I’ve posted Entry #539 to my weekly Valuation-Informed Indexing column at the Value Walk<I’vesite. It’s called We Don’t Acknowledge Our Get Rich Quick Urge cause It’s Irrationality Shames Us.
Juicy Excerpt: The psychological block is the shame we feel over what we have done. The damage done by a bull market is small in its early years. So the shame felt over it is limited. But as prices rise higher and the risk attached to them grows greater, the shame we feel over our irrational behavior grows stronger. When a bull market has been in place for a long time (this one has been in place for a longer time than any earlier bull market in U.S. stock market history), the shame grows so strong that discussion of the dangers of bull markets becomes taboo. Irrational exuberance is fun in its early days, In its later days, it becomes something that we cannot bear to look at closely.
Anonymous says
The only shame someone would have is if they do not make the appropriate efforts in fulfilling their obligations in supporting their family.
Rob says
I don’t agree.
I trained all my life to be a journalist. And I have had thousands of people say that they want to hear what I have to say on this subject. I have had leading experts in the field praise my work to the skies. I obviously believe that U.S. law should have been applied when you Goons advanced death threats and acts of extortion and all that sort of thing. If that had happened, I would have made many, many millions of dollars and every investor on the planet would be in a better place today. Our economic system would be more stable. All good stuff.
I don’t quite buy the idea that supporting my family is my only obligation. My mother lived through the Great Depression. She told me stories. In the event that stocks continue to perform in the future at least somewhat as they always have in the past, we stand a good chance of seeing this runaway bull market putting us in a Second Great Depression. That’s a big deal. That means seeing millions of lives destroyed..
Circumstances have placed me in a situation in which I can do something to help us to survive a Second Great Depression. The key thing that we are going to need to do then is to help investors get over their irrational depression and push the CAPE level back up to fair-value levels. The people who pushed Buy-and-Hold are not going to have any credibility at that time because they caused the problem with their “no market timing” blah-blah. I believe that I can tell the story of what the peer-reviewed research teaches us in a way that will help us all. So I feel obligated to stick to my honest-posting thing.
We live in communities. A person’s first obligation is to his own family, I agree with that. But, when millions of lives are at risk, I think that a person needs to try to work out some sort of balance in which the millions of people are not entirely sold out. Personally, I could not sleep at night if I sold out those people in an effort to appease you Goons, That one doesn’t fly for me.
I naturally wish you all the best, Anonymous.
Rob
Anonymous says
So you think your VII campaign should come before your family. Got it.
Evidence Based Investing says
How close are you to finishing your book?
Rob says
A person has to be able to live with himself, Anonymous. The circumstances here are very, very, very unusual. A person has to do the best that he can do given the circumstances that apply.
You make it sound like my family would be spared negative consequences if I just didn’t have you Goons trying to destroy my ability to earn a living. It’s not so. My family is going to have to live in the world that we are creating with this massive act of financial fraud. There aren’t going to be many jobs around for my boys if we experience a Second Great Depression. It’s possible that a Second Great Depression could bring on such political turmoil that we get involved in a war and then even their lives would be at risk.
Ignoring that is not the responsible thing to do. Those of us who are aware of what is going on have a responsibility to speak out. I am sure of that much.
Look at it this way. Would the Buy-and-Holders be willing to risk a Second Great Depression and all the human suffering that will come with it if the past 40 years of peer-reviewed research were not very, very, very important? So we are in agreement re the importance of these matters. If those of us who believe that Shiller’s Nobel-prize-winning research is legitimate research fail to speak up, it might mean bringing on a Second Great Depression. And it ALSO might mean missing out on the biggest surge of economic growth ever seen in U.S. history. So it’s all bad on one side and all good on the other. And all that is needed to unlock the good is for a small number of people to work up the courage to stand up to you Goons and to insist on their right to post honestly at every discussion board and blog on the internet, without a single exception.
Given those stakes, I feel the need to carry on. I love my family and I hope that a payment of $500 million on the other side of this thing will help to make up for the 19 years when I couldn’t earn a penny because I was not willing to sell out my friends by pretending that I believed that the retirement study posted at John Greaney’s web site contains an adjustment for the valuation level that applies on the day the retirement begins. We’ll see, you know? John Walter Russell once said that he believed that this was all going to turn out in a way more positive than any of us were able to imagine was possible. That statement always had the ring of truth to it in my ears. So we’ll see, you know?
I naturally wish you all the best that this life has to offer a person, in any event.
Hang in there, man.
Rob
Rob says
If you found out about the 911 attacks before they happened and you felt that there was some risk to your family if you went to the authorities, would you have kept your mouth shut?
If you did, would you be able to sleep at night from that point forward?
Rob
Rob says
How close are you to finishing your book?
My current target date is August 1. I have made big strides lately. But there is still a ways to go. Sometimes you have to get into something pretty deep to see how deep it goes.
It’s insanely long. My first book was 84,000 words. Even that was slightly long by today’s standards. I would have preferred it to be something like 70,000 words. But there were a lot of serious ideas that needed to be explained in it. So I thought that 84.000 words was acceptable. This one is going to be twice that length. Lots of people won’t read a book that long. But to some extent the book tells us what its proper length is as you go about the process of writing it. I will make it as short as I can make it while not leaving out anything critically important. What I am learning from the writing process is that that is going to require more than 160,000 words. So be it, you know?
There are people who will not read a book that long. But I think it is important that I address every critically important question so that influential people who are willing to read something that long have all of their questions answered in one place. This is really two books: (1) the story of how stock investing really works as revealed by the peer-reviewed research; and (2) the story of how this critically important information has been denied to millions of investors for 40 years now. I wish that I could just write the first book. That’s the more fun story and that’s the one that people are ultimately interested in hearing. But the two stories cannot be separated. The missing piece of the puzzle has been how emotions affect stock investing and the 40-year cover-up is a story of emotions being permitted to run wild. So the fun story doesn’t make complete sense unless the cover-up is described in some depth.
Wish me luck re that August 1 completion date! As you know, I have blown right past a few earlier internal deadlines. It will be a huge weight off my shoulders when I can put this one to bed. I will be very, very, very pleased when that day comes to pass.
My best wishes to you.
Rob
Anonymous says
Will your book tell us about the death threats? Will your book tell us about how you will get the $500 million? Will your book name all the goons so we know who you are talking about?
Rob says
The book will discuss the death threats. There is no way that something like this could have happened without death threats. The normal thing is for people to feel free to discuss the findings of peer-reviewed research wherever they please. The death threats and similar behavior are what messed everything up. People do not say the same things when there are death threats hanging over them as they do when they feel free to express themselves honestly.
The book will discuss the $500 million payment that I expect to receive on the other side of the next price crash. Just as we want to do away with penalties for posting honestly, we want to encourage rewards for posting honestly. The fewer penalties and the more rewards we see for honest posting, the more honest posting we will see. And the stronger our understanding of how stock investing works will grow over time.
The book will discuss the Goon phenomenon. A key theme of the book is that we all have goonishness residing within us. If we didn’t love Get Rich Quick stuff so much, the Trinity study would never have passed peer review and Greaney would never have made the error that he made in his study. We have met the enemy and he is us! Stock investing does not need to be risky. It has always been risky in the past because,, prior to 1981, we did not have Shiller’s Nobel-prize-winning research findings available to us and, from 1981 forward, we have not given ourselves permission to discuss the far-reaching strategic implications of that research. The thing that holds us back is the goonishness within us all that so much desires something for nothing that it rejects the idea of applying human reason to the stock investing project.
The book is an extended argument for moving beyond goonishness and thereby opening up the possibility for us all to retire many years sooner while taking on much less risk with our retirement accounts. The key is saying those three magic words “I” and “Was” and “Wrong.” Saying those three words permits us to learn new things. And I think it would be fair to say that the last 40 years of peer-reviewed research will permit us all to enjoy the greatest learning experience in the history of personal finance once we give ourselves permission to discuss it.
Rob
Anonymous says
So we can expect to find your book in the fiction section.
Rob says
Next to Greaney’s safe-withdrawal-rate study.
Rob