Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently posted to the discussion thread for another blog entry at this site:
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
Who made a death threat against you? Can you give us a link?
What matters is that the error in the Greaney retirement study has not been corrected in 20 years. That’s the story here.
The death threats were one of the tactics employed to disrupt the conversations so that they study would not need to be corrected. If you are focused on the death threats, you are focused on the wrong thing.
When it wasn’t death threats, it was something else. Acts of extortion. Word games. Demands for unjustified board bannings. Whatever it took.
Is there any possibility that an error in a retirement study could remain uncorrected for 20 years WITHOUT death threats and all the other garbage? It obviously is not possible. So any reasonable person who checks to see whether the study contains a valuation adjustment knows that all of that stuff happened.
To set things right, we need to have enough people concerned about what Buy-and-Hold has done to us to stand up to the Lindaurheads and the Greaney Goons. I believe that we will have that in the days following the next price crash, when the human misery that follows from the heavy promotion of a pure Get Rich Quick “strategy” will be severe and widespread. But we will have to wait and see to find out for certain.
My best and warmest wishes to you.
Rob
“ The death threats were one of the tactics employed to disrupt the conversations so that they study would not need to be corrected. If you are focused on the death threats, you are focused on the wrong thing.
When it wasn’t death threats, it was something else. Acts of extortion. Word games. Demands for unjustified board bannings. Whatever it took.”
I can’t find any of this. Why not just post it so we can see exactly what you are talking about.
You can see what I am talking about in every thread that has ever appeared at this blog. There are thousands and thousands of them. The Buy-and-Holders are ALWAYS defensive. They don’t want to see the Greaney retirement study corrected. They don’t want to acknowledge that he made an error by claiming to have calculated the safe withdrawal rate without even taking the valuations level that applies on the day the retirement begins into consideration.
Do you think that it is possible to say what is safe without taking valuations into consideration in a world in which valuations affect long-term returns? This “idea” is an absurdity. The long-term return that applies obviously affects what withdrawal rate is safe.
This is why I say that Buy-and-Hold is a Get Rich Quick approach. Returns that take the CAPE value above its fair-value level (17) are the product of irrational exuberance, not economic factors. If you treat emotion-based gains the same as economic-based gains, you are treating irrational exuberance as something real. Could anything be more dangerous? I don’t want to celebrate irrational exuberance, I want to protect people from it. So I always encourage people to take valuations into consideration when performing any calculation relating to investment strategy.
The Greany study has not been corrected to this day, 20 years from the time the error was pointed out. Please explain. Something like that couldn’t happen without the generous use of death threats and lots of other abusive stuff.
Rob
“ You can see what I am talking about in every thread that has ever appeared at this blog. There are thousands and thousands of them.”
I can see lots of posts with you talking about them when I search the term “death threats”, but I can’t find anything from you or anyone else that shows the actual death threats. If I claimed thousands of times that aliens from Mars live in my backyard, does that mean they actually exist? Wouldn’t you expect me to provide the actual proof?
Greany claimed thousands of times that a 4 percent withdrawal rate is “100 percent safe” regardless of the CAPE level that applies on the day the retirement begins. Have you come across any actual proof that all of those little green men are real?
Rob
Based on your response, we can only conclude that your claims of death threats are only as real as the existence of martians in my backyard.
Based on your lack of a response to my comment, I can only conclude that a good number of Buy-and-Holders don’t care whether there are errors in their retirement studies, they want Buy-and-Hold to remain dominant regardless.
That’s a big deal. That’s huge.
The purpose of the death threats was to take attention away from that huge story. I don’t want to spend more time on the death threats because doing that just takes more attention away from the huge story. I want to keep focused on the huge story, the error in the Buy-and-Hod retirement studies that has been covered up for 20 years now.
Yes, there were death threats. But that’s not the primary issue. Deal with the primary issue and the death threats will go away. Correct the studies and the death threats will no longer serve any purpose.
Rob
” I don’t want to spend more time on the death threats because doing that just takes more attention away from the huge story.”
Then why do you keep mentioning the death threats?
Say that one of you Goons mentions that there are no non-Goon comments at this blog. In ordinary circumstances, that would be a reasonable question. The answer is that the death threats and other abusive stuff drove people away.
But its not the death threats that matter, It’s the substantive stuff that matters. Does the Greaney study contain a valuation adjustment or does it not. The death threats and other abusive stuff are just tactics employed to take people’s eye off the ball. What matters is getting the numbers right in retirement studies.
Rob
Yet you can’t even provide evidence of even one death threat.
The incontrovertible evidence is that the error in the Greaney retirement study has not been corrected in the 20 years since it was brought to his attention.
Rob
“Does the Greaney study contain a valuation adjustment or does it not. ”
It does not. Everyone knows that. No one ever claimed otherwise. However you keep bringing it up to distract from the fact that you can’t answer questions that are posed to you.
I like it that you now say that “everyone” knows that the Greaney retirement study lacks a valuation adjustment (and thus is in error since there is 40 years of peer-reviewed research showing that valuations affect long-term returns). Did “everyone” speak up about it on those occasions when Greaney would say that a 4 percent withdrawal is “100 percent safe” even at the sort of valuation levels that applied in the last 1990s. I don’t recall “everyone” doing that. I recall there being a big commotion when I first worked up the courage to do it on the morning of May 13, 2002.
Did “everyone” know that slavery was wrong in the days when it was legal?
Did “everyone” know that smoking was bad in the days before we put cancer warnings on cigarette packages?
Did “everyone” know that pollution was hurting out planet in the days before “Silent Spring” was published and kicked off the environmental movement?
Did “everyone” know that it was wrong that women couldn’t vote in the days when that was so.
Sometimes everyone knows something one one level of consciousness but also suppresses what they know because there is a social taboo against speaking up about truths that are inconvenient to people with power and wealth and connections.
Yes, everyone who cares to know whether or not the Greaney study is in error knows that it is, Nothing could be more obvious. Everyone who cares to know the truth about stock investing also knows on one level of consciousness that one asset class can not always be the best choice and that putting ourselves at risk of a huge price crash also puts us at risk of an economic crisis and that valuation-based market timing is always a good thing (how could it ever be a bad thing for stock investors to practice price discipline when making purchases?).
It’s one thing for everyone to know something, It’s something else for everyone to be able to talk about that something so that they can process the knowledge and put it to good use in the real world. Today’s CAPE value would not be 40 if we had opened every discussion board and blog on the internet to honest posting re the last 40 years of peer-reviewed research in this field, as I proposed on the afternoon of May 13, 2002.
My sincere take.
And my best and warmest wishes to you, Evidence.
Rob
“Did “everyone” speak up about it on those occasions when Greaney would say that a 4 percent withdrawal is “100 percent safe” even at the sort of valuation levels that applied in the last 1990s. I don’t recall “everyone” doing that.”
Why would they speak up about it? No one said it, no one thought it, only one person obsesses about it. Repeatedly stating that the study did not contain valuation adjustments would be like repeated stating that the moon is not made of cheese.
There was a huge response to my post. It was like a nuclear explosion. Outside of you Goons, the most common thought expressed was: “Thanks, Rob, for starting the most exciting discussion in the history of this board.”
http://www.passionsaving.com/investing-discussion-boards.html
Rob