Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently posted to the discussion thread for another blog entry at this site:
Other than JWR, why hasn’t there been just one person that has said that they believe the death threats, job threats, extortion, etc or even has come out to say they support your VII strategy and use it for their own portfolio, or say they agree with your interpretation of what Schiller says?
Are they all afraid of those mystical goons, despite being able to post anonymously?
There have been thousands who have expressed a desire that honest posting be permitted. There have been hundreds who have said they see merit in Valuation-Informed Indexing. Some very effusively so. I have had numerous people tell me that they view me as the first person who has ever spoken about stock investing in a way that makes complete sense.
The intimidation stuff is very scary to people. There was a day when women were not permitted to vote. Why didn’t everybody speak up? Some genuinely supported the policy. But lots and lots of people were just afraid to speak up about something that was so deeply embedded into our way of life. Buy-and-Hold is deeply embedded into our understanding of how stock investing works. If we opened every site to honest posting on the last 40 years of research tomorrow morning, that would cause a massive price crash and an economic crisis. Would you want to be responsible for that?
People are intimidated by the social pressure to pretend that Get Rich Quick/Buy-and-Hold is just fine. The other side of the story, of course, is that, the longer the cover-up continues, the harder things will be for all of us when it finally is brought to a close, as it must be if our economic system is going to remain in place. So I vote for permitting honest posting. But lots of good and smart people have a hard time standing up to you Goons, given the circumstances that apply.
Had Shiller’s research come 20 years sooner, there never would have been any controversy. Had we known how stock investing worked before Buy-and-Hold came along, no one would have ever taken the idea seriously. But that’s not the way things played out. So we have to do things in his unfortunate, mixed-up way instead.
My best wishes to you.
Rob
We have different definitions of the word “honest”. Let’s set that aside for a minute. If the entire I was open, including your website, it would be just like it was many years ago. You would be hijacking every thread and posting the same repetitive stuff and people would explain why you are wrong. There would be no change in the stock market.
I would certainly be posting the same stuff. I would be saying that irrational exuberance is a negative and that we all should be doing all we can to overcome it through market timing.
I have never once hijacked a thread and I never would. It would be against everything that I believe in. But it is certainly true that my posts generated a lot of attention. That’s because so few people dare to call the Buy-and-Holders out on their b.s. So the posts of those that do generate a lot of controversy. The solution to that is to permit honest posting everywhere so that instances of it no longer stand out so much. Honest posting re the last 40 years of peer-reviewed research should be a ho-hum thing, not some international incident.
As the ideas caught on, there would be a big change in the stock market. The more we can persuade people of the importance of market timing, the more we can pull prices down. A CAPE level in the mid-30s is a logical impossibility in a world in which people feel free to post honestly about the far-reaching implications of Shiller’s Nobel-prize-winning research. We could never have another out-of-control bull market once we have opened every site to honest posting re the last 40 years of peer-reviewed research. Once investors were free to learn what was in their best interest, stock prices would become self-regulating.
My sincere take.
Rob
How do you think things change when it is just the same message as before ? Can I post links showing where you hijacked threads?
You can’t post links that don’t exist, Anonymous.
The smear campaign began when I pointed out the error in the retirement study posted at John Greany’s web site (it lacks an adjustment for the valuation level that applies on the day the retirement begins). The study has not been corrected to this day. That shows where the trouble lies The Buy-and-Holders do not want to correct their error. There were millions of people who used the 4 percent rule to plan their retirements.
Getting the numbers in retirement studies right is not a small thing. That is a huge positive change.
And pointing out the error in the Greaney retirement study was only the first day!
Rob
So you have posted the same thing 17,877 times. What makes you think that when you post it 17,878 times, people will suddenly change their mind?
There were scores of people who responded to my very first post asking if we should consider valuations when calculating the safe withdrawal rate by thanking me for starting the most exciting and helpful discussion in the history of the Retire Early board. If Motley Fool had given Greaney the boot when he advanced his first death threat (as I recommended at the time), Valuation-Informed Indexing would today be the dominant model for understanding stock investing today.
Motley Fool went for the quick buck. It’s hard for a research-based strategy to compete with a pure Get Rich Quick approach for popularity points.
I have never had any problem whatsoever convincing lots of people of the merit of following a research-based approach. The problem is that, the more successful I am in persuading people, the more brutally abusive you Goons become. People don’t like to see the lives of their loved ones threatened. Until as a society we agree to enforce the laws of the United States in the investing advice field as we do in all other fields, you Goons are going to have the edge.
I believe that we will see a big change in the days following the next price crash, when millions of people will see half of their stock portfolio disappear into thin air. We’ll see.
Rob