“None of us Should Want to See a Second Great Depression.”

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

“Because it is just a distraction to act like the death threats themselves are a big deal.”

You have made a big deal about them, so people ask you for proof and then you don’t provide it.

“The big deal is that I pointed out an error in a retirement study 19 years ago and it has not been corrected to this day.”

Wade Pfau, and many others, have pointed out how you don’t understand John Greaney’s work and what he has said. People keep telling you all of this over and over and over again, and all you want is more access to other people’s websites to repeat the same thing over and over again. This is known as bad behavior.

I think that the last 40 years of peer-reviewed research in this field needs to be part of the discussion anytime stock investing is being discussed. There are today two academic models for understanding how stock investing works, Buy-and-Hold and Valuation-Informed Indexing. Everybody knows about Buy-and-Hold because it is discussed everywhere and has been for a long time. Few understand Valuation-Informed Indexing in any depth because only 10 percent of the population believes in it and that 10 percent holds back from talking about it in any depth for fear of alienating the Buy-and-Holders, who are in the majority. So millions of people who would be open to making the transition from Buy-and-Hold to Valuation-Informed Indexing if they heard all about it and had all their questions answered, are not even aware that there is an alternative to Buy-and-Hold that is supported by 40 years of peer-reviewed research (which is so respected that the author of it has been awarded a Nobel prize).

I believe that Valuation-Informed Indexing is the future and that Buy-and-Hold is the past. So I want to see the word spread as quickly as possible. That won’t happen if I and the others in the 10 percent don’t insist on our right to post our honest beliefs. Since I want others to do that, I think that I am absolutely required to do it myself. During the three years when I posted at Motley Fool and did not speak up about the error in the Greaney retirement study, there were a lot of people who were friends of mine who got the impression that I believed that the study was accurate because I never said otherwise. I am ashamed of myself for having been such a coward. The other side of the story is that I have seen how excited people get when Valuation-Informed Indexing clicks for them for the first time. I have had many people tell me that it is by listening to me that they came to understand how stock investing really works for the first time. I found it very gratifying to have that effect on people and I would like to see that happen in millions of additional cases.

The Ban on Honest Posting is killing us. The best thing to do when you discover that you have made a mistake is to acknowledge it and move on with your life. To be covering up a mistake for the rest of your life is a horrible place to be. The Buy-and-Holders would of course benefit themselves from developing a better understanding of how stock investing works, Today, it’s not even the idea that people will learn about their mistake that most bothers them. Today, they don’t want people to learn about the 40-year cover-up. And that feeling of course just gets worse as the cover-up extends longer into time.

I love my country, That’s the bottom line. The mistake that the Buy-and-Holders made (that market timing — price discipline! — is not required) is in the process of hurting millions of people in a very serious way. None of us should want to see a Second Great Depression. None of us should want to see hundreds of thousands of businesses go under. None of us should want to see millions of people thrown out of work. None of us should want to see political frictions worsen. The laws that we have against threats of physical violence and against extortion are there for a good reason. We should be 100 percent united in wanting to see those laws enforced in the investment advice field just as they are enforced in all other fields of human endeavor.

That’s where I am coming from, Anonymous. I naturally wish you all the best that this life has to offer a person.

Rob