Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently posted to the discussion thread for another blog entry at this site:
‘ Again, he only said that after he was threatened.“
Where is the threat? We can’t find it. Wade can’t find it? There is nothing to suggest that anything you say is true. To the opposite, we see in his private emails that he says that is it YOU that are causing him harm. That is direct evidence against you.
The Greaney retirement study has not been corrected to this day, Anonymous. It’s been 20 years. What more proof could there possibly be? It’s not normal for an error in a study that people use to plan their retirements to be pointed out and for the study to remain uncorrected for 20 years. I mean — Holy, moly!
Rob
Wade Pfau agrees with Greaney. Robert Shiller agrees with Greaney. Your wife agrees with Greaney.
Greaney himself doesn’t agree with Greaney. His behavior reveals a lack of confidence.
If Buy-and-Holders believed deep in their hearts in bull market prices, prices wouidn’t crash. A price crash is just a confidence crash. It comes when the Buy-and-Holders can no longer successfully persuade themselves that irrational exuberance is real.
Rob
Even you agree with Greaney and that is why you apologized to him 20 years ago.
I felt intense social prssure to conform, to ignore what my independent mind told me about the dangers of irrational exuberance. I’m not proud of it, But I am not entirely ashamed of it either, Humans live in communities. To live in communities, we sometimes need to compromise our individual thoughts. If that weren’t so, we couldn’t have bull markets.
But if it weren’t also so that we have something within us that makes us want to rise above our inclination to create bull markets and then protect them from questioning, Shiller’s book wouldn’t have become a best seller and he wouldn’t have been awarded a Nobel prize and we wouldn’t have seen thousands of our fellow community members express a desire that every site be opend to honest posting re the last 41 years of peer-reviewed research.
I have goon inclinations within me. I don’t say different. But I have certainly taken steps to overcome those inclinations. I put forward that famous post of the morning of May 13, 2002, That wasn’t a goon post. It was the post of a human investor seeking to overcome his goonish inclinations. The reason why it struck such a chord is that we all have that desire to overcome our goonishness within us. Every Buy-and-Holder has that inclination, just as every Valuation-Informed Indexer has some goonishness within him.
I don’t believe that we will ever entirely eliminate Get Rich Quick/Buy-and-Hold inclinations. They are part of our human nature. But I think we can become better skilled at keeping them under control. We can become more thoughtful about these matters. The addictive drive that makes people want to smoke still exists. But the percentage of people who smoke has dropped since we became more aware of the dangers of smoking and of the need to make people aware of those dangers. There’s a sense in which humans keep repeating the same mistakes over and over. But there is also a sense in which progress is possible. Both things are so. We are flawed creatures. But we are capable of doing better than we have always done in the past.
Rob
“ I felt intense social prssure to conform”
I don’t think you have ever “conformed” to anything. If you did, you would not be broadly banned from the investment community, nor would you be broke or divorced.
I’ve conformed to U.S. law, Anonymous. I’ve conformed to what the last 41 years of peer-reviewed research teaches us all about how stock investing works in the real world. I’ve conformed to the expressed wishes of thousands of our fellow community members who have indicated a desire to see honest posting re the peer-reviewed research permitted at every site.
Rob
Yet you are broke, divorced and have no friends………….and think you have conformed. Nope. Not even close.
I go to sleep at night knowing that I stood up for my fellow community members who were being taken in by the claims made in the Greaney retirement study. That’s something. That’s a lot. That’s everything. I wouldn’t trade in that feeling for all the money in the world.
If Get Rich Quick/Buy-and-Hold were a real thing, no one would ever suffer any financial penalty for pointing out the errors in Buy-and-Hold retirement studies. If Get Rich Quick/Buy-and-Hold were a real thing, Buy-and-Holders would ENCOURAGE people to ask questions about the methodoligies used in their studies. The fact that a good number of Buy-and-Holders don’t care about getting the numbers right in their retitement studies tells a tale that needs to be told far and wide.
People use retirement studies to plan retirements. I’ve seen it with my own eyes.
Rob
It is just a silly story you keep repeating as an excuse for not getting a real job. No one is buying it. Not even your ex-wife.
I’m buying it, Anonymous. I am the person who I need to persuade that I have behaved decently to be able to sleep at night. And then of course we have the thousands of our fellow community members who have expressed a desire that honest posting be permitted at every site. Those people are not willing to stand up to death threats and threats of career destruction and that sort of thing. But they obviously are interested in hearing what I and the other Valuation-Informed Indexers have to say. Greaney never would have demanded a ban on honest posting re the peer-reviewed research in the first place if he hadn’t seen people losing confidence in his study because of what I and the other Valuation-Informed Indexers had to say.
Are you okay with waiting to see how things play out in the days following the next Buy-and-Hold Crisis?
Rob
“ I’m buying it, Anonymous. ”
Once again, it is all about you, in your mind. You are not a dictator and you can’t expect others to buy into your line of b.s. The entire financial community has banned you, you have gone broke and your wife divorced you, yet you somehow don’t see how you are the problem.
I think that the problem is the Get Rich Quick/Buy-and-Hold impulse that resides within all of us, Anonymous. The Bennett/Pfau research shows that the key to successful long-term stock investing is learning how to restrain that impulse. We cannot learn how to restrain it if we cannot even talk about it. If we all were working together to restrain that impulse to the extent possible, we would all get along together and be friends. I believe that thats the future.
Unfortunately, it appears to me that we are going to need to live through another Buy-and-Hold Crisis to get there, That’s the part that scares me.
My best wishes to you.
Rob
“ I think that the problem is the Get Rich Quick/Buy-and-Hold impulse that resides within all of us, Anonymous.”
And that has been proven wrong.
A death threat is not proof of anything. A demand for an unjustifed board banning is not proof of anything. Thousands of acts of defamation are not proof of anything, Acts of extortion are not proof of anything.
Those are all signs of desperation that you do not possess confidence that you can prove what you want to prove and instead just want to suppress questioning of your safe withdrawal rate claims.
My sincere take.
Rob
You haven’t provided any proof of a death threat, or acts of defamation or acts of extortion. It is all made up. The board bannings are all justified. Plus, anyone can block anyone else from their board, just like you block people here.
Only broke people (like you) are desperate.
Okay, Anonymous.
Please take good care.
Rob
It certainly doesn’t look like your wife wanted to “ see how things play out” when she dumped you.
She may feel differently in the days following the next Buy-and-Hold Crisis, Anonymous. Millions of people may feel differenly then.
If I don’t make the effort, who is going to do it?
Someone has to do something. I think that much is more than fair to say.
Rob
The biggest problem with your argument is that buy and hold has not and will not cause an economic crisis.
I believe it will, Sensible.
Today’s CAPE value tells us that there are many trillions of dollars of irrational exuberance present in the stock price. When those trillions disappear into thin air, will that not cause a contraction in consumer spending? That’s what happened on all the earlier occasions when we permitted stock prices to reach these levels.
Irrational exuberance is not a good thing. It is a very bad thing. I would like to see us all working together to keep it from getting out of control.
Rob