Set forth below is the text of a recent comment that I posted to the discussion thread for another blog entry at this site:
It doesn’t matter what you think. You can’t argue with facts and numbers just because you don’t like what it says. If you notice, it was mentioned on Wade’s website.
It matters what I think when it is my name going on a post. If I say things that I do not believe, that’s financial fraud. Not freakin’ interested. If I truly believed that Greaney included a valuation adjustment in the retirement study posted at his web site, I would say that. I truly believe that his study LACKS a valuation adjustment. So that’s what I say instead.
I believe that we should bring all the criminal stuff to a full and complete stuff by the close of business today so that people like Wade felt 100 percent free to post their sincere thoughts. Wade looked at the Greaney study and concluded that it is “dangerous.” I think he’s right.
My best wishes.
Rob
No, it matters what others say. Wade Pfau said you are wrong on the Greaney issue and that he was never threatened. People believe him and not you.
No one who has looked at my correspondence with Wade has ever concluded that he was not threatened. It would not be possible for someone with a rational mind to conclude that. People believe me that he was threatened. Every single person who has heard the story believes me.
Now —
People do not step forward and do something about it. That’s true. And that’s what hurts me. If people stepped forward and did something about the abusive stuff, the abusive stuff would stop. People don’t want to do it. They do not want the abuse directed at them. And they do not possess a sense of urgency re the substantive issues. Stock prices are still very high. So we have not yet seen the misery that always follows a time when Buy-and-Hold strategies become popular. So people are not willing to get involved.
The fact that that’s the only thing keeping Buy-and-Hold going today is a very, very bad sign for Buy-and-Hold. Advancing death threats and engaging in extortion are desperation tactics. The Buy-and-Holders would not employ such tactics if they thought that Buy-and-Hold (no market timing!) could be effectively defended in civil and reasoned debate. They employ those tactics because they don’t believe that they have any other choice other than to acknowledge that Shiller’s Nobel-prize-winning research has discredited the Buy-and-Hold concept. I think it would be better just to move on.
The desperation stuff is not for me. For me, the goal is to learn how to invest effectively, not to keep Buy-and-Hold from being questioned no matter what the consequence. It is my belief that deep inside that is the goal of the Buy-and-Holders too. They cannot bring themselves to acknowledge it now that the cover-up has been going on for 40 years. But I believe that deep down inside we are all in this together, we all want the same things.
There’s only one way to put the nasty stuff behind us and to get to all the good stuff. That’s to open every site on the internet to honest posting re the last 40 years of peer-reviewed research. So that’s where I hope to take this thing in the days following the next price crash.
Wish me luck, Anonymous!
My best wishes to you and yours.
Rob
Name just one person that agrees with you about Wade being threatened and show us the link.
I’ve spoken to many people about what happened to Wade Pfau. Everyone who I told the story to found it shocking. No one has ever questioned whether I was telling the truth.
I sent e-mails to 30,000 academic researchers telling them what happened to Wade. Several wrote back that this was below any acceptable ethical standard.
There’s a difference between knowing that something is wrong and wanting to get involved to fix it. The price for getting involved re this matter is very high. Shiller published his research in 1981. So the cover-up has been going on for 40 years. There are a lot of powerful and wealthy people who do not want the general public to learn what has been going on.
But what happens after the next price crash? If Shiller is right, many trillions of dollars of irrational exuberance will disappear into thin air. People will not be able to spend when they have lost that much money. Hundreds of thousands of businesses will go under. Millions of people will be thrown out of work. Political frictions will worsen. Will there be a few brave and good people who will work up the courage to speak out then? I think there will be.
We are a good people, Anonymous. We are not perfect or we would have got to work rewriting the textbooks soon after Shiller published his research. But we are basically good. That’s why we have laws against extortion, That’s why we have laws against threats of physical violence. We will as a society do the right thing in the end.
Or so this Rob Bennett fellow believes, in any event. There’s always that one-in-a-hundred possibility that I am wrong, We will just have to wait to see how things play out to find out for sure.
My best and warmest wishes to you and yours.
Rob
So you can’t name just one person and provide a link, yet Wade Pfau has denied that there was ever any threat made against him. So the whole premise is false to start with. When you send out 30,000 emails making the claim, you were just spreading something that lacks any proof.
The guy spent 16 months of his life studying whether long-term market timing always works or not. He sent me scores of e-mails describing his excitement over our findings. He posted numerous articles at his web site summarizing our work. He contributed to discussions about it at the Bogleheads Forum on many occasions, He sent our paper to several peer-reviewed journals and had it published in one. Then you Goons threatened to destroy his career unless he took the articles he had written down from his web site and agreed to stop doing honest work on these matters in the future. And he wrote to me and told me that he was scared of you and that one of the journals he had contacted had told him that they had received hate mail from Buy-and-Holders. He told me that he thought that he might lose his job if he continued doing honest work and that he thought that the best thing he could do was to keep quiet. That’s extortion, Anonymous.
And of course this is not the only case. There’s the fact that I was banned from many sites where hundreds of posters have expressed a desire to be able to hear what I have to say and despite the fact that I have never once in 19 years violated a published posting rule. There’s the fact that I have had financial advisers call me on the telephone because they want to pick my brain on Valuation-Informed Indexing but they ask me not to tell anyone that they have spoken to me. Rob Arnott said that he would like to help me but that he is dealing with too much “controversy” of his own because he has spoken honestly about the effect of stock valuations on long-term returns. Bill Bernstein said that the safe withdrawal rate studies were off by two full percentage points at the top of the bubble but then never said that when he was posting at the Bogleheads Forum. The Wall Street Journal ran a story in which Bret Arends said that the ides that long-term timing doesn’t work is “a bunch of hooey” and that the Buy-and-Holders leave out half the story when they talk to investors. Numerous professors who teach this stuff in universities have told me that my work is top rate and yet I am banned everywhere that matters. Call me madcap but, yes, I have come to believe that there is some funny stuff going on.
A nation cannot survive indefinitely if there is no means to communicate to millions of investors what the peer-reviewed research teaches is all about how stock investing works in the real world. The people of the United States are going to find a way to overcome you Goons. Because we have no choice. It will happen in the days following the next price crash, when millions of people will be able to see with their own eyes the consequences of the relentless promotion of a pure Get Rich Quick approach to stock investing without people even being able to hear about the downside of it and to deide for themselves. We’ll see, you know?
I will continue to wish you all the best things that this life has to offer a person. And I will continue to maintain that the retirement study posted to John Greaney’s web site lacks an adjustment for the valuation level that applies on the day the retirement begins. Because I believe that it is best for you Goons and for Greaney himself that this cover-up brought to a full and complete stop. I don’t believe that any of us is capable of knowing everything there is to know about a subject. So we should always be willing to let the other guy say what he thinks and to keep our minds open to learning from it. That’s where I am coming from, Anonymous. That’s the story here. I truly do not believe that that study contains a valuation adjustment. So that’s what I say when discussions of safe withdrawal rates come up on the internet.
My best wishes.
Rob
You claim to have all these supporters, yet you can’t even get one of the them to post anonymously on this site.
You claim that threats were made, yet you can’t post just one link here.
Everything you say requires us to just take you word for it. In many cases, we would also have to believe that there is also a mass conspiracy and that all these experts out there are liars.
You don’t have to take anybody’s word for anything, Anonymous. It wouldn’t take you 1o minutes to pull up Greaney’s study for yourself and see whether it contains an adjustment for the valuation level that applies on the day the retirement begins.
People used that study to plan their retirements. I was there. They talked about it every day at the old Retire Early board.
Rob
“You don’t have to take anybody’s word for anything, Anonymous.”
That is the only option left if there is no proof to say otherwise. Stop rehashing your tired Greaney line. It has been explained thousands of times by many people how you were wrong. The current topic is the threats that you have alleged. There is nothing to see, other than your claims. Period.
Okay, Anonymous.
I do wish you all good things, in any event.
Rob