing harassment for months on end now.
Usually I can figure out the Rob-logic behind what you are thinking, but I really don’t know how you think you come out of this whole episode looking like the good guy. I guess it is because you think you are saving my soul and putting me back on the path of righteousness, or something, huh? If only you had the power to do a little bit of self reflection…
Now that the whole email history is on display, we have the reminder of how angry you got at the very beginning when I referred to you as dogmatic. Yet, look at the way you’ve treated me for disagreeing with you on something which you don’t even understand. You quote numbers from JWR’s statistical work, but I’m not sure if you can even distinguish a mean from a median. So how can you be sure his work is right? I don’t know either, as I never did get around to digging into it, and I doubt I ever will now. But I’m not sure how a properly calculated lower confidence bound for a 2000 retiree could have been higher than zero.
Rob, suppose the stock market does drop 65% as you are expecting. It might happen, who knows.
Step 1: Stock Market Drops 65%
Step 2: ??
Step 3: Rob wins $500 million settlement from the Goons, the Goons are sent to prison, the investing public learns about and adopts VII.
What is Step 2? There isn’t one. You will still be in the same position as you’ve been in for the last 10 years. Why didn’t something happen for you after the 2008 financial crisis? You are like the guy who keeps predicting new ends for the world as each previous prediction date passes by.
That is why I’m telling you, from one human being to another, that it is time to move on. You are a smart guy, and you could use your talents for something productive. While warning people about the 4% rule is helpful, the way that you go about doing it is rather “catastrophically unproductive” as one wise fellow said to you years ago. I provide a loud voice that is critical of the 4% rule, and so spending your days assassinating my character is counterproductive to your underlying cause. So perhaps you can start fresh with a new issue of social import that carries less baggage for you. What happened in the past is a sunk cost, but you still have a chance to turn things around and start afresh today. And you can do all of this while still being honest and true to yourself.”
Wade said those things.
He also said all the things that he said before you Goons threatened to destroy his career if he continued doing honest work in this field, He said that the Buy-and-Hold retirement studies are “dangeorus.” He said that “yes, Virginia, Valuation-Informed Indexing works!” And he expressed consternation at the abusive posting tactics of you Goons on numerous occasions.
People coming here in the days following the next price crash trying to figure out why they have lost 50 percent of their life savings will be able to compare the comments Wade made prior to the threats and the comments that Wade made after the threats and figure out for themselves what is going on. And of course the thing that is going on affects not only Wade. It affected me for three years. It affected John Walter Russell. It affects Shiller. It affected Bogle It affects every last one of us. It is hurting every last one of us because when all of these people are afraid to express their sincere thoughts about how stock investing works in a complete and bold and blunt way, we all miss out on an amazing learning experience.
I can’t change history, Anonymous. There was a time when lots of good and smart people sincerely believed that market timing (price discipline!) might not always work or might not always be required. Then this Shiller fellow came along and showed that that is not so. The only thing that has been holding us back for 39 years now is that the Buy-and-Holders are having a really, really, really hard time saying the words “I” and “Was” and “Wrong.”
Once a sufficient number of them say those words to make us all feel comfortable expressing our sincere views from that day forward, all the ugliness is behind us and all the good stuff comes within our reach. My job is to get us all to that magical place. I think we are close. I think it is going to take another price crash. That part of course breaks my heart. But the good news is that all signs are that we are going to get there and that we are close.
We’ll see, you know?
Am I engaging in “conspiracy theories” to believe that the retirement study posted at John Greaney’s web site has not been corrected to this day, nearly 18 years from the day when I pointed out on a Motley Fool discussion board that it lacks an adjustment for the valuation level that applies on the day the retirement begins?
My best wishes.
Baggage-Carrying Rob
If Wade had gone with me to the New York Times and told them the story about fraud and corruption in the investment advice field that he saw with his own eyes for 16 months, I think that we could have gotten this story written up on the front page. And from that time forward, no one would have been afraid to post honestly. That would have changed the world in a very, very, very positive way. The way to end corruption is to EXPOSE it, not to appease those practicing it.
Wade agrees that the Greaney retirement study is in error. Has his appeasement approach gotten the study corrected? It doesn’t work, Anonymous. If Greaney were worried about the harm he has done to people with his study, he would have corrected it on the day he learned about the error in it, May 13, 2002. Asking him “pretty please” isn’t going to get the job done. Wade’s way doesn’t work. When you see fraud, you have to call out the fraud. Otherwise you become compromised yourself and it becomes harder for the people who come after you to call out the fraud because it has been going on for an even longer time.
That is my sincere take re these terribly important matters, in any event.
Corruption Exposing Rob
I don’t see fraud. I don’t see death threats. I don’t see job threats. I don’t see anyone that is afraid (maybe you are afraid?). Until people see actual evidence of what you say, your words are “catastrophically unproductive” as someone once said.
I pointed out that the retirement study posted at John Greaney’s web site lacks an adjustment for the valuation level that applies on the day the retirement begins in a post that I put to a Motley Fool discussion board on the morning of May 13,2002. Today’s date is January 29, 2020. The study has not been corrected to this day.
Please mark me down as saying that that constitutes fraud, the biggest case of financial fraud in the history of the United States by a long shot.
I will continue doing everything in my power to EXPOSE this massive act of financial fraud. I can do no more and I can do no less.
If pointing out financial fraud and seeking to have it corrected constitutes catastrophically unproductive behavior, then please make me down as pleading 100 percent “guilty as charged.” And please feel free to tell everyone on the internet that that is my plea.
I naturally wish you the best of luck in all your future life endeavors.
Catastrophically Unproductive Rob
You said: “ I pointed out that the retirement study posted at John Greaney’s web site lacks an adjustment for the valuation level that applies on the day the retirement begins in a post that I put to a Motley Fool discussion board on the morning of May 13,2002. Today’s date is January 29, 2020. The study has not been corrected to this day.”
Wade already addressed you on that issue, pointing out that you are wrong. He said:
“And the further reality is that if I *did* lack personal integrity, I could have made this all stop just by saying the meaningless sentence you want so desperately to hear: “I think the errors in the traditional safe withdrawal rate studies must be corrected by using Rob’s analytically valid method.”
But I don’t believe that. I do not believe you have offered a valid correction to the safe withdrawal rate question.”
Wade said on numerous occasions that he believes that the Greaney retirement study is “dangerous.”He even says in the words that you have quoted above that “I provide a loud voice that is critical of the 4% rule.”
The part where he says about me insisting that the study be corrected in some particular way is of course false. If Wade wants to correct the Greaney study in some other way, that is of course fine. And if hundreds of others want to correct it hundreds of other ways, that is of course also fine. What I have been saying since the first day is that each and every person who participates in investment discussions should post honestly. That’s what I did on the morning of May 13, 2002, when I said that I did not believe that the Greaney sudy contains a valuation adjustment. I stand by that today. I still do not believe that the study contains a valuations adjustment. I have taken note that thousands of people have looked at the study over the past 18 years and not one has been able to identify a valuations adjustment in it. I can’t help but wonder why.
Wade believes that the study is in error. That’s the important thing. When people see that study, they need to know that many people in this field believe that it is in error. Then they can decide for themselves how it should best be corrected. The more people we have participating in those sorts of discussions, the better. We are not going to get enough people participating honestly and openly and frankly until we do something about your criminal acts. That is the first step toward taking things to a productive place. The laws against financial fraud and extortion and threats of physical violence are good and necessary laws. I urge reasonable enforcement of those laws.
My best wishes.
Law-Abiding Rob
It is interest how you pick and choose comments from Wade and then give those comments your win interpretation.
When the same person says two things that are opposites, that presents a puzzle. My job as a journalist is to solve the puzzle, to figure out what causes the person to do that.
I don’t deny that he put forward the words that you quoted in the beginning of this thread. But there were hundreds of occasions on which he said very, very different things. There has to be some explanation of that strange behavior. The explanation is that he wants to be able to work in this field and the corruption is so deep that he has lost confidence that he can pull that off if he is fully honest. So he compromises himself.
I don’t want Wade to have to compromise himself. And I don’t want to have to compromise myself. And I don’t want anyone else to feel that he has to compromise himself. The only way out is for us all to stand up for the right of everyone else to post honestly. We just have to have some protections. When there are no protections in place, when we cannot even count on the laws of the United States being applied, we are in a very dark place. No one can do truly good work in such circumstances.
It is important to get the numbers that people are using to plan their retirements right. There should be zero controversy re that one. It is just not a viable situation to have retirement studies that get the numbers wildly wrong and to have them remain uncorrected for years and years. The biggest problem that I have is that people cannot believe that so crazy a situation can exist. I wouldn’t have believed it myself in the days before I saw it with my own eyes.
We have to do better. We all need to pull together and help each other do better. I believe that we will do it in the days following the next crash. We’ll see.
My best wishes to you.
Comment Choosing Rob
“ When the same person says two things that are opposites, that presents a puzzle. ”
Actually, it is his words versus your interpretation of what he said or meant.
“ We have to do better.”
There is no”we”. You are responsible for YOU. You want everyone else to change to your way of thinking. That is not how YOU get better.
Set forth below are some of Wade’s words. It is not possible that any reasonable person could read those words and conclude anything other than that Wade believes that the Buy-and-Hold retirement studies are “dangerous” and that Valuation-Informed Indexing is gold. Those are the two most important issues that have been debated over the past 18 years.
I agree that I am responsible for me and only me. That’s why I insist that I be permitted to post honestly. When I see someone advocating the 4 percent rule and I fail to point out that there is 39 years of peer-reviewed research showing it to be false, I am failing my readers and myself.
I do not want everyone else to change to my way of thinking. I want everyone else to post their honest views just as I post my honest views. That’s how I learn from others. It would be horrible if everyone just agreed with me. I would hate that. That’s why I never engage in intimidation tactics against people who offer views that I do not agree with. But the fact that I like hearing views that I do not agree with from others does not mean that I like hearing views that I do not agree with from me. I believe that posts with my name on them should reflect accurately my views. That’s the thing that enrages Mel Lindauer and John Greaney. They want me to pretend to believe things that I just do not believe. And I do not feel even a tiny bit comfortable going there.
A) Academic Researcher Wade Pfau’s Statements Showing Interest In and Confidence in Rob Bennett’s Work
1) “I do cite you and John Walter Russell in my paper as the earliest and strongest advocates of this approach [New School safe-withdrawal-rate research].
2) “Are you aware of Shiller offering asset allocation advice based on PE10? …. If you read Rob Bennett’s stuff carefully, I think he did provide an important contribution in terms of describing a way for PE10 to guide asset allocation for long-term conservative investors. I also think he was right on the issue of safe withdrawal rates.” — Posted at the Bogleheads Forum discussion board.
3) “I am also extremely grateful to Rob Bennett for motivating this topic and contributing his experience and encouragement.” — Written in Acknowledgments section of Wade’s breakthrough research paper.
4)”You deserve much of the credit as the whole idea of Valuation-Informed Indexing belongs to you.”
5) “I definitely need to cite some of your work as the founder of Valuation-Informed Indexing, as I have not found anyone else who can lay claim to that. Shiller pointed out the predictive power of PE10 but never discussed how to incorporate it into asset allocation, as far as I know.”
B) Academic Researcher Wade Pfau’s Statements on the Superiority of Valuation-Informed Indexing Over Buy-and-Hold
1) “What you see in the top part of the graph for each year is the amount of wealth accumulated after 30 years for someone following Buy-and-Hold against someone following Valuation-Informed Indexing….Valuation-Informed Indexing provides more wealth for 102 of the 110 rolling 30-year periods, while Buy-and-Hold did better in 8 of the periods.”
2) “I will take steps in my final paper to test a wide variety of assumptions about asset allocation, valuation-based decision rules, whether the period is 10, 20, 30, or 40 years, lump-sum vs. dollar-cost averaging, and so on, and to show that the results are quite robust to changes in any of these assumptions.”
3) “Any data mining that I am doing is in favor of buy-and-hold, not in favor of market timing.”
4) “The findings for “market timing” are so robust anyway, that it hardly matters how we do it.”
5) “The maximum drawdown from market timing is much less. That is how far the portfolio drops from past highs to current lows. The Buy-and-Holder once experienced a 60.96% drop, whereas the worst drop for market timing was 24.16%.”
6) “Market timing provides signficantly higher returns at a comparable level of risk.”
7) “The market timer enjoys a far less risky strategy.”
8) “On a risk-adjusted basis, market-timing strategies provide comparable returns as a 100 percent stocks Buy-and-Hold strategy but with substantially less risk. Meanwhile, market timing provides comparable risks and the same average asset allocation as a 50/50 fixed allocation strategy, but with much higher returns.”
9) “If everyone increased exposure after a market fall and vice versa, then this would dampen out the big swings in the market aggregates, and we might get shallower boom/bust cycles.”
10) ““‘I’m excited about this, as depending on what you have already done, I think I can design a study using the Shiller data to provide historical simulations of Valuation-Informed Indexing strategies against fixed Buy-and-Hold strategies and also lifecycle strategies (declining allocation to stocks as one ages). If Valuation-Informed Indexing consistently outperforms fixed and lifecycle strategies, then the proof is in the pudding so to speak. Given how well valuations help to explain withdrawal rates, I think there is a lot of potential for this topic.”
11) “Yes, Virginia, Valuation-Informed Indexing Works!”
12) “It makes complete sense to have an equity allocation that is in some way flexible. Having a completely inelastic demand for equities is a bit bonkers; no-one acts that way with life’s other important commodities.”
13) “I wrote up the programs to test your Valuation-Informed Indexing strategies against Buy-and-Hold, and I must say that the results look very promising…. I am quite excited about the findings so far. As you say in the podcast, Valuation-Informed Indexing should beat Buy-and-Hold about 90 percent of the time, and I am getting results that support this for various strategies.”
14) “I have been toying with the idea of sending the paper to the Journal of Finance, which is the most prestigious journal in academic finance.”
15) “Now that I am accounting for risk, I am even more amazed by how well Valuation-Informed Indexing works.”
16) You shouldn’t be too excited with great wealth accumulations if they happened due to unusually high valuations, and low wealth accumulations shouldn’t be as scary if valuations are also quite low.”
17) “My idea is to show many different tables with results over the whole period for returns and risks. Valuation-Informed Indexing always provides more returns for often less risk.”
18) “No matter what I try, Valuation-Informed Indexing will still perform better in 85-95% of cases for 30 years.”
19) “I have a new figure for showing this as well. And a nice figure showing the outperformance percentages across rolling periods of lengths between 1 and 40 years. I think it is all quite persuasive.”
20) “You haven’t seen anything yet! This was just the secondary study. I’m still working on the main one!”
C) Academic Researcher Wade Pfau’s Statements of Incredulity That He Was the First Academic Researcher to Examine the Valuation-Informed Indexing Strategy
1) ” I know that there is an extensive literature about the predictability of long-term stock returns dating back to Campbell and Shiller’s work in the mid-1990s. I also know that there is an extensive literature about short-term market timing strategies…. But my question is about LONG-TERM market timing strategies. In other words, using market timing over periods of at least 10 years to obtain better returns than a Buy-and-Hold strategy. The literature seems slim.”
2) “Let me just explain a bit more why I posted about this here. Valuation-Informed Indexing has had critics for years, but until Norbert did it in 2008, nobody seemed to have provided a serious investigation of it. I just couldn’t understand why. And that bothered me.”
3) “Two papers by Fisher and Statman are still all I can find that provide evidence against long-term market timing.”
4) “I’m so confused by why Fisher and Statman didn’t consider risk in their idiot switching tests. Valuation-Informed Indexing is much less risky by pretty much any standard I consider. I must wonder… did I make a mistake somewhere? Why haven’t academics already published research about this?”
D) Academic Researcher Wade Pfau’s Statements on the Dangers of the Conventional Retirement Planning Advice
1) “The traditional approach to retirement planning (as described on pages 10 and 11 of The Bogleheads’ Guide to Retirement Planning, for example) is counterproductive and possibly damaging.”
2) “Retirees now frequently base their retirement decisions on the portfolio success rates found in research such as the Trinity study…. This is not the information that current and prospective retirees need for making their withdrawal rate decisions.”
3) “This article provides favorable evidence based on the historical record for long-term conservative investors to obtain improved retirement planning outcomes (lower savings rates, higher withdrawal rates) using valuation-based asset allocation strategies.”
4) Wade sent me a link to an article in Business Week that was published more than eight years after my post pointing out the errors in the Old School retirement studies and which he characterized as “quite sympathetic to the point you were trying to make all along”.
5) “Though I was only trying to do an Old School safe-withdrawal-rate study, all that I ended up doing was showing in a different way what you had been saying all along: the safe withdrawal rate changes with valuations.”
6) “Valuations are the driving factor. ”
7) “This is similar to your drunk driving analogy, which I agree with.” The discredited but uncorrected retirement studies find that in most circumstances a 4 percent withdrawal rate provides a huge cushion for the retiree using it. However, in each of the three cases in history when stocks reached insanely high price levels, retirements using a 4 percent withdrawal came within a whisker of failing. To say that this shows that a 4 percent withdrawal is “100 percent safe” (these words are used in the Greaney study) for a retirement beginning at a time of insanely high price levels is like saying that driving drunk is “100 percent safe” because 97 sober drivers drove their cars 20 miles without incident while 3 drunk drivers were paralyzed for life in car accidents but did not die. The fact that 4 percent only worked by a whisker in the cases in which valuations were high at the beginning of the retirement shows that a 4 percent withdrawal is high-risk at times of high valuations, not that it is “100 percent safe.”
8) ” Actually, this issue shouldn’t really even be all that controversial. It’s just common sense that the probabilities from the Trinity study shouldn’t be interpreted as forward-looking probabilities for new retirees.”
9) Naturally, I am finding that Valuation-Informed Indexing can allow you to reach a wealth target with a lower savings rate, use a higher withdrawal rate, and also have a lower “safe” savings rate, than a fixed allocation.
E) Academic Researcher Wade Pfau’s Statements Showing His Concerns that Continuing to Report Honestly on the Investing Realities in the Face of the “Hostile Environment” for Doing So Created by Buy-and-Holders Would Harm His Career
1) “I was trying to pay tribute to your accomplishments in what I knew would be a hostile environment.”
2) “Valuations and long-term investors is a somewhat controversial topic.” Wade posted these words to his blog in October 2011 as his explanation of why he was abandoning his plan of doing further research on the superiority of Valuation-Informed Indexing strategies over Buy-and-Hold strategies. He had told me in earlier days that “You ain’t see nothing yet!” when I praised his breakthrough research in this area. After his flip to the dark side, Wade removed the page containing this blog entry from his site.
3) “We have both read and met to discuss your paper. Unfortunately, we did not find the paper’s incremental contribution to the academic finance literature, assuming the analysis proved to be correct, rose to the level that we are seeking for papers in the JFR. Thus sending the paper to a reviewer would be inefficient.” These words are from an academic journal’s “desk reject” of Wade’s breakthrough research.
4) ) ““ I was discouraged when I first received the “desk reject” by the editors of the same journal that published the Fisher and Statman paper. I realized that I didn’t have a chance with one of the top journals.”
5) “I think I should stay publicly quiet for a while, as I really don’t want anyone sending messages about any topics to officials at my university.”
6) I don’t want them [the Goons] working behind the scenes to derail me.”
7) “I did warn the editor of the Journal of Financial Planning that they may receive some ‘hate mail‘ after I mentioned your name in the safe savings rate paper.”
Rob (Expressing the View of Rob, As Is Proper)
Can we trust anything you say when Wade said this:
“ The reality is that you are causing me 1000x more career damage than the Goons ever could have by filling Google with so much nonsense about me….”
Each person is going to have to make up his or her own mind re that one, Anonymous.
Wade really did say the words that you quote him as saying. I give you that one And he really did say the words that I quote him as saying. You are not willing to give me that one. But the reality remains that he really did say all those words.
I think that the bottom line is that people’s willingness to look at both sides will increase following a price crash in which millions of people will lose half of their life savings and hundreds of thousands of businesses will go under and millions of workers will be thrown out of their jobs and political frictions will increase. We know how stock investing works today. Those who follow the peer-reviewed research in this field have known for 39 years now. We just cannot talk about it publicly because it causes the Buy-and-Holders too much pain to hear their beliefs challenged. Will the next price crash cause more of us to come to believe that the pain of experiencing more economic crises is worse than the pain felt by the Buy-and-Holders to hear their beliefs challenged? I believe that it will. But I am not God, I could be wrong.
We are just going to have to wait and see how things play out.
I naturally wish you all the best that this life has to offer a person, in any event.
Rob
“Each person is going to have to make up his or her own mind re that one, Anonymous.”
Everyone else has. Just look at your own comments section. I have yet to see one person back up your story and/or conclusions.
Wade Pfau backed up my story in the comments quoted above.
1) “I was trying to pay tribute to your accomplishments in what I knew would be a hostile environment.”
2) “Valuations and long-term investors is a somewhat controversial topic.” Wade posted these words to his blog in October 2011 as his explanation of why he was abandoning his plan of doing further research on the superiority of Valuation-Informed Indexing strategies over Buy-and-Hold strategies. He had told me in earlier days that “You ain’t see nothing yet!” when I praised his breakthrough research in this area. After his flip to the dark side, Wade removed the page containing this blog entry from his site.
3) “I think I should stay publicly quiet for a while, as I really don’t want anyone sending messages about any topics to officials at my university.”
4) I don’t want them [the Goons] working behind the scenes to derail me.”
5) “I did warn the editor of the Journal of Financial Planning that they may receive some ‘hate mail‘ after I mentioned your name in the safe savings rate paper.”
There’s a good reason why as a society we have enacted laws against death threats and against extortion and against defamation. These things hurt us all in very serious ways.
My sincere take.
Law-Abiding Rob
None of that backs you up. In fact, in Wade’s latest book “Safety-First Retirement Planning”, there is no mention of VII or any other market timing strategy. Instead, it begins with a foundation of having a probability based approach (with 50-75% in stock) as the core and then adding on a piece for safety utilizing fixed income/bonds (such as TIPS), annuities and/or life insurance.
What did he say in the days after your prison sentence was announced and he felt free once again to post in a fully honest way?
It hasn’t happened yet. So there is no way to know for certain what he believes today.
Given that he wrote me scores of e-mails endorsing Valuation-Informed Indexing during the 16 months in which we worked together, I believe that once your prison sentence is announced he will return to saying that. In the event that he has modified his views in any way, I of course would like to know that as well. But of course there’s simply no way of knowing until as a society we work up the courage to insist that you Goons be placed in prison cells, where you belong.
Our laws against death threats and extortion and defamation are a critical part of what makes our system work and of what has for a long time made our economy so productive.
Fair enough?
Productivity Advocate Rob
Living off of some fantasy that your critics will go to prison is not healthy. You really need to figure out how to deal with your own issues. Wade is doing just fine, as is the rest of us. You need to be concerned with yourself.
Okay, Anonymous.
I wish you all the best that this life has to offer a person, in any event.
I hope that that helps at least a tiny bit.
Fantasy Man Rob
“ I hope that that helps at least a tiny bit.”
You are not paying attention. We are not looking for help. Your the one with the problem and you are looking to blame everyone else.
My strong sense is that you are indeed looking for help, Anonymous. If you weren’t looking for help, you wouldn’t be posting here.
I am 100 percent willing and happy to offer you some help. As just one example of how I can help, I can report that Greaney’s retirement study caused a good number of people at the Retire Early board to go with lower withdrawal rates than they would have gone with had Greaney not posted and promoted his study. That’s a positive. I can honestly say that that’s the case. So I have no problem doing so.
Does that mean that you will have no prison sentence? I don’t think so. There has never been a situation like this. So I cannot say for sure what will happen. But I would not feel comfortable promising you that the things that I say will get your prison sentence reduced to zero. I’ll give it my best shot. That much I can promise.
I cannot say that I believe that Greaney included a valuations adjustment in the study. That’s always been the sticking point. I have zero willingness to go to the wrong side of the felony line myself. So I think that it would be fair to say that we are just going to have to wait to see how things play out in the days following the next price crash.
I hope that that works for you, dear Goon friend.
Helpful (But Not the the Point of Committing Felonies) Rob
“ My strong sense is that you are indeed looking for help,”
That same strong sense told you that there would be a stock market crash by 2015 and we see how well that worked out.
In your desperate attempt to make yourself feel better, you have dreamed up these wild scenarios of prison sentences and $500 million windfalls. You have lost touch with reality.
You are correct that years ago I had a strong sense that we would see another price crash long before today and that it has not appeared. You’ve got me re that one.
I don’t believe that I have lost touch with reality. But then, I wouldn’t, would I? The scary thing about losing touch with reality is that you are not aware that you have done it. Yikes!
My best wishes to you, Anonymous.
Still-in-Touch-With-Reality (Says Me!) Rob
It is not just the faulty crash predictions. I have yet to see you get anything right.
Okay.
I naturally wish you all the best that this life has to offer a person.
Wrongo Rob