Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently posted to the discussion thread for another blog entry at this site:
What do you feel you need to see and accomplish in order to feel as if you have been successful. Is it the $500 million windfall? Is it a nobel prize?
Or putting it another way. If you never get a dime of your windfall payment, you continue to be banned and your retirement fails, causing financial distress, will you consider your efforts to be a failure?
I like this question.
For me, success would be seeing every discussion board and blog on the internet being opened to honest posting re the last 40 years of peer-reviewed research in this field. I believe in the United States. I love my country. So I naturally believe that the same laws that apply in every field of endeavor outside of the investing advice field should apply in the investing advice field as well.
What I like about the idea of having U.S. law apply in the investing advice field is that it provides us all a way of getting our mistakes corrected over time. If I made a mistake and honest posting were permitted, someone would point it out and I would have to correct it. If I violated U.S. law to suppress discussion of the mistake, I would be placed in a prison cell and the rest of the nation would be able to resume its learning experience.
I love it that we have laws in place that provides for correction of mistakes in that way. There is of course a great responsibility involved in making suggestions as to how people might invest their retirement money. It gives me comfort knowing that, so long as the laws of the United States apply in this field, any mistakes that I make will be discovered and corrected. I of course want that comfort to apply for my Buy-and-Hold friends. So I argue in favor of having the laws of the United States apply in this field.
There’s nothing that could happen to me that could cause me to view my efforts as a failure. If honest posting were permitted and the ideas did not catch on, I would view my efforts as a failure. But for so long as the ban on honest posting remains in place, the failure of the ideas to catch on is of no particular significance. The discussions lack integrity for so long as no criminal acts are being employed by Valuation-Informed Indexers but are being employed by Buy-and-Holders.
If anything, the fact that Buy-and-Holders employ criminal acts suggests that Shiller’s Nobel-prize-winning research is legitimate research. Shiller showed that investors are sometimes highly emotional (Buy-and-Hold posits that investors are always 100 percent rational). It is crazy to engage in criminal behavior because there are people who follow a different investment strategy than you do. If the Buy-and-Holders were right, we never would have seen any criminal acts. All of the bad behavior that we have seen over the past 19 years could exist only in a world in which investors were highly emotional, which is the world that Shiller says exists.
I want to restore integrity to discussions of stock investing. For so long as our discussions lack integrity, we are in the soup, in my assessment. Once integrity is restored, I will be highly confident that we will end up in a good place. I love my country and it is hard to think about the horrors that are likely to follow if we don’t as a nation work up the courage to stand up to you Goons and insist that honest posting re the last 40 years of peer-reviewed research be permitted at every discussion board and blog, without a single exception.
That’s where I am coming from, Anonymous.
I naturally wish you all the best that this life has to offer a person regardless of what investment strategy you elect to follow.
Rob
If criminal acts occurred, they would be prosecuted. If you had a valid claim to the $500 million, you would have a line of legal firms all competing to represent you. If you had a successful track record with your VII strategy, you would have millions wanting to invest with the VII strategy. If your had any credibility, you would have thousands posting here every day.
Instead, you have none of the above.
If smoking caused cancer, no one would smoke.
If driving drunk caused accidents, no one would drive drunk.
If dating the wrong person caused heartbreak, no one would date the wrong person.
Humans are not perfectly rational creatures, Anonymous. We are capable of acting rationally. But it does not come automatic. We need to work it. CAPE is the tool that stock investors can use to identify when they have become dangerously irrational and to make corrections. There is a good reason why Shller was awarded a Nobel prize. His finding that stock investors often behave in dangerously irrational ways empowers us all to do better (higher returns, less risk) in the future than we have ever done in the past. It is by talking over the far-reaching implications of Shiller’s research that we come to a deep understanding of his findings and achieve the insights needed to live far richer and fuller and better lives than we ever before imagined that we could live.
If investors were 100 percent rational, the safe withdrawal rate would always be the same number. But they are not. Learning that was the breakthrough. We have wasted 40 years that could have been spent developing Shiller’s insights. We will never get those 40 years back. But there is no law that requires us to waste additional years. It’s a matter of us learning to say the words “I” and “Was” and “Wrong.” Or, at the bare minimum, “I’m” and “Not” and “Sure.” That much would at least open the door to learning about the most amazing 40 years of stock investing research in the history of investment analysis.
My sincere take.
And my best and warmest wishes to you.
Rob
“If smoking caused cancer, no one would smoke.
If driving drunk caused accidents, no one would drive drunk.
If dating the wrong person caused heartbreak, no one would date the wrong person.”
There is evidence behind each of these statements, yet there is no evidence in the criminal allegations you make. There is also no evidence of a successful out come after implementing VII. In fact, just he opposite. Your retirement plan failed.
There’s a mountain of evidence. I pointed out the error in the Greaney retirement study in a post that I put to a Motley Fool discussion board on the morning of May 13, 2002. The study has not been corrected to this day. Do you care to describe some means by which that could happen without criminal behavior having taken place? Its inconceivable.
The Bennett/Pfau peer-reviewed research shows that Valuation-Informed Indexing has been FAR superior to Buy-and-Hold (higher returns, lower risk) for as far back as we have records of stock prices.
Science! Stay the Course!
Rob