Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently posted to the discussion thread for another blog entry at this site:
Hi Rob,
I forgot that I was still saying things like this even 2 weeks after the initial incident.
This was more than a year ago now, but I am thinking that I was just trying to explain politely to you that I’d rather have you quit writing about me, or at least stop using my name. I suppose that I figured the only way you might understand why is if I explained it in terms of your favorite conspiracy theories.
I will make one more attempt at a reality check for you. You go on and on about how I allegedly lack personal integrity because I allowed the Goons to threaten me into silence.
The reality is that though I may have for a brief moment got a bit too caught up in YOUR drama, I do not have any fears about the Goons.
The reality is that you are causing me 1000x more career damage than the Goons ever could have by filling Google with so much nonsense about me, and sharing embarrassing private details such as my overly ambitious journal submission strategies, etc. Those in particular are highly private. People don’t publicly share where they submit articles to unless those articles are accepted. You’ve violated my trust in so many countless ways and yet you still proclaim to be my friend.
And the further reality is that if I *did* lack personal integrity, I could have made this all stop just by saying the meaningless sentence you want so desperately to hear: “I think the errors in the traditional safe withdrawal rate studies must be corrected by using Rob’s analytically valid method.”
But I don’t believe that. I do not believe you have offered a valid correction to the safe withdrawal rate question. And I believe that retirement income strategies go much further than the question of a safe withdrawal rate. And so that is why I’ve had to endure your ongoing harassment for months on end now.
Usually I can figure out the Rob-logic behind what you are thinking, but I really don’t know how you think you come out of this whole episode looking like the good guy. I guess it is because you think you are saving my soul and putting me back on the path of righteousness, or something, huh? If only you had the power to do a little bit of self reflection…
Now that the whole email history is on display, we have the reminder of how angry you got at the very beginning when I referred to you as dogmatic. Yet, look at the way you’ve treated me for disagreeing with you on something which you don’t even understand. You quote numbers from JWR’s statistical work, but I’m not sure if you can even distinguish a mean from a median. So how can you be sure his work is right? I don’t know either, as I never did get around to digging into it, and I doubt I ever will now. But I’m not sure how a properly calculated lower confidence bound for a 2000 retiree could have been higher than zero.
Rob, suppose the stock market does drop 65% as you are expecting. It might happen, who knows.
Step 1: Stock Market Drops 65%
Step 2: ??
Step 3: Rob wins $500 million settlement from the Goons, the Goons are sent to prison, the investing public learns about and adopts VII.
What is Step 2? There isn’t one. You will still be in the same position as you’ve been in for the last 10 years. Why didn’t something happen for you after the 2008 financial crisis? You are like the guy who keeps predicting new ends for the world as each previous prediction date passes by.
That is why I’m telling you, from one human being to another, that it is time to move on. You are a smart guy, and you could use your talents for something productive. While warning people about the 4% rule is helpful, the way that you go about doing it is rather “catastrophically unproductive” as one wise fellow said to you years ago. I provide a loud voice that is critical of the 4% rule, and so spending your days assassinating my character is counterproductive to your underlying cause. So perhaps you can start fresh with a new issue of social import that carries less baggage for you. What happened in the past is a sunk cost, but you still have a chance to turn things around and start afresh today. And you can do all of this while still being honest and true to yourself.
These words were not written by Wade Pfau today. One of the Goons just posted them today. But they were written by Wade a good number of years back, when he was threatened by the Goons after working with me for 16 months on the research that we had published in a peer-reviewed journal which caused Wade to exclaim: “Yes, Virginia, Valuation-Informed Indexing works!”
It was one of the Goons who posted this comment today. But look at what it says! Even in these Goon-approved words, Wade says that: “warning people about the 4% rule is helpful.” If there is something to warn people about, that’s huge. Before I put up my famous post from the morning of May 13, 2002, no one at the Motley Fool board was warning people about Greaney’s study. They were using it to plan retirements! That happened almost every day at that board! So getting that out there was huge. And of course what Wade really believes is that the Greany study is “dangerous,” which is what he said before he was threatened. And he believed all of the things that he said in the days before he was threatened on scores of other subjects as well.
Why is it that only the members of the Buy-and-Hold Goon Squads who feel a need to threaten people? We never see Valuation-Informed Indexers do that. The difference is that the Valuation-Informed Indexers have Nobel-prize-winning research supporting what they say while all the Buy-and-Hold Goons have is a mistake (the Efficient Market Theory) that was DISCREDITED by that Nobel-prize-winning research 41 years ago. We all need to move on from the mistake at the heart of the Buy-and-Hold strategy (the idea that market timing [price discipline!] is not required for all investors at all times).
That’s my sincere take re these terribly important matters, in any event. I believe that we will as a nation of people move on in the days following the next Buy-and-Hold Crisis. And, when we do, Wade Pfau will return to saying all the things that he said in the days before the Buy-and-Hold Goon Squads threatened to destroy his career if he continued doing honest work in this field. We all benefit from having Wade Pfau believe that it is safe to do honest work in this field. We all benefit from having EVERY academic researcher feel that it is safe to do honest work in this field.
Rob
Wade Pfau said he was never threatened and also points out the harm you caused him. – He won’t talk to you.
Shiller told you not to time the market. – he won’t talk to you.
Thousands have told you how you are wrong about Greaney’s work. You ignore them.
Your wife asks you to get a job. You ignore her, so she divorced you.
Your priest tells you to get a job. You ignore him.
The investment community tells you to not quit your job and how market timing doesn’t work. You ignore them and go broke.
Notice the common thread? You ignore everyone and things fall apart for you. There is no one to blame but you.
There’s another common thread to our discussions of the past 20 years, Anonymous. I said in a post to the Motley Fool board advanced in the morning of May 13, 2002, 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. Not one iota of evidence has been presented over the 20 years that the Greaney study contains a valuation adjustment. Yet the study has not been corrected to this day.
Please explain.
Rob
“ Not one iota of evidence has been presented over the 20 years that the Greaney study contains a valuation adjustment. Yet the study has not been corrected to this day.”
It’s not needed. You have been told that, but you ignore it. You are broke. The rest of us are not. Outcomes matter.
Okay. I believe that Robert Shiller’s Nobel-prize-winning research showing that valuations affect long-term returns is legitimate research, Anonymous.
I naturally wish you all the best that this life has to offer a person, in any event.
Rob
You are broke and divorced, but somehow have convinced yourself that you think you have things figured out.
I do not believe that the retirement study posted at John Greaney’s web site contains a valuation adjustment. I am not the only person who has come to that conclusion. Many people have looked at it. Not one has been able to identify a valuation adjustment in the study. That includes a guy who posts under the screen-name “Evidence-Based Investing.” Evidence is one of the generals in Graney’s army of Goons. Evidence advanced a post in late 2021 saying that “nobody” truly believes that the Greaney study contains a valuation adjustment, including Greaney himself. I think that Evidence nailed it with that one.
The thing that has to be figured out is, why is there even one person who has not insisted that the Greaney study be corrected immediately? That’s the Get Rich Quick/Buy-and-Hold urge that resides within all of us at work. We all like the idea of getting something for nothing and the stock market offers us an amazing opportunity to obtain it. Just push prices up beyond their fair-value level (a CAPE value of 17) and you can pretend that you are closer to having enough for retirement than is really the case. There’s a rub. however. If the irrational exuberance is exposed, people lose confidence in it and sell stocks and prices go down and the irrational exuberance disappears. So those who have an inclination to post honestly about what the peer-reviewed research tells us all about how stock investing works in the real world need to be supressed to keep the scam going. That’s me. I’m a threat to today’s CAPE value of 29. Every investor who longs to believe that Buy-and-Hold/Get Rich Quick is a real thing has a motive to want to see me banned from every investing site on the internet.
The Bennett/Pfau research shows that reining in irrational exuberance is 70 percent of what it takes to achieve long-term success as a stock investor. So 70 percent of an investment expert’s job is to encourage market timing, which is the only tool we have available to us to rein in irrational exubernce before it gets out of control. LOTS of people want to tell the truth about this stuff. If they didn’t, Shiller’s book would not have become a bestseller and he wouldn’t have been awarded a Nobel prize for his work. But most people are frightened by death threats and by threats to destroy their careers if they do honest work. If we all want to invest more effectively than was ever possible in the days before Shiller published his Nobel-prize-winning research, the first step is opening every site on the internet to honest posting re the past 41 years of peer-reviewed research.
I would not be either broke or divorced if you Goons had not directed abusive and criminal behavior at me and at others who worked with me to get the word out about what the last 41 years of peer-reviewed research teaches us all about how stock investing works in the real world. We need to apply the same laws in the investment advice field as apply in every other field of human endeavor. It’s important to get the numbers right in retirement studies. People use retirement studies to plan retirements. A failed retirement is a serious life setback.
My sincere take.
And my best and warmest wishes to you and yours.
Rob
“I would not be either broke or divorced if you Goons had not directed abusive and criminal behavior at me…”… “A failed retirement is a serious life setback.”
Rob,
I haven’t looked at your blog or googled you in ages. For some reason today, I wondered how you were faring and saw the above quotes from you. The first is an outright lie, the second is very true.
It seems everything has changed in your life, except your mindset. Sorry to hear that. Can’t say I didn’t see it coming, but it still hurts to hear how someone has squandered their life.
Rob, job #1 of any successful turn-around story is to take stock of where one is at, take a fearless personal inventory, and then commit to whatever changes are needed to climb back out.
I honestly hope you find the courage to inspect your life, decide on a path that *can* lead to success in the future, and that you take the first steps down that road. I am truly praying for you. Money is *not* the root of all evil. It is the *Love* of (i.e. sole pursuit of) money, however, that definitely is. Godpeed on you getting your personal priorities straight.
Please keep praying for me, Hopeful. That’s a kind thing to do.
I still believe to this day 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. I intend to keep saying that unless I am somehow, someday persuaded otherwise. After 20 years of this, I put the odds of that happening at one in 20 billion or so. So the chances aren’t good, you know. But we’ll see.
I would say that we’ve seen some amazing things over the past 20 years. Some amazingly bad things, yes. But also some amazingly good things. More good than bad. I believe that the good stuff that we’ve seen (like the peer-reviewed research that I co-authored with Wade Pfau showing that market timing always works) will in time lead us to the greatest surge in economic growth ever seen in our nation’s history. But again, we’ll see.
When will all of this amazingly good stuff happen? I believe that things will change in the days following the next Buy-and-Hold Crisis. Most people are not Goons. You Goons represent about 10 percent of the Buy-and-Hold population; you are outliers. But most of the Normal Buy-and-Holders have sympathy for the Goon positiion. They are depending on irrational exuberance to finance their retirements and they don’t want to see it disappear. If we opened up every investing discussion board and blog on the internet to honest posting re the past 41 years of peer-reviewed research, as I have been proposing for 20 years now, it would disappear. Everyone can see that. So I have been silenced just about everywhere.
Will I still be silenced in the days following the next Buy-and-Hold Crisis? I think not. I think that the losses that the Normals will suffer in the next crisis will cause them to stop and reflect as to whether the pure Get Rich Quick/Buy-and-Hold “strategy” is as perfect as it has been advertised to be. Yet. again, we will see, you know? I am not God, I don’t know everything. But I believe what I believe.
And, when what I believe is that the retirement study that my friends are using to construct their retirements lacks a valuation adjustment, I am obligated in conscience to point that out. So I did so. All of the rest followed from that. Tell the truth about one important investment-related matter and the entire Buy-and-Hold/Get Rich Quick house of cards comes tumbling to the ground. I am happy to see it tumble to the ground given that there is 42 years of peer-reviewed research (which caused its author to be awarded a Nobel prize!) discrediting it. You are not so happy. You don’t want Greaney to have to correct the error in this study. So be it, you know?
It’s not a good thing. I don’t like to see conflct between different groups of human beings. But I do like to be able to sleep at night. There came a time when Greaney had repeated his claim that a 4 percent withdrawal rate is always “100 percent safe” regardless of the valuation level that applies one too many times for me to be able to live with myself if I didn’t work up the courge to say something. So I did so. I have accepted the consequences that have come my way as a result.
And I will accept the $500 million settlement check that I believe will be delivered to me when we all make it safely to the other side of The Big Black Mountain. A $500 million settlement check will not make me even for what I have had to live through for the past 20 years. But that’s how we resolve these sorts of matters in our system and I think it’s a pretty darn good system overall. So I will accwpt the check and say “thank you” and move on down the line.
My best and warmest wishes to you and yours regardless of what investment strategy you elect to follow.
Rob
“I still believe to this day 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”
So what?
It was one guy, saying something on one amateur blog, decades ago. No one but you even remembers. No one but you has decided to make it a life’s quest to somehow un-ring another person’s bell. You’ve literally squandered your life, you treasure, your wife, and all opportunities you could have taken from the day you decided to go loco over that one omission (in YOUR eyes) on someone else’s speculative work. One blog among thousands. What is the best case scenario for you going forward, in your own estimation? How will you get there? (And, is your plan practicable, or just a personal internal, flight of fancy?)
“God, give me the grace to change the things that are within my control, the courage to accept those that are not, and the wisdom to know the difference.”
Get well soon, Rob.
“That’s a kind thing to do…… You Goons….”
Do you not detect an issue there, Rob?
If you decide to see everyone in the world as an enemy, and even label them as such, I wonder what kind of result you could expect to find in life?
So what?
It was one guy, saying something on one amateur blog, decades ago. No one but you even remembers. No one but you has decided to make it a life’s quest to somehow un-ring another person’s bell. You’ve literally squandered your life, you treasure, your wife, and all opportunities you could have taken from the day you decided to go loco over that one omission (in YOUR eyes) on someone else’s speculative work. One blog among thousands. What is the best case scenario for you going forward, in your own estimation? How will you get there? (And, is your plan practicable, or just a personal internal, flight of fancy?)
“God, give me the grace to change the things that are within my control, the courage to accept those that are not, and the wisdom to know the difference.”
Get well soon, Rob.
Greaney wasn’t the only person who advanced the 4 percent rule, Hopeful. There were thousands of newspaper articles on retirement planning that cited that rule. There were millions of retirements constructed with that rule in mind.
It’s been 20 years since I pointed out the error and it hasn’t been corrected to this day. How could something like that happen?
It happened because there are millions of people who are counting on the full amount in their stock portfolio to finance their retirement. They should be adjusting the amount listed on their portfolio statement for the amount of irrational exuberance present in the stock market at the moment they are checking. People aren’t going to do that unless they are told why it is so important that it be done. Lots of people are willing to warn them. But they are not going to do it until they feel safe to do so.
We need to open every discussion board and blog to honest posting re the last 41 years of peer-reviewed research. That’s my sincere take, in any event.
My best wishes to you and yours.
Rob
Do you not detect an issue there, Rob?
If you decide to see everyone in the world as an enemy, and even label them as such, I wonder what kind of result you could expect to find in life?
I see you as a friend, Hopeful. You don’t see me as such. But that’s how I see you. My aim is to open every discussion board and blog on the internet to honest posting re the last 41 years of peer-reviewed research, without a single exception. That would benefit you greatly, would it not? You don’t see it that way today. But that’s the reality. And I have a funny feeling that you will be changing your mind in the days following the next Buy-and-Hold Crisis. We are all on the same side here. We all want the same thing. We all want to able to invest effectively.
Do I refer to the people who post in “defense” of Mel Lindauer and John Greaney as “Goons”? I do. Your goonishness is a big part of the story. The Buy-and-Hold “idea” that market timing/price discipline is not 100 percent required for eveey investor is rooted in a belief that the market is efficient/rational. Shiller’s Nobel prize-winning research shows that stock investing is at times a HIGHLY emotional endeavor. Greaney has not corrected his retirement study in the 20 years since the error he made in it was brought to his attention. And a good number of posters have “defended” him. What is that? It is EMOTION. Your Goon behavior and the widespread tolerance of it shows that Shiller is right and that we all need to start paying a lot more attention to irrational exuberance (which can only be reined in with market timing/price discipline).
Your Goon behavior is a stock investing topic. It’d not one that we see discussed at all often. But it is a matter of critical importance in this field. It is the reason why today’s CAPE value is 29. We can’t do away with irrational exuberane if we don’t first open every site to honest posting re the last 41 years of peer-reviewed research. It’s those 41 years of peer-reviewed research that shows us why Buy-and-Hold/Get Rich Quick is so dangerous to all of us in the long run.
Without the Goon stuff, we would be talking about the dangers of Buy-and-Hold/Get Rich Quick at every site. And we could overcome it. But for so long as those of us who believe that Shiller’s Nobel-prize-winning reseaarch is legitimate research live in fear of what the Buy-and-Hold Goon Squads will do to us if we dare to “cross them by posting honestly, we are not going to get anywhere. There’s no way to get to the other side of the mountain than to go through it.
I do care about you. I do want to share my thoughts about stock investing with you and to hear your thoughts in response. But I would like to see the discussions conducted within the laws of the United States. Otherwise, I do not believe that they will be terribly productive. The laws against death threats and acts of extortion and acts of defamation are good and necessary laws, in my sincere assessment.
You would obviously be in a lot better shape today had you never participated in or tolerated a single criminal act. Anf guess who has been imploring you to knock off the funny business for 20 years running now? Your good and true friend Rob. Have any of your Goon friends done the same? You know perfecctly well that they wouldn’t dare. Some friends, huh.
My sincere take.
My best wishes to you and yours.
Rob
“God, give me the grace to change the things that are within my control, the courage to accept those that are not, and the wisdom to know the difference.”
I believe that the opening of the entire internet to honest posting re the past 41 years of peer-reviewed research is a change within the contol of us as a nation of people. It’s a question of all of us working up the courage to stand up to you Goons. I am just one guy.I cannot achieve this wonderful result by myself. But I can do my part. I believe in the saying that one should be the change that he is advocating for others. I have advocaterd that everyone post honestly re these matters. So I think it makes sense for me to do that myself. I believe that eqach time one of us posts honestly it makes the people of the United States a little bit stronger and you Goons a little bit weaker.
Which of course is a result that benefits each and every one of us, including (paradoxically enough) you Goons.
Yes?
Rob