Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently posted to the discussion thread for another blog entry at this site:
I wouldn’t feel comfortable using a timing scheme that has no successful outcome. I would not feel comfortable not having a retirement nest egg in my 60’s. I would not feel comfortable relying on some kind of fantasy windfall payment to rescue my failed retirement.
Then you shouldn’t do those things.
Where you go seriously off track is in blocking millions of others who would like to hear both sides of the story and then make their own decisions re what they are comfortable doing.
That’s my sincere take, Anonymous.
My best and warmest wishes to you and yours.
Rob
“ Where you go seriously off track is in blocking millions of others who would like to hear both sides of the story and then make their own decisions re what they are comfortable doing.”
Millions want to hear your story? Really? You can’t even get one person to come here asking you for information/advice. Also, why should any other board owner have an obligation to let post whatever you want? Every board owner controls their content. What is do special about you versus the other 300+ million Americans.
All of the sites have published posting rules. They should follow them. Most sites prohibit death threats. So, if one group of posters advances death threats with the aim of blocking discussion of the last 40 years of peer-reviewed research in this field, the site owner should remove the group advancing the death threats, not the people posting their sincere views at whom the death threats are aimed.
John Walter Russell referred to the current state of play at investing sites as “mob rule.” The Buy-and-Holders got there first. Buy-and-Hold was developed in the 1960s and Shiller did not publish his Nobel-prize-winning research showing that valuations affect long-term returns until 1981. If everything is decided by majority vote, then the Buy-and-Holders can block people from learning about the new research indefinitely. That hurts us all. We all need to know how stock investing works in the real world. We need to know about both the pre-1981 research (Buy-and-Hold) and the post-1980 research (Valuation-Informed Indexing).
When posting honestly re the last 40 years of peer-reviewed research is banned at the behest of the Buy-and-Holders, people viewing the boards to gain a sense of what works in stock investing get a distorted view of the realities. Since they never hear about the new research, they come to believe that everyone who has examined these matters has come to believe that Buy-and-Hold (no market timing!) is a reasonable strategy. Nothing could be father from the truth. People need to know the realities. They need to hear both sides of the story to be able to form reasonable assessments of their own.
Even Evidence-Based Investing (one of the generals in Greaney’s Goon Army) now acknowledges that the Greaney retirement study lacks an adjustment for the valuation level that applies on the day the retirement takes place. People should be pointing that out every time someone refers to the Greaney study’s claim that the safe withdrawal rate is always 4 percent. When people don’t hear that objection, they assume that the study might be legitimate research. No site owner should be supporting such deceptions on so important a matter. A failed retirement is a serious life setback.
If Motley Fool would have banned Greaney on the day he advanced his first death threat (August 27, 2002), the world would today be 19 years ahead of where it in fact is in its understanding of how stock investing works in the real world. That would be a very, very, very good thing for each and every one of us. The site should have followed its published posting rules rather than just have gone with the easier way to turn a quick buck (Buy-and-Hold and indeed all Get Rich Quick “strategies” are highly popular at times when stock valuations are at dangerously high levels).
That is my sincere take re these terribly important matters, in any event, my dear Goon friend.
My best wishes to you.
Rob
The rules don’t give you a blank check to post what you want. Further, accusations of death threats, etc require proof and you haven’t done that.
The published rules of the various site permit honest posting re the last 40 years of peer-reviewed research in this field. Shiller was awarded a Nobel prize for his finding that valuations affect long-term returns. And thousands of our fellow community members have expressed a desire that honest posting be permitted.
The death threats took place in public. So there is no difficulty in proving them. You Goons say that, when you posted photographs of the gun that you intended to use to murder my loved ones, you were just making an argument for gun safety. No reasonable person believes that. The site administrator at Motley Fool acknowledged that it would be “ideal” if Greaney were to permit honest posting,
It was not Greaney;s call. It was Motley Fool’s call and Motley Fool expressed its true position in its published posting rules. The thing that swung things in the other direction is that Motley Fool made money as a result of Greaney’s false safe-withdrawal-rate claims, This is the danger with all Get Rich Quick approaches. They give the impression of creating wealth in the short term while destroying lives in the long term.
It is my strongly held view that we should permit honest posting pointing out the long-term dangers of pure Get Rich Quick strategies. Otherwise, the discussion boards and blogs are just aiding a con that will do serious harm to millions when the next price crash and economic crisis hits.
It will be interesting to see how it all plays out. It is my belief that we will as a nation experience the biggest economic surge in our nation’s history in the days after we open every site to honest posting re the last 40 years of peer-reviewed research. I don’t think it is an accident that every site permits honest posting and prohibits things like death threats. Those rules were published at times of calm reflection, when the mountains of money seemingly created by Get Rich Quick/Buy-and-Hold “strategies” were not influencing the thinking of site administrators.
We live in communities. We all have to give some thought to what our endorsement of Get Rich Quick investment strategies does to our friends and neighbors and co-workers. That’s where I am coming from re these matters, in any event. I had become friends with a number of my fellow community members at the Motley Fool site over the years. That’s how I worked up the courage to put forward my famous post suggesting that perhaps we could take valuations into consideration when calculating the safe withdrawal rate.
My best and warmest wishes to you and yours regardless of what investment strategy you elect to follow.
Rob