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>The entire world is wrong and everyone else needs to change what they are doing versus you giving any consideration that you might be wrong.</i>
No. It is not anything close to the entire world that has insisted that discussion of Shiller’s Nobel-prize-winning research findings be prohibited at every site on the internet. It is just you Goons. You represent about 10 percent of the population of Buy-and-Holders. That’s it. You have power far beyond your numbers because you engage in criminal behavior that scares people and people in positions of authority are not willing to stand up to you (because they share your belief in Buy-and-Hold), But the laws that exist to protect us all from the tactics that you employ are a reality that reveal something important about what the majority of people believe deep in their hearts re these matters (not about Buy-and-Hold itself but about how discussions of the legitimacy of the Buy-and-Hold concept should be conducted).
Today’s CAPE value is 38. So the Get Rich Quick “idea” is obviously very popular today. It has never been more popular. But irrational exuberance is not a lasting thing. It never has been. By its very nature it is not a lasting thing. If it could last, it would not be irrational. So the CAPE is going to go down hard at some point, When that happens, I believe that we will as a people revisit the foundational beliefs that caused us to make it a felony to advance death threats and to engage in extortion to silence academic researchers and all the rest.
I believe that the existence of those laws tells what we really are and the irrational exuberance/Buy-and-Hold/no market timing/ death threats/4 percent rule stuff is a the product of a temporary fit of emotion that will in time disappear into the wind. I believe that at that time pretty much the entire world will come to agree that the 20-year cover-up of the error in the Greaney retirement study (it lacks an adjustment for the valuation level that applies on the day the retirement begins) was a tragic mistake.
We’ll see.
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
I have yet to see anyone ban Shiller or anything he has to say. On the other hand, I have seen people that are not willing to let you hijack their boards with the same repeated lies that you have been spewing for the last two decades. It is your behavior that lead to banning and not anything with respect to Shiller.
Was it a lie when I said that the retirement study posted at John Greaney’s web site lacks an adjustment for the valuation level that applies on the day the retirement begins?
Rob
It is a defacto lie because the study did not require it. It is like pointing out that your neighbor doesn’t have a hot dog stand in his front yard.
um….
Rob
Let’s go back the original point you have avoided. No one has banned Shiller and/or what he has to say. Thus, your headline is faulty to begin with.
If you don’t permit discussion of the merits of market timing, you are not permitting discussion of Shiller’s amazing research findings. The title of Shiller’s book is “Irrational Exuberance.” If irrational exuberance is a real thing (I believe it is), we all should be doing everything we can to combat it. How would you propose combating it without engaging in market timing? There is no other way.
Shiller was awarded a Nobel prize. So his research must have changed how we all think about stock investing in many ways. Please tell me five ways in which Shiller’s research findings caused you to alter your stock investing strategies.
Rob
Your problem is that you don’t have a discussion. People ask you questions and you won’t give direct answers. You make claims and then won’t back them up.
Just look at the example here. You have been told thousands of times that Greaney’s work does not have an error. People grew tired of you repeating it thousands of times.
It doesn’t contain a valuation adjustment, Anonymous. It shouldn’t take 20 years to check that.
Rob
Everyone knows that and no one cares
If no one cared, you never would have sought a single ban at a single site. If no one cared, honest posting re the peer-reviewed research would not represent a threat to Buy-and-Hold.
Most people don’t care enough. I can agree to that much. I believe that that will change after the next price crash. But there are many people who care even today. The behavior that we have seen from the Buy-and-Holders (especially you Goons) would be inexplicable if no one cared.
Rob
what people care about is the avalance of nonsense that you cause in message boards. your presumption of causation is wrong: ‘what i am saying must be right because i get banned for it’ is totally inaccurate. there are many other possibilities.
the most likely being: you are a message board nuisance due to the volume and length of your repetitive posts as well as your inability to defend your statements with actual facts.
I have never posted one word of nonsense in the 20 years of The Great Safe Withdrawal Rate Debate, Edge. What happened is that as a people we made a mistake in the 1960s when we discovered that short-term market timing does not work and jumped to the hasty conclusion that no form of market timing is required (Shiller’s Nobel-prize-winning research showing that market timing always works and is always required was not available to us at that time). In the beginning, cognitive dissonance kept the experts in this field from seeing their error. But, as time went on, they became more and more stressed that millions of investors not come to learn about it. So a social taboo developed against honest discussion of these matters.
That social taboo is today killing us. Millions of us think that market timing might be optional or might not even be a good thing. As a result, we have seen the CAPE value rise to insane levels. It is my belief that the next Buy-and-Hold Crisis will help us to see that we all need to be working hard to ensure that we all practice market timing (price discipline!) at all times and that we take action to get super high CAPE values down as fast as possible.
That ends it. Doing that would normalize the discussion of stock investing at every site. All of the nastiness would go away because it would no longer serve any purpose. Once every site was permitting honest posting re the last 40 years of peer-reviewed research, each investor would be able to hear both sides of the story and decide for himself or herself how much market timing he or she wants to engage in. It’s up to the investors to decide that, not to the members of internet goon squads. I mean, please give me a freakin’ break.
There is enormous interest in learning the realities of stock investing. Nothing could be more clear. If that were not so, you Goons would never have engaged in a single abusive post, much less any of the criminal stuff. I believe that the people of the United States will be successful in overcoming you Goons and opening every site to honest posting re the peer-reviewed research in the days following the next price crash. I sure hope so.
I believe that the next Buy-and-Hold Crisis will bring on an ocean of human misery. That part of course makes me very, very sad. But I also believe that it is that next Buy-and-Hold Crisis that is going to make clear to us that permitting honest posting is absolutely essential and that will in time bring on the greatest surge of economic growth ever seen in our history. Stock investing matters. We all should want to know what the peer-reviewed research tells us about how it works. There is no downside to knowing the realities. The peer-reviewed research permits us all to retire many years sooner while taking on only a fraction of the risk that we were taking on during the Buy-and-Hold Era. I can live with that. I have a funny feeling that millions and millions of middle-class investors will feel just fine living with it as well.
Everybody makes mistakes. I find no fault with my Buy-and-Hold friends for the mistake they made. But mistakes need to be corrected when they are discovered. Covering up mistakes makes things worse and worse and worse, I believe that my Buy-and-Hold friends are good and smart people. I believe that, if they were thinking clearly, they would have wanted their mistake corrected within 24 hours of the time it was uncovered by the publication of Shiller’s Nobel-prize-winning research. So I will continue to do everything I can to get our discussions back on track and to help my Buy-and-Hold friends get to a place where they can again feel good about themselves and the work they do.
The Great Safe Withdrawal Rate Debate is not a debate that will have winners and losers, Edge. We all will be winners. I am not able to imagine circumstances in which there could be any losers emerging from this. Learning is the one true free lunch available in this world. I vote for learning, which of course requires the widespread tolerance of honest posting. I am proud that after three years of being afraid of what Greaney would do to me if I worked up the courage to point out the error in his retirement study, I finally did just that because I cared about what would happen to my friends at the Motley Fool board if I failed to do so.
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