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’ll do what I can to get along.”
Not really a plan when you are in your 60’s. It’s now to late to say you will wait to see how it will all turn out. We see how it played out. It failed.
It’s about 500 times better than betraying my friends and then not knowing how I am going to be able to sleep at night, Anonymous. I had posted with a good number of people at the Motley Fool board for three years and had gotten to know them and to care about what happened to them.
Do you see?
Rob
Do you have any friends in the investment community that currently speak to you on a regular basis?
No.
Rob
Do you don’t have any current friends, you are broke and divorced, yet you think everyone else is at fault and not you. Really?
I don’t think everyone else is at fault. I think we all have a Get Rich Quick/Buy-and-Hold impulse residing within us which has caused us to make stock investing more risky than it needs to be for as long as there has been a stock market. And that we were blessed to discover the huge missing piece to the stock investing puzzle when Robert Shiller published his Nobel-prize-winning research in 1981. After seeing how many people were excited to hear about the how-to implications of the new research, I became excited about the life-affirming possibilities of spreading the word all across the internet. So that’s what I am to do.
The nasty stuff advanced by you Goons shows that you too see how big an advance this is. If you didn’t think it was a super big deal, you would just permit honest posting and let people make up their own minds. You’re hurting. And the only way to ease the hurt is for all of us who believe that Shiller’s Nobel-prize-winning research is legitimate research to not permit ourselves to be intimidated and to assure each other that we have each other’s backs. You’re going to feel better about yourselves when we are all living better and fuller and richer lives. I’m sure!
Rob
No friends, your predictions failed, you depleted your savings, your wife divorced you and you lost your house. You are like the drug addict that can’t admit that he has a problem.
Today’s CAPE value is 28, Anonymous. I would say that it is today’s stock investors who are like drug addicts. We no longer need to endure the Buy-and-Hold Crises that have been doing harm to stock investors going back to the day when the first stock market was formed. We now know how to deal with them. And the 10 percent of us who believe that Shiller’s Nobel-prize-winning research is legitimate research are happy to share our thoughts if only we would as a nation take action to rein in the abusive and on occasion even criminal behavior of the Buy-and-Hold Goon Squads. I believe that the answer is to open every discussion board and blog on the internet to honest posting re the last 41 years of peer-reviewed research in this field.
I know it is!
Rob
“ I don’t think everyone else is at fault.”
You recently blamed Greaney for your being broke and divorced. No you are accepting the fact that it is your fault. You can’t keep your stories straight.
I don’t blame Greaney for the error he made in his study. I don’t see that as a big deal. I blame him for failing to correct the error and for engaging in a cover-up. But the bigger issue is — how does he get away with it? If we were all thinking clearly, we would have insisted that he correct the error within 24 hours of the moment it was brought to his attention. Some of us (about 10 percent of the population) did that. But the majority showed no sense of urgency about getting the error corrected. That’s why today’s CAPE value is 28. That’s why Buy-and-Hold/Get Rich Quick remainds popular 41 years after the Novel-prize-winning research showing that valuations affect long-term returns was published. That’s why a runaway irrational exuberance is threatening to bring on yet another Buy-and-Hold Crisis.
Greaney certainly did bad things. But it’s a weakness in human nature that let him get away with doing those things. To become effective long-term stock investors, we need to pull together as a nation of people to do what we can to rein in our Get Rich Quick/Buy-and-Hold impulse. We need to open every internet site to honest posting re the last 41 years of peer-reviewed research in this field.
My sincere take.
Rob
Greaney didn’t make an error. You did and you apologized. Unfortunately, you did not learn from your mistakes and now you are broke, divorced and have no friends. How is that a success? I can’t see how things couldn’t have turned out any worse for you.
It depends on how things go in the days following the next Buy-and-Hold Crisis, Anonymous. I think things are going to go well. I believe that we are findamentally a good people. If we were a completely corrupt people, Shiller would never have seen his research published in a peer-reviewed journal. He never would have found a publisher for his book. It would not have become a best-seller. He would not have been awarded a Nobel prize. Wade Pfau and I would not have been able to get our research published in a peer-reviewed journal. We would not have seen thousands of our fellow community members come forward and express a desire that honest posting re the last 41 years of peer-reviewed research be permitted at every site.
I obviously wish that there had never been a cover-up. But the shift from Buy-and-Hold to Valuation-Informed Indexing is a huge advance. So it has taken some time for us as a nation of people to process it. We are close. I believe that one more Buy-and-Hold Crisis will get us over the line. I doubt that there will ever be anyone except perhaps a few of you Goons who will ever express a desire for us to go back to the Buy-and-Hold days.
But we’ll see, you know?
I naturally wish you all the best of luck with it.
Rob
If you were right, you wouldn’t be broke, divorced and friendless.
That’s like saying that, if today’s CAPE value were really 28, all investors would work together to persuade each other of the importance of market timing to help pull prices back down to reasonable levels.
In theory, it makes sense. In reality, stock investors are humans and humans are at times highly emotional beings. They are capable of rationality. But they are flawed creatures. Rationality does not always come easy to them. They have to work at it.
That’s what these 20 years of dicussions have been about, If we were all 100 percent rational, as the Buy-and-Holders assumed when they developed their “idea” that market timing is not always 100 percent required, we would have all insisted that Greaney correct the error in his retirement study within 24 hours of the moment it was brought to his attention. It hasn’t happened. Perhaps you’ve noticed.
Rob
You can repeat your lines all you want. It doesn’t change reality. You are broke, divorced and without friends. You made the wrong decisions and now we see the results. No one wants to end up like that.
You can lie to yourself and make all these silly posts in an attempt to make yourself feel better. In the end, it won’t. You will still be broke, divorced and have no friends. That seems to be a miserable life to me.
You can repeat your lines all you want. It doesn’t change reality. You are broke, divorced and without friends. You made the wrong decisions and now we see the results. No one wants to end up like that.
No one wants to experience another Buy-and-Hold Crisis either, Anonymous. Once we have opened every site to honest discussion of the past 41 years of peer-reviewed research, I will have millions of dollars and millions of friends. So the things that you are making reference to won’t be issues anymore. That stuff followed from your abusive behavior, which is aimed at keeping discussion of the how-to implications of Shiller’s Nobel-prize-winning research off the internet.
We are working at cross purposes. You want to be able to persuade yourself that Shiller’s research doesn’t exist so that you can feel that you were right to adopt views on stock investing that were developed before his research was available to people. I want millions of people to be able to benefit from the many amazing insights into how stock investing works that follow from that Nobel-prize-winning research. For Valuation-Informed Indexing to become more popular, Buy-and-Hold has to become less popular. They start with opposite premises (Buy-and-Hold is rooted in a belief that investors are 100 percent rational, Valuation-Informed Indexing is rooted in a belief that investors are sometimes highly emotional).
Is the object of this game to never have to say the words “I” and “Was” and “Wrong”? Or is the object to learn how to invest as effectively as possible?
Rob
You can lie to yourself and make all these silly posts in an attempt to make yourself feel better. In the end, it won’t. You will still be broke, divorced and have no friends. That seems to be a miserable life to me.
I am the co-author of the most important research done in this field in 30 years. The Bennett/Pfau research shows that Valuation-Informed Indexing has been far, far superior to Buy-and-Hold for as far back as we have records of stock prices. “Yes, Virginia, Valuation-Informed Indexing works!” Have you ever stopped to think how graitfying it is to know that, onee the entire internet is opened to honest posting re the last 41 years of peer-reviewed research, my contribution to the literature will be helping millions of people to live better and fuller and richer lives? There is zero chance that something like that could ever have happened had I not first worked up the courage to put up that May 13, 2002, post pointing out the error in the Greaney retirement study. That was the thing that got the ball rolling in the right direction.
Did I experience a mountain of misery with the divorce? Obviously. Was it incredibly painful to see numerous discussion boards and blogs burned to the ground because Greaney really, really, really, really, really doesn’t want to say the words “I” and “was” and “wrong”? Obviously. Stop engaging in the abusive stuff and all of the stuff that causes misery disappears. What we want to highlight is all of the wonderful, amazing, life-affirming stuff that follows from permitting (and encouraging!) honest posting re the last 41 years of peer-reviewed research at every discussion board and blog on the internet.
The good stuff here is 20 times more good than the bad stuff is bad. The good stuff will be enhancing human lives forever. No one is going to want to spend 20 minutes thinking about the bad stuff (except thinking about ways to make sure that something like this never happens again) once we have opened every site to honest posting.
Does all of that not make perfect sense?
Rob
If what you said was true, you would be rich by now, your wife would have never left you and you would have thousands of friends posting here every day.
If Shiller’s Nobel-prize-winning research is legitimate, there will be a big swing in investor psychology in the days following the next Buy-and-Hold Crisis. The CAPE value usually drops to 8 when irrational exuberance is transformed into irrational depression.
We’ll see.
Rob
Your spin/interpretation of what Shiller has said, what Pfau has said, etc., etc., has failed you over and over again. No one is buying it as you can see. It is like telling us that we have to wait and see if the Chicago Cubs won the World Series in 2022. We don’t need to wait because they never made it that far. We already have seen how “things turned out” (to use your words). Game over. You’re broke, divorced and without friends……..the end.
Okay, Anonymous.
I do wish you all good things, in any event.
Rob