“The Goon Behavior Is Evidence of Emotion! It Proves Shiller’s Thesis! So Shiller and All Others Who Think His Thesis Has Value Should Be Talking About It.”

Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently posted to the discussion thread for another blog entry at this site:

I have never seen Shiller, Pfau and Bernstein use the word “goons”, or day that there have been criminal acts/threats, or say people should go to prison. You are the only one making these claims.

You’re right, Anonymous. And that’s a problem. That’s a HUGE problem. I don’t think it would be overstating things too much to say that that is our ONLY problem.

Say that everyone in this field used the word “Goon” on every occasion on which it was appropriate to do so. If that were the case, we wouldn’t see any more Goon behavior. The Buy-and-Holders who were tempted to engage in Goon behavior would rein it in if they felt that they were going to be called out on it.

So all that would be left would be people advocating Valuation-Informed Indexing and people advocating Buy-and-Hold in civil and reasonable ways. That would of course be a good thing. We want that. If we only heard from Valuation-Informed Indexers, there would be no one to keep them honest. We need to have people keeping them honest and the Buy-and-Holders serve that role. So that part is good.

Say that Motley Fool had followed its own published rules and gave Greaney the boot when he put forward his first death threat. That would have ended the problem. Greaney was a popular poster. Had people seen him get the boot, they would have refrained from putting forward death threats themselves. So the discussions would have been amazing. It would have been one learning experience after another after another after another.

It’s not that these people you mention do not see the Goon behavior and are not appalled by it. Wade spoke to me about it on several occasions. He was shocked by it. He found it unbelievable. But you are right that he was afraid to call you Goons out on it in public and to your face. Why? He knew that, as soon as he did that, you would turn your fury on him and he didn’t want that. So he only talked about his horror at your behavior to me. Which of course didn’t accomplish much. I already knew about it! I am the world expert on it!

Shiller was awarded a Nobel prize because he showed us something very important about the stock investing experience. He showed with research that stock investing is a highly emotional experience. You engage in bad behavior because you feel pain when your Buy-and-Hold beliefs are challenged. The Goon behavior is evidence of emotion! It proves Shiller’s thesis! So Shiller and all others who think his thesis has value should be talking about it. But there are not, as you point out. That’s why we are in the unfortunate situation that we are in.

We need to have everyone talking about it if we are to overcome it. It wouldn’t take long at all to overcome it. If Motley Fool had just given Greaney the boot, that would have done the job. But Motley Fool did not do that. And then the next site did not do it. And then the next. On into infinity.

I want it to stop. I want the bad behavior to stop. I want the learning experiences to take place. So I call you out on your Goon behavior. Me doing that alone doesn’t get the job done. But there is no other way to get the job done than for a number of us to do that. So I do it and I encourage others to join in. When others join in, then we are off to the races. I believe that that will happen after the next price crash. I sure hope so. But, whether it does or it doesn’t, I am going to continue calling you out on your bad behavior. There is no other way to bring it to an end and to get the amazing learning experiences going. So I am going to continue doing the only thing that can take this to a good place and the thing that I implore all others to do. There is nothing else that can ever get the job done. If we do not call the Buy-and-Holders out on their bad behavior, they are going to keep engaging in it. It helps them to achieve their goal of silencing challenges to Buy-and-Hold.

If Shiller had published his research before Fama published his, none of this would ever have been an issue. We all want to know how to invest effectively. But that’s not the way things played out. Fama published his research and Buy-and-Hold became a thing and so now there are lots of powerful and wealthy and well-connected people who feel terribly threatened when anyone posts about the implications of Shiller’s research. Lots of Buy-and-Holders are more concerned about blocking others from discovering how stock investing works than they are about knowing themselves how stock investing works and lots of others are afraid to stand up to the ones who feel that way. It’s a mess.

We will have to figure it out as a society or we will all go down together. This stuff is important. You cannot have a society in which millions of people are investing to finance their retirements but they are not permitted to use the internet to learn what the peer-reviewed research teaches us about how stock investing works. That is just not a viable long-term proposition. At least not in this guy’s sincere take.

I suppose that we will all find out whether I am right or wrong in the days following the next price crash.

I naturally wish you all the best that this life has to offer a person.

Abusive Posting Call-Out Guy Rob