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 not banned from honest posting. We do have to clarify as to what honest posting REALLY is because I would never let you post made up stuff like pretend death threats or pretend job threats if you were on my website. But setting that aside, you have the largest venues available to you, such as Twitter, YouTube and Facebook. That gives you access to everyone.if you can’t make it on any of those platforms, then no one sees value in your message.
Thousands have found value and thousands have said so. Not at one time. There was no single day on which thousands said they saw value. But over the course of the 18 years it has been thousands. There have been scores who have indicated that they have found value in a single day On the sixth day of the discussions, John Walter Russell put up a post saying that he had investigated my safe withdrawal rate claims and that he saw great value in them and that post obtained more than 50 recommendations.
So I have never had any problem whatsoever generating support for my work, But most of those people left the Motley Fool board after Greaney threatened to have his Goon Squad murder the loved ones of any poster who posted honestly re those matters. Once the people interested in the topic of early retirement left the Retire Early board, the board was no longer able to fulfill the purpose for which I had built it up in the first place.
Motley Fool of course had published rules prohibiting death threats. Had those rules been enforced in a reasonable manner, there never would have been a problem. But of course there is a lot of money to be made promoting a pure Get Rich Quick/Buy-and-Hold strategy. Greaney was telling people that they could retire many years earlier than what the peer-reviewed research showed was prudent. So he was popular. And his popularity brought in money for the Motley Fool site.
All Get Rich Quick approaches are going to be popular. For obvious reasons. The beauty of the peer-reviewed research is that it shows the dangers of going with a pure Get Rich Quick approach. This is why the Buy-and-Holders are so hostile to the idea of permitting honest discussion of the last 39 years of peer-reviewed research in this field. There is no research supporting the idea that market timing (price discipline) is not required. There never has been and there never will be. Buy-and-Hold cannot survive in a world in which discussion of the peer-reviewed research is permitted. For so long as discussion of the research is prohibited, emotion can rule the day and it is emotion (the Get Rich Quick emotion that all humans possess) that makes Buy-and-Hold look promising.
I believe that Buy-and-Hold will fall following the next price crash. At that time millions of people will be able to see in a concrete way what a terrible mistake it was to fall for a pure Get Rich Quick approach and to tolerate a general ban on discussion of the last 39 years of peer-reviewed research in the field. We’ll see.
Shiller has “made it” on every platform possible. His book was a best-seller. He was awarded a Nobel prize. What good has it done us? We all still have that Get Rich Quick/Buy-and-Hold urge residing within us. If we are to overcome that emotional urge, we need to be able to DISCUSS the practical how-to implications of Shiller’s findings. That’s what the Buy-and-Holders do not want to see happen. As people learn about the research, the entire Buy-and-Hold house of cards tumbles to the ground. Market timing is price discipline. No market can survive without price discipline. Persuade millions of stock investors not to practice market timing and the stock market is sooner or later going to collapse. There is no getting around it.
I tried for many years to prevent that collapse. I did everything that a person can do. If the collapse cannot be prevented, then the next best thing is to supply people the information after the crash that they need to understand it and to avoid future crashes. We may see a Second Great Depression with the next price crash. It horrifies me that I have not been able to stop it. But at least I can do what is possible to see that we never see a Third Great Depression. That ain’t nothing.
Rob
Shiller has never endorsed market timing. There are no “thousands”. The silence of support on this site Sows you have no support.
The criminal acts that you have engaged in to block millions of people from being able to discuss the far-reaching implications of the last 39 years of peer-reviewed research in this field show that Buy-and-Holders view Shiller’s Nobel-prize-winning research as a huge threat.
If irrational exuberance exists, market timing always works and is always required. We should be telling people that. The only reason why we don’t is that we didn’t always know it and our Wall Street Con Men friends built an entire industry on a false root assumption (that the market is efficient) before we did.
If you thought that Buy-and-Hold could prevail in a civil and reasoned discussion, you would permit one.
My sincere take.
Rob
If you can give a link to just one criminal act, not just your accusations, I will send you a check for $10k. If you can’t, then you apologize. Deal?
If you can give me a link to a screenshot of the page of the Greaney retirement study containing a valuation adjustment, then I’ll give YOU a check for $10k. If you can’t, then you drop all the criminal stuff and permit honest posting re the last 39 years of peer-reviewed research at every discussion board and blog on the internet. Deal?
Rob
The Greaney retirement study does not contain any valuation adjustments and no one has ever claimed that is does.
Thank you for saying that, Evidence. I certainly agree that the study does not contain a valuation adjustment. I also agree that neither Greaney himself nor any of you Goons have claimed that it does. So we are okay that far.
What I say is that Greaney needs to make people aware that the study lacks a valuation adjustment and that the numbers would be very different if one were included. If the market were efficient, there would be no need for a valuation adjustment. If valuations affect long-term returns, then the safe withdrawal rate cannot be calculated accurately without taking the valuation level that applies on the day the retirement begins into consideration. That’s what I said in my post from the morning of May 13, 2002, and that’s what I continue to believe today. Greaney has not corrected the study by adding a valuation adjustment and he has not made any effort to make people who use the study aware that it lacks one and that the numbers would be very different if one were included.
There are some people who would use the 4 percent number even if they were made aware that the study lacks a valuation adjustment. That’s up to them. There are others who would not. Greaney is responsible for the losses those people suffer as a result of his failure to make them aware of the lack of a valuation adjustment. If he were thinking clearly, he would not want to be responsible for those losses. If he were thinking clearly he would be grateful to me for pointing out that the study lacks a valuation adjustment and for encouraging him to make every reader of the study aware of this. There is no benefit to anyone in hiding this reality. It is a matter of critical importance to all aspiring retirees.
That’s Rob Bennett’s sincere take re these terribly important matters, in any event.
My best wishes to you.
Rob
When has 4% not worked?
Greaney’s claim wasn’t that 4 percent had always worked. His claim was that 4 percent was safe.
People were using his study to plan retirements. They needed to know about the error in it.
Rob