Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently posted to the discussion thread for another blog entry at this site:
“ An easy way to test that theory is to stop terrorizing board communities. Permit every discussion board and blog on the internet to allow honest posting and see what happens. I predict that I soon would be making so much money that there would be no need for me ever to look for other paid employment.”
It would not change one thing if you were given full access to the boards you were kicked off due to your bad behavior.. You have full control of this board, yet you have no following or income on this board. Just duplicating activity would still produce the same results. As we learned in math class, zero times any number is still zero.
I’ve seen it make a big difference in many cases. I was once a Buy-and-Holder. I am obviously not that today. What changed? I gave myself permission to think heretical thoughts. Giving myself permission to think one heretical thought (the Greany retirement study is in error) caused me over time to open up to other heretical thoughts (market timing always works and is always requited). Anf then those heretical thoughts lead over time to even more heretical thoughts (every site on the internet should be open to honest posting re the last 41 years of peer-reviewed research in this field). One day you look up and see that you are a Valuation-Informed Indexer and the biggest critic of Buy-and-Hold on Planet Earth.
The same thing happened with John Walter Russell. He was a Buy-and-Holder on the morning of May 13, 2002, Instead of just ssying “tis is the dogma, I will just accept it,” he devoted his energies to doing research to determine the realities. He ended up spending eight years of his life doing research into Valuation-Informed Indexing.
The same thing happened with Wade Pfau. He contacted me, I didn’t contaxct him. He had seen my posts at the Bogleheads Forun and was intrigued. He wanted to do research into Valuation-Informed Indexing. He asked my permission to do because he felt that I was the founder of the new model. I of course said that I would be happy to work with him. The research we did together so excited him that he told me he couldn’t sleep at night. He told me that he questioned whether he has missed somethinjg becaused he was discovering so much amazing stuff about how stock investing works in the real world and he couldn’t understand why eveyone else who works in this field was not going similar research. Of coursed the answer to that one was deliverd to him when you Goons threatened to destroy his career if he continued doing honest research and people like John Bogle just sat on their hands and did nothing.
Similar things happened to scores and scores of people. The Buy-and-Holders got there first. That’s the only thing that the “idea” that market timing doesn’s always work has going for it. Of course it always works! How could the exercise of price discipline ever not work? But Shiller’s research had not yet been published at the time when Buy-and-Hold was being developed. So the Buy-and-Holders made an extremely unfortunate mistake. It wouldn’t have mattered if they just corrected their model when they learned about the mistake they had made in it. Instead, they covered it up. So here we are 41 years later still engaging in silly arguments as to whether market timing (price discipline!) is always reqauired or not. Humans!
Market timing is always required. I think we will all come to see that in time. I think it is going to happen when we see the ocean of human misery we have brought on through our collectice tolerance of the behavior of you Goons. But we’ll see, you know?
Humans learn by talking things over. If Buy-and-Hold were a real thing, the Buy-and-Holders would encouraged questioning of their dogmas. They would understand that respinding to challenges makes their own understanding of the subject matter stronger over time, The reactions that we have seen among the Buy-and-Holders to my claim that the Greaney retirement study lacks a valuation adjustment shows that belief in the no-market-timiing “idea has eroded even among the most dogmatic of Buy-and-Holders. I believe that it will fall entirely in the days following the next Buy-and-Hold Crisis, when it will no longer be possible for any of us (including you Goons!) to deny what a horrible mistake the Buy-and-Holders made when they came to believe that there might be an alternatve universe 20 billiion light years away in which price discipline/market timing was not 100 percent required for every stock investor on the planet.
But we’ll see, you know?
I naturally wish you all the best that this life has to offer a person regardless of what investment strategy you elect to follow, Anonymus.
Rob
You have been talking about threats for about 20 years. How come no one but you can “see” those threats? At the same time, you keep telling me that I can going to lose 50-65 percent of my money, yet it keeps growing. Why isn’t your timing predictions working? You have told us that you would be rich by now, but your savings are depleted. Why is that?
I don’t have $6 million anymore. I now have $6.2 million. How much of the $500 million have you received? How are the book sales going? How is the job search going?
You have been talking about threats for about 20 years. How come no one but you can “see” those threats? At the same time, you keep telling me that I can going to lose 50-65 percent of my money, yet it keeps growing. Why isn’t your timing predictions working? You have told us that you would be rich by now, but your savings are depleted. Why is that?
If you had a friend who was an alcoholc, you could say “he’s going to lose his job” or “he’s going to lose his marriage” or “he’s going to wreck his health,” there would be a high percentage chance that you would ultimately be proven right. But, if you tried to pick the day or the week or the month or even the year that those things would happen, there’s a good chance that you would get it wrong. We know from experience that addictions bring on horrible consequences. But there are a lot of factors at play determining precisely when those bad outcomes will come about. So the best that we can do is to say that “it’s a bad idea to get into the habit of drinking to excess.”
It’s the same with stock investing. The benefit of using the peer-reviewed research for guidance is that it is objective, it cuts through the rationalizations. The Buy-and-Holders wants to tell himself that it will all go differently this time, that it will all through some magical process work out. He can intiimidate his friends into keeping quiet about what their common sense is telling them. But he can;t intimidate the peer-reviewed research into not reporting that valuations always, always, always affect long-term returns. The peer-reviewed research isn’t trying to win our favor. It tells the truth of the matter.
Of course, when the addiction is strong enough, we can refuse to listen. We can say “valuations affect long-term returns but a safe withdrawal rate study needs a valuation adjustment as much as a car needs a microwave,” as if that signified anything meaningful. And, if we were abusive enough, we could frighten people into not saying that we were abusive. That would just make the addiction worse. But it would further delay the consequences of the addiction,.
I believe that things will likely go somewhat as they always have in the past. I don’t believe that microwaves in cars have anything to do with it. I believe that valuations affect long-term returns. I believe that Shiller’s Nobel-prize-winning research is legitimate research.
Rob
I don’t have $6 million anymore. I now have $6.2 million. How much of the $500 million have you received? How are the book sales going? How is the job search going?
Every day that I write another chapter for my book I create more long-term wealth for myself. That wealth is real. It’s not phony, baloney irratioanl exuberance stock gains, which will get blown away in the wind in the next Buy-and-Hold Crisis.
Shiller’s Nobel prize-winning research helps us to distinguish the real stuff from the fantasy stuff. The fact that it upsets you do is a good indication of its power and importance. If you were thinking clearly, you would want to know all about it. You would want honest posting to be permitted at every investing site on the internet. I want no part of any investment strategy that its advocates cannot bear to hear discussed in civil and reasonable debate.
Rob
“ Every day that I write another chapter for my book I create more long-term wealth for myself.”
That is what the guy says when he buys his lottery ticket at the liquor store. The only difference is that his odds of getting rich are much better than your’s
That is what the guy says when he buys his lottery ticket at the liquor store. The only difference is that his odds of getting rich are much better than your’s
Okay, Anonymous.
I do wish you all good things, in any event.
Rob
“I believe that things will likely go somewhat as they always have in the past.“
They have. The market has always recovered from any drop and has gone on to new highs. Buy and Hold has always worked and market timing has always failed. That is why I have over $6 million and you are broke.
Okay, Anonymous.
Please take good care, old friend.
Rob
“Every day that I write another chapter for my book I create more long-term wealth for myself”
It is almost 20 years since you first started talking about your second book. How many chapters have you written?
I’m not able to give a chapter count. There are places where I may combine three chapters into one. Or just delete three chapters because I no longer believe that the ideas being examined in those chapters are essential.
I would say that the book is 80 percent finished. There are parts where I haven’t changed a word for a year or two. That’s mostly the early stuff. The stuff near the end remains fluid.
I don’t recall thinking about a book 20 years ago. If I did, those were preliminary ruminations. I only became confident that I could complete a book when I finished my article “Buy-and-Hold Is Dangerous.” That was in March of 2019. I did not think that it would take another four years to finish the book at that time. But it takes what it takes. Sometimes the act of polishing something brings up thoughts that lead to new chapters and a better book. It is 50 times better to get the thing done right than to get it done quick. I feel strongly about that one.
It will be worth the wait. I believe that all fair-minded people (non-Goons) will see that when they read the finished product. If this stuff were easy, we never would have seen a single abusive post. It’s important to get this right so that we can all move ahead in our understanding of how stock investing works.
Greaney hasn’t corrected the error in his study in 20 years. Explain that one. That one should have not taken more than 20 minutes. If he can take 20 years to correct an error in a study that people used to plan their retirements, I can take 20 years to explain the mistake that the Buy-and-Holders made back in the 1960s and why so many of us have been reluctant to recognize the mistake and to insist that it be prompty corrected. That’s not a normal situation. It takes some digging and some pondering to figure that one out.
Come to think of it, you haven’t insisted that Greaney correct the error in his study to this day even though you acknowledged in a post that you advanced here nearly a year ago that the Greaney study lacks an adjustment for the valuations level that applies on the day the retirement begins, Evidence. What gives?
Rob
“I don’t recall thinking about a book 20 years ago.”
You don’t recall a lot of things. Particularly when you choose not to. Fortunately there are Post Archives, with memory not so faulty. From July 5, 2006:
“His next book, “Investing for Humans: How to Get What Works on Paper to Work in Real Life,” is slated for publication in 2008.”
https://www.prweb.com/releases/2006/07/prweb407131.htm
That book should be finished by now, even if you only wrote one chapter a year.
2006 wasn’t quite 20 yeara ago. That was a very early stab at it. The first time that I wrote the book, it did not go anywhere. I just didn’t have enough of a knowledge base to pull it off. I put it away and did not return to it for a long, long time. I hadn’t even started working with Wade Pfau at that time. I knew that I was onto something important. But I did not have a book in me at that time.
You can’t write a chapter a year if you do not have a book. A book is telling one story. You need to have the material for the entire book to write the first chapter. Everything is related. It’s not like I could spend one year gathering the material for chapter one and then write that and then start gathering material for chapter two. It just doesn’t work that way.
I knew that I had the material for a book when I finished the article “Buy-and-Hold Is Dangerous.” That was in early 2019. So it has been more than three years, not quite four years. Even that is a long time. It’s been an emotionally difficult experience getting it down on paper. The story is a ainful one for lots of people. The relentless promotion of the Buy-and-Hold strategy has done serious harm to the lives of millions of people. It is hard to go about the process of telling a story that many people very, very much do not want to hear. But the story needs to be told. If it is not told, even more lives will be destroyed. So I keep at it.
Intellectually, I could tell the story in no time. The hard part is the emotional part. It’s not just that millions of lives have been harmed. Millions of lives have been harmed that did not need to be harmed. Shiller published his Nobel-prize-winning research showing that valuations affect long-term returns in 1981. The subtitle of his book contains the word “revolutionary.” Yet the Buy-and-Holders have not made a single change in their strategy as a result of Shiller’s revolutionary findings. So it’s a hard story to tell.
But I am close today. I would say I am at about the 80 percnt mark. Partss One through Four are done. Parts Five through Seven will require only modest changes. The same is so of Parts Nine through Eleven, Parts and Twelve still need a good bit of work. But it’s getting there.
My best and warmest wishes to you and yours, in any event.
Rob
Evidence said you were thinking about this book nearly 20 years ago. You said No. But after seeing your own press release proving he was right, you say “oh THAT book. That doesn’t count.” Sigh.
On August 6, 2019 you said “I intend to seek corporate employment at the end of the year, when I have finished my book.” Now, over three years later, it’s only 80 percent done.
I know math isn’t your thing, so here’s a hint. At your present rate of progress, your projected completion date is approximately Never. And you’re fine with that. You never intended to finish it. It’s not an actual goal and never was. It was only an excuse you gave your then-wife for avoiding a job hunt. (Which of course she saw right through, the woman’s not an idiot.). Yet even though you no longer need an excuse, you keep up the pretense. Fascinating.
Okay, Anonymous.
I do wish you all good things, in any event.
Rob