“Try Doing It Without the Criminal Stuff for a Few Weeks and See What Happens. The Internet Will Explode If You Do That.”

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

If there was all this “tension” you speak of, then your website would have loads of people commenting.  Instead, we just have crickets.

When I put up my famous post from the morning of May 13, 2002, the place exploded. Community member after community member said: “Thanks for starting the most exciting discussion we have ever seen!” That’s how it would be here and at every other investing site on the internet today if not for the criminal acts.

That stuff scares people. The criminal stuff suppresses discussion. Try doing it without the criminal stuff for a few weeks and see what happens. The internet will explode if you do that. There are good reasons why we have laws against death threats and against extortion and all the rest. We need to begin enforcing the law in the investing advice field in the same manner as we enforce it in every other field of human endeavor.

Do that and it will just be good stuff piled on top of good stuff piled on top of good stuff. But for so long as the law is not enforced against the Buy-and-Holders, they have too much of an edge. Being a pure Get Rich Quick approach gives them a huge edge right from the start. Add in that the Buy-and-Holders got there first and this have inertia on their side and they have a second major edge. Throw in that telling people that irrational exuberance is real money is the greatest marketing gimmick in history and they have a third major edge. The Valuation-Informed Indexers could overcome all that if we did something about the death threats and the extortion. But give the Buy-and-Holders a fourth huge edge by granting them an exemption from U.S. and the hill is just too big to climb.

I don’t believe that that will continue to remain true in the days following the next price crash. But for now, we will need to do something to rein in the criminal stuff if we want people to learn what the last 40 years of peer-reviewed research teaches us all about how stock investing works in the real world.

My best wishes to you, Anonymous.

Rob