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 had built the Retire Early board into the most exciting discussion board community on the internet, Anonymous.”
“ If all that isn’t worth a bare minimum of $500 million I have a hard time imaging what would be.”
It is not hard to determine value. You look at income flow and you also look at how much someone is willing to pay you for what you have (just like knowing how much your house is worth). You haven’t been generating an income, we don’t see any materials you have for sale and I haven’t seen anyone willing to pay you for your services.
There’s value in avoiding another Buy-and-Hold Crisis, Anonymous. If there’s no value in getting the mistake that the Buy-and-Holders made in the 1960s corrected, then why do we send people to schools to get Ph.D.s before we let them publish peer-reviewed research in this field? The purpose of the schooling is so that they can get things right. It’s not just about turning a quick buck. One of the aims of peer-reviewed research is to get things right, which in some cases translates into correcting errors made at earlier times. There’s HUGE value in that.
I believe that there will be lots of people who will see the value in getting things right in the days following the next price crash. But we’ll see, you know? I wish you the best of luck with it regardless of what investment strategy you elect to follow, in any event.
Rob
“ I had built the Retire Early board into the most exciting discussion board community on the internet, Anonymous.”
Your famous post received 12 recommendations
https://boards.fool.com/price-adjusted-safe-withdrawal-rates-17209214.aspx
Your most recced post got 242
https://boards.fool.com/ten-mental-exercises-leading-to-freedom-12298938.aspx?sort=recommendations
There are dozens of posts that got more than that back in that same time period
https://boards.fool.com/BestOf.asp?topwhat=rec&numofposts=25&folder=all&ticker=&span=from&from=1%2F1%2F2000&to=1%2F1%2F2004&submit.x=17&submit.y=14
You have an over inflated ego.
242 recommendations is a lot of recommendations. There may be a tiny number of posts that got more. But there was no other poster who had as many high-recommendation posts as I did.
Greaney himself paid tribute to me. He had a post for newcomers to the site at which he urged them to read my stuff before reading anything else at the board because it was “seminal” material on the subject of early retirement. Tom Gardner wrote a rave review of my my “Secrets of Retiring Early” report on the front page of the Motley Fool site. My posts brought enough people from other boards to the Retire Early board to make it the top board at the site. I made the Retire Early topic so hot that Motley Fool hired me to teach a course on retirement planning for them. Everyone loves that board in the days before Greaney and his Goon Squad burned it to the ground because a lot of people there wanted to be free to discuss early retirement. In its hey day, it was the best place to learn about early retirement on Planet Earth. We were a better resource than the finest personal finance libraries in the world.
And of course my Secrets of Retiring Early report was the #1 best-selling report in the history of the Soapbox.com site, largely because people from the Retire Early board bought enough copies and left enough five-star reviews to give the report an amazing kick-off. Those were fun times. Nobody who was there at the time would say that that wasn’t an amazing place.
Rob
I have posts with over 1000 recommendations. I make more in a month than you made in total from your report. I don’t consider myself as being famous.
It wasn’t the number of recommendations for any one post that matters. It was the success of that board that matters. My posts put that board on the map. We had the most effective savers from all over the world posting at one place. That was an amazing resource. People were able to learn things abut early retirement there that they couldn’t learn anywhere else in the world. You could see it in my Passion Saving: The Path to Plentiful Free Time and Soul-Satisfying Work book. I couldn’t have written that book without the amazing feedback that I received from hundreds of great posters at that board.
I wanted to cry when Greaney elected to burn it to the ground because he didn’t want to correct his study. John Walter Russell and I offered to let him be a partner in the development of the first accurate safe withdrawal rate study. That would have been 500 times better for Greaney than burning that board to the ground and setting himself up for a long prison term in the days following the next price crash. If you Goons hadn’t been afraid of him, you would have joined me in telling him that.
The best thing to do when you discover that you got an important number wrong in a retirement study is to get that error corrected quickly so that you can move forward with your life Covering up the error is the worst possible thing you can do, Doing that leaves you on the hook for any financial losses suffered as a result of the financial fraud, which in this case are likely to be in the many trillions of dollars. Not good, you know?
That’s where I am coming from, in any event.
If my post were not famous, you wouldn’t be here talking about it 20 years after the moment that I pushed the “Send” button, Anonymous, I mean, come on. It’s important to get the numbers in retirement studies right. It’s especially important to avoid criminal behavior when trying to cover up the error. Holy moly!
Rob
12 recommendations and you think it is famous? Look at the internet. Google your name. Look at what pops up. The comments make you look like a crockpot. You call that famous?
Look at your website. You can’t get any supporters. If you were famous, as you say, you would be flooded with fans.
12 recommendations and hundreds of thousands of follow-up posts are scores of different sites. I think it would be fair to describe the peer-reviewed research that I co-authored with Wade Pfau as the most important research to be published in this field in the past 30 years. Wade would not have contacted me to ask if I would work with him on research on Valuation-Informed Indexing had I not worked up the courage to advance that famous post of the morning of May 13, 2002.
How many supporters do think that I would have today if you Goons had not engaged in any criminal behavior. People don’t usually risk prison sentences because of a comment put to an internet discussion board. Your own behavior over these past 20 years shows how important that post was.
When we can all post honestly re the past 41 years of peer-reviewed research, we will all be living better lives than we ever even imagined possible during the Buy-and-Hold Era. Yes, I would call the post that got that process started as pretty darn earth-shaking. I think of it as the Post Heard ‘Round the World. I just wish that Greaney had corrected the error he made in his study on the afternoon of May 13, 2002, as I proposed at the time.
Rob