Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently posted to the discussion thread for another blog entry at this site:
Your old pal Greaney still hasn’t gotten banned from Motley Fool: https://boards.fool.com/hocomania-still-active-34829648.aspx?sort=whole#34829648
He suggests you may be a bot, but in your defense, bots are more original.
The Retire Early board was an amazing place in the days before Greaney and his Goon Squad burned it to the ground. I still say to this day that the retirement study posted at his web site lacks an adjustment for the valuation level that applies on the day the retirement begins.
Rob
Wrong. The community established the Bogleheads forum to specifically get away from you and it has become the largest success we have seen to date in every respect. It is a friendly, very educational and has helped millions to become financially prepared for retirement.
Wrong. The community established the Bogleheads forum to specifically get away from you and it has become the largest success we have seen to date in every respect. It is a friendly, very educational and has helped millions to become financially prepared for retirement.
You are correct that the Boglehreads Forum was formed to escape me. But people did not want to escape me because I have b.o. People wanted to escape me because, every time someone requested help planning a retirement, one of the Buy-and-Holders would recommend using the Greaney retirement study and I would point out that that study lacks an adjustment for the valuations level that applies on the day the retirement begins. My claim re that point, which is correct, undermines a belief in the Buy-and-Hold model for understanding how stock investing works. If Shiller is right and Buy-and-Hold really is bad news, is it better for people to continue to live in a fantasy world? Or is it better for people to come to terms with what the last 40 years of research says? You know what I think.
I agree with all the good things you say about the Bogleheads Forum. Yes, it is educational and freindly and so on. Which is great. But you know what else it is? It is corrupt. If you went by the posts that appear at that board, you would think that market timing is not required. Or, heaven help us all, that it does not work. That belief is going to cause millions of people to suffer huge financial losses in days to come, in the event that stocks continue to perform in the future anything at all as they have always performed in the past. And it’s not because no one was willing to share honest information re the peer-reviewed research that people at that board don’t know the realities. Many people TRIED to post honestly and were either silenced or banned. Are the people who run the board responsible for the losses that will likely be suffered? It sure seems to me that they are. We will see how it plays out. But, if I were sitting on a jury, I would be highly sympathetic to claims advanced that hose people are responsible for any and all losses suffered.
How is that a good thing? If honest posting had been permitted, I would come to a different conclusion. Then I would say that each investor is responsible for his own decisions. But where there is criminal behavior employed to keep people from learning what they want and need to know, I come to a very different conclusion.
Corruption is not a good thing. That’s my sincere take.
Rob
The last count I have seen is that you have been kicked off from at least 15 boards. I have never seen you kicked off for the reason you state. Anyone that has kicked off this many times, it tells us that the problem is most likely them and not others.
In ordinary circumstances, I would agree with that. However, in this case, what I said on the morning of May 13, 2002, has proven out — the retirement study at Greaney’s web site really does lack an adjustment for the valuation level that applies on the day the retirement begins. Say that there were only a 1 in 100 chance that that is so. If there is a 1 in 1oo chance, then we should be discussing that possibility at every site on the internet. Greaney wasn’t the only one who pushed the 4 percent rule. That was common practice. There were thousands of newspaper articles that cited the 4 percent rule in advising people how to plan their retirements. So, if what I said really is so, there will be millions of failed retirements in the days following the next price crash. That could put us in the Second Great Depression. Getting this market timing thing figured out is the most important public policy issue before the United States states today.
The problem is not me. The problem is the 40-year cover-up. Human beings make mistakes. If the Buy-and-Holders are not willing to admit their mistake, that puts us all at great risk of enduring huge financial losses. We need to apply our laws in the same manner in the investing advice field as we apply them in every other field of human endeavor.
Or so this Rob Bennett fellow sincerely believes, in any event.
My best and warmest wishes to you and yours.,
Rob