Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently posted to the discussion thread for another blog entry at this site:
Can you explain why you make allegations of criminal acts, yet refuse to provide proof that they even exist?
Can you explain why Greaney has not corrected an error in his retirement study that was brought to his attention 19 years ago?
The two things are the same thing. Greaney doesn’t want to correct the error. So he was left with no alternative but to engage in criminal acts to suppress discussion of it. The criminal acts obviously do not serve their purpose if they are acknowledged. So discussion of the criminal acts too is suppressed.
The root question is — Why do so many people (experts and ordinary investors alike) let him get away with it? The answer is — because they do not want to know the truth about how stock investing works. Buy-and-Hold/Get Rich Quick is a fantasy. Investors work together to create phony wealth (irrational exuberance). They sense on some level of consciousness that permitting discussion of the scam will cause it to unravel. So they insist that those who talk about these matters pretend that there is some reason to believe that market timing (price discipline!) is not required. Those who claim otherwise are disappeared.
But sooner or later the irrational exuberance disappears anyway. That is what Shiller’s Nobel-prize-winning research shows. So this suppression of honest posting business is a temporary strategy. It won’t work forever. When it fails, then what?
We will have the choice as a people to educate ourselves re the first true research-based investment strategy (Valuation-Informed Indexing, which is Buy-and-Hold without the no-market-timing business). We can move forward or we can refuse to move forward and suffer the consequences, which according to Shiller’s research will be severe. I of course vote for moving forward.
If that is the choice that we make as a society, we will be able to talk about all aspects of the question at that time — safe withdrawal rates, market timing, allocation percentages, risk management, and yes, the death threats and other criminal acts that helped us to remain in the dark when we so desperately wanted help in doing that. My job is to tell the story in a balanced and clear and complete way. I intend to give it my best shot.
If you want to know why nothing has been done about the death threats, ask yourself why nothing has been done about the error in Greaney’s retirement study. That’s the story that matters. If we cannot get errors in retirement studies corrected, we are in a fix. And it has been 19 years now. I still say to this day that Greaney’s study lacks an adjustment for the valuation level that applies on the day the retirement begins.
I believe that as a society we are in the process of working up the courage to hear the truth about how stock investing works. I believe that we are going to make it to the other side. Not until after the next price crash. But I believe that we will then make it. But then I would, wouldn’t I?
My best and warmest wishes you you and yours, my dear Goon friend.
Rob
Just one big massive conspiracy against you, right?
No.
Its a conspiracy of ignorance. And it is not just against me. It is against every human being living on Planet Earth. You own stocks, Anonymous. It is to your benefit to know how stock investing works. The Ban on Honest Posting hurts you in a very serious way. It’s a conspiracy against you as much as it is a conspiracy against me.
Human beings move out of ignorance over time by discovering new things. Shiller taught us something new and very important. That’s why he was awarded a Nobel prize. The problem that we are having is that the advance is so big that it makes the Buy-and-Holders feel bad that they did not always know it all. That’s the source of the resistance — permitting honest posting would require that the Buy-and-Holders say the words “I” and “Was” and “Wrong.”
My view is that we should all encourage them to say it. They are going to have to say it sooner or later, right? We are not going to watch the next Buy-and-Hold Crisis bring our economic and political system to their knees and not do anything about it. So we are going to open the entire internet to honest posting and the Buy-and-Holders will be saying the words “I” and “Was” and “Wrong.” Isn’t it best that they say those words as soon as possible? It sure seems so to me. So that is what I have been urging going back to the morning of May 13, 2002.
The Buy-and-Holders advanced many powerful insights. They helped us all in many important ways. Shouldn’t we all be trying to help them out when the opportunity presents itself? It sure seems so to me.
My best and warmest wishes to you.
Rob
“Its a conspiracy of ignorance.”
Everyone is ignorant but you?
The market is crashing today. Why isn’t anyone blaming it on buy and hold? Is that all part of the mass conspiracy? Why hasn’t The New York Times called you for an interview?
Everyone is ignorant but you?
May 13, 2002, was the day that i worked up the courage to point out the error in the Greaney retirement study. I still believed in Buy-and-Hold at that time. So I was ignorant.
And how about before that? I posted at the Retire Early board for three years before I advanced that post. So I was ignorant then, right?
We humans learn things by talking them over with other humans. So long as we do not give ourselves permission to talk about the last 40 years of peer-reviewed research, we will remain largely ignorant of it. Once we all feel free to talk about it, our ignorance will dissipate. That’s what I want to see.
I am less ignorant today because I talk about this stuff every day. I write articles about it and all that sort of thing. We should all be doing that. We should all want to know how stock investing works.
Rob
The market is crashing today. Why isn’t anyone blaming it on buy and hold? Is that all part of the mass conspiracy? Why hasn’t The New York Times called you for an interview?
If the news reports blamed Buy-and-Hold for falling prices, they would fall even harder? The people writing the news reports don’t want that and the people reading the news reports don’t want that. That’s why.
Do you think that the people who were invested in the Madoff fund wanted the fraud exposed? For so long as the fraud remained in place, people could pretend that they were richer than they really were. That’s the story with all Get Rich Quick approaches. They are a trap. The time to see through them is when your financial future is not riding on them. Once you have everything riding on the fraud remaining in place, you lose your objectivity. Your emotions block out what your intellect is trying to tell you.
Rob
“If the news reports blamed Buy-and-Hold for falling prices, they would fall even harder? The people writing the news reports don’t want that and the people reading the news reports don’t want that. That’s why.”
Again, that is all part of the big conspiracy against you, right?
No. It’s not directed at me. Most of these people don’t even know that I exist.
It is directed at the last 40 years of peer-reviewed research in this field. That’s the threat. Permit discussion of the last 40 years of peer-reviewed research and it becomes very hard to believe in a pure Get Rich Quick approach. And we humans love, love, love the idea of getting something for nothing. Get Rich Quick investing strategies are very dear to us. We cannot tolerate the discussion of research that points us to the realities.
Were the people who worked for the tobacco companies engaged in a conspiracy against the scientists who discovered that smoking causes cancer in the days before we put warnings on the cigarette packages? They didn’t want word getting out, that much is certainly fair to say. But a lot of those people smoked themselves! They were killing lots of people. Some of the people they were killing were themselves and their friends and members of their families. That’s a funny kind of conspiracy, a conspiracy aimed at yourself and your loves ones. I call that a conspiracy of ignorance. Had they known how strong the connection was between smoking and getting cancer, they would have agreed that warnings were needed. But they saw the cancer research as a threat to their way of making a living and so they rationalize the policy of not having warnings on the packages.
No one would advocate Buy-and-Hold today had Shiller’s research been published in 1961. THe problem is that we learned what doesn’t work before we learned what does work and so now we need to acknowledge having made a mistake if we are to move forward. Some of us are having a hard time with that. It’s a very big advance. The bigger the advance is, the harder it is to admit the mistake that kept people from enjoying the benefits of the advance many years sooner.
Rob
“It is directed at the last 40 years of peer-reviewed research in this field. That’s the threat. Permit discussion of the last 40 years of peer-reviewed research and it becomes very hard to believe in a pure Get Rich Quick approach. And we humans love, love, love the idea of getting something for nothing. Get Rich Quick investing strategies are very dear to us. We cannot tolerate the discussion of research that points us to the realities.”
But then why are you the only one that is so widely banned?
I don’t respond to the intimidation tactics. I continue to say that the Greaney retirement study lacks a valuation adjustment no matter what threats are employed to shut me up. I am not smarter than others. I am more stubborn.
Rob
So you are the only one that is stubborn. The rest of the investment community is either passive or ignorant, while you stand alone as being the only knowledgeable and ethical person in the entire investment community.
I am certainly not the most knowledgeable person. Shiller was awarded a Nobel prize for his work.
And I wasn’t terribly ethical during the three years in which I was too afraid of Greaney and his Goon Squad to tell my fellow community members about the error in the study that they were using to plan their retirements.
I have learned a lot over the past 19 years. That’s for sure. My knowledge of the realities of stock investing grows deeper with every column that I write and with every chapter of my upcoming book that I write. I would today put my knowledge of why market timing is so critical up against that of anyone in the world, including Shiller. It’s not my intent to hoard. I have argued that we need to open every discussion board and blog on the internet to honest posting re the last 40 years of peer-reviewed research. Do that and you will soon have thousands of people discussing stock investing in a realistic way. From that day forward, we will all be living better and richer and more fulfilling lives than we ever though possible in the Buy-and-Hold Era.
I can live with that.
Rob
“I have learned a lot over the past 19 years. That’s for sure. My knowledge of the realities of stock investing grows deeper with every column that I write and with every chapter of my upcoming book that I write.”
No, you really haven’t learned anything. What you write are just repeats. You have about 3 or 4 themes and you just repeat it over and over and over again. In fact, I challenge you to name just one thing that you have posted that is new in the last 5 years. Try really hard and see if you can come up with just one thing.
There’s really only one theme — valuations affect long-term returns. Every word that I have ever written on stock investing follows from that premise. If the market is efficient, as was believed at the time that Buy-and-Hold was developed, then valuations do NOT affect long-term returns and every statement that I have ever written about stock investing is false. But if Shiller’s Nobel-prize-winning research is valid research, then the market is NOT efficient and valuations affect long-term returns and every statement that the Buy-and-Holders have ever made about stock investing is false. It’s one or the other.
It’s better to get every aspect of the stock investing project right than to get every aspect of the stock investing project wrong. So, if there is even one chance in a billion that Shiller’s Nobel-prize-winning research is legitimate research, we should be permitting posting rooted in the premuse that valuations affect long-term returns at every site on the internet. We don’t want to get them all wrong. So, if there is any chance at all that Shiller is on to something, we need to be exploring the far-reaching implications of Shiller’s amazing research breakthrough at every opportunity that presents itself.
I develop new implications of the core premise on a daily basis. I write a weekly column at the Value Walk site, for one thing. That forces me to come up with new insights. I also continue work on my book, Just yesterday, I added two thoughts that I want to explore in the book to a file where I keep a list of them that occur to me when I am taking a walk or whatever. That process of developing new insights as to how stock investing works will never end so long as stock investing does not end. It is me developing them because I am the one who will not drop this thing. It should be thousands of different people developing them. Those insights help every last one of us. So, if we were thinking straight, we would all want to see as many of them developed as possible. We have had many many people express a desire to get in on the fun. But, when they discover that speaking honestly about the subject of stock investing will bring on death threats and acts of extortion, they pull back. People are not used to seeing that sort of behavior. The stuff that we have seen from the Buy-and-Holders is far, far, far out of the cultural norm for our society.
Even that reality tells us that we have a tiger by the tale here. If the Buy-and-Holders were confident that the market is efficient, they would welcome challenges to their thinking. Challenges would help them sharpen their thinking. The Buy-and-Holders do not welcome challenges. Not even a tiny bit. That is not a good sign for Buy-and-Hold.
I think it would be fair to say that market timing is 70 percent of the story of what it takes to be successful in stock investing for the long term. You can’t take 70 percent of what matters off the table and do a good job of offering advice. We all need to be encouraging market timing (price discipline!) at all times and in all places. And the Buy-and-Holders just do not do that. We need to have a general acknowledgement of the mistake they made if we all are to move forward in our understanding of this important subject matter.
That’s my sincere take, in any event.
My best wishes.
Rob