Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently posted to the discussion thread for another blog entry at this site:
You have certain beliefs and others have their beliefs. So what. It has nothing to do with getting a job. Why should things be any different for you versus every other American.
I’m the only person who advanced a post on the morning of May 13, 2002, that pointed out the error in the Greaney retirement study (it lacks an adjustment for the valuation level that applies on the day the retirement begins) and then saw the cover-up that followed for the next 21 years. Any decent person who saw what I saw would be doing the same thing that I am doing. I just happened to be the lucky one that the universe selected for the job!
Rob
You are the only person that makes up a story about an error as a way of avoiding work for 21 years. Just ask your ex-wife. She agrees with me and knows better than anyone else.
I didn’t make it up. The Greaney study truly lacks a valuation adjustment. You could confirm it for yourself if you were capable of being even a tiny bit fair-minded re these matters.
My ex does not “agree” with you. She thinks the goon stuff is horrible. She couldn’t live without an income coming in for so long. That’s something different. I don’t think that that shows that the Campaign of Terror against our board and blog comminities is a good thing or is justified. It shows that as a nation of people we very, very, very much need to overcome it so that over time we can all come to think clearly about how stock investing works in the real world.
As bad as the behavior of you Goons is, the far more damaging thing is the tolerance that the Normals have for it. There are always going to be outlier personalities in the world who do crazy thing. It’s just an unfortunate reality of life. But why does the 90 percent of the population that is not flat-out nuts tolerate it only in the investment advice field? That’s the real story here.
We tolerate it because we all have a Get Rich Quick/Buy-and-Hold impulse residing within us and it has been making stock investing a lot more risky than it needs to be ever since the first stock market was formed. We now have 42 years of research pointing us in a much more promising and life-affirming direction. We should be thanking Shiller for his amazing research, not banning discussion of it at every site.
I believe that the day when one large site opens itself to honest posting re Shiller’s Nobel-prize-winning research will be a turning point in U.S. history. I don’t believe that there will be anyone who will want to go back to the Buy-and-Hold days once it has become common practice to take valiations into consideraton when making any stock investing decision. We’ll see.
Rob
Your story doesn’ t make sense. Divorcing you doesn’t increase her income. It is obvious that she no longer believed your story and you wouldn’t change.
She doesn’t support the goon tactics even a tiny bit. But she has a strong work ethic and she believes that I should have abandoned the investing work and took up work that would produce immediate income. I also have a strong work ethic and I have concerns for the losses of accumulated life savings that millions of hard-working people will experience in the event that stocks continue to perform in the future somewhat as they always have in the past and we experience yet another Buy-and-Hold Crisis. I believe that, if my ex had witnessed everything that I have witnessed, she would support me 100 percent.
I think that is so for every person in the United States. I believe that we are fundanemtally a good people. But we got on the wrong track when Buy-and-Hold was beign develped becaused Shiller’s Nobel-prize-winning research showing why a strategy that does not call for market timing/price discipline can never work was not available at the time. Now that the cover-up has been going on for 42 years, it makes the Buy-and-Holders look very, very, very bad for the realities to be discussed. It is not my aim to make the Buy-and-Holders look bad. But I do want to do honest work. So I am not willing to say that I believe that the retirement study posted at John Greaney’s site contains a valuation adjustment. I believe that as a nation of people we will get it worked up sometime following the onset of the next Buy-and-Hold Crisis. I sure hope so.
My best wishes to you and yours.
Rob
“ She couldn’t live without an income coming in for so long.”
By your own words, she left you because you wouldn’t work. It had nothing to do with your goon stories.
It had everything to do with you Goons. She never said that I didn’t work my tail off on the investing stuff. If I had been bringing in millions, she would have been perfectly happy.
That’s so of everyone else who works in this field as well. If Wade Pfau had been awarded the Nobel prize that the research he co-authored with me merited, he never woiuld have flipped. We should be praising the people who have showed the courage to stand up to the Buy-and-Hold Goon Squads to the sky, not discouraging them from continuing the fight, We all need to hear the research-based story at every site on the internet.
That’s my sincere take, Anonymous.
I natiurally wish you all the best that this life has to offer a person.
Rob
No one kept you from earning money. You just decided not to work. Your wife gave you over 2 decades to work, but you refused.
Pointing out the error in the Greaney retirement study is work. It’s very important work. There are milions of people who relied on the infamous 4-percent rule in the planning of their retirement. Those people need to know about the error.
Valuation-Informed Indexing is a huge advance from Buy-and-Hold. The Bennett/Pfau research shows that it is a superior strategy in every possible way. I obviously would have earned hundreds of millions of dollars promoting it had you Goons not limited progress in our nation’s understanding of how stock investing works with your abusive and in some cases criminal behavior. This important work should be well-compensated, and, but for your insanely abusive behavior, it would have been.
I will continue doing what I can to open every internet site to honest posting re the last 42 years of peer-reviewed research in this field. It will be interesting to see how things play out in the days following the onset of the next Buy-and-Hold Crisis.
I hope that helps at least a tiny bit.
Rob
Stating an opinion is not work, not to mention, you quit your job a long time before you came up with this story.
My aim is not just to state an opinion. My aim is to launch an internet-wide discussion of the realities of stock investing, as revealed by the last 42 years of peer-reviewed reseaarch. It is of coursr extremely strange that that discussion did not get launched in 1981. But the fact is that it didn’t. So we need to get it started now. Whoever launches that discussion is adding hundreds of millions of dollars of value to the people of the United States. I think it would be fair to say that for 21 years now the Universe has been sending me a message that I have been elected to carry out the task.
I quit my job in pursuanve of my Passion Saving plan. The idea was to save enough money to permit me to move to a more fulfilling and more lucrative (in the long term) line of work — independent jouinalism (rather than the corporate journalism that I had been doing). I wouldn’t have added hundreds of millions of value had I not made that shift. So I think it would be fair that it is not only Valuation-Informed Indexing that works, but Passion Saving as well.
Rob
Your plan was already failing in the first 3 years. Everyone told you how dangerous and faulty your plan was and looked what happened. Rather than admit those people were right, you invented a story about coverups, goons, etc., rather than coming up with a new plan.
The Greaney retirement study has not been corrected in the first three years. What did that tell you?
Rob
Nothing, because it did not have an error. That has nothing to do with your lack of working. You are free to be a journalist, but if you can’t make money with journalism, you had a duty to your family to makes changes in your career to support them. The primary responsibility is to provide and not just expect the world to give you money for a dream.
Um….
Rob
Can I expect to have people pay me millions for my opinions on Tesla’s?
If the alcoholic beverage industry told people that the key to safe driving is drinking six beers before you get in the car and there was peer-reviewed research showing that that is nonsense and the industry suppressed discussion of that research for many years and you exposed the cover-up, then, yes, I would say that you would be properly collecting millions for that valuable journalism work.
People need to know how to drive safely. And people need to know how to invest in stocks successfully.
Getting the numbers wildly wrong in a retirement study is not a joke.
Mistakes happen. But 21-year cover-ups should not happen. We need good journalism to expose them. We should compensate journalists that do that sort of work for the great value they add to our society.
That’s my sincere take, Anonymous. I offer zero apologies for pointing out the error in the Greaney retirement study. I only wish that I had had the courage to do it sooner. I feel like a creep for taking three years to work up the courage to advance that famous post of May 13, 2002.
Rob
Just like the alcoholic, you blame others and can’t admit you are the problem.
Okay, Anonymous.
I do wish you all good things, in any event.
Rob
Your 21 year cover up of laziness and refusal to get a job.
Yeah, yeah.
Rob
Read this:
https://esimoney.com/retirement-update-7-years/
This is a successful retirement. This is the same person that previously ran the board freemoneyfinance.com. He wouldn’t let you guest post, so you told him he would be going to prison because of it. Look at how he turned out and how you turned out.
The story is not over, Anonymous. The problem with Buy-and-Holders is that they look at one moment in time and say “this is it — the result that appears to apply for today is the final word on stock investing and that’s that.” What I loved about Buy-and-Hold in the days when I was drawn to it enough to become a Buy-and-Holder myself is that Buy-and-Holders in those days used to urge investors to look at the peer-reviewed research to learn how to invest effecticely. The peer-reviewed research doen’t look at a single moment in time. It looks at the entire history of the market. That’s why it shows how important it is for every investor to practice market timing/price discipline at all times. There are moments in time when it appears that it is all going to turn out different this time than it ever has before. But those moments always pass. The fundamental rules always apply in the end.
We will all have to decide as a nation of people who goes to prison and who does not. I have said that I am not going to take a position in those discussions. I am going to continue to say that price discipline (market timing!) is always 100 percent required for every investor and I am going to continue to say that I truly do not believe that the Greaney retirement study contains an adjustment for the valuation level that applies on the day the retirement begins. If people are pissed off because of the huge losses they have suffered in the next Buy-and-Hold Crisis (earlier Buy-and-Hold crises have produced millions of failed retirements and hundreds of thoussands of business failures and millions of people being thrown out of work), it would not surprise me even a tiny bit to see demands for prison terms for those who posted in “defense” of Mel Lindauer and John Greaney on more than one or two occasions. I am not going to say that I do not see where those people are coming from. I believe that Robert Shiller’s Nobel-prize-winning research showing that valuations affect long-term returns is legitimate research and that we should be permitting people to post about its far-reaching how-to implications at every discussion board and blog on the internet. So I can see why people who have suffered huge losses will be mighty pissed of to learn about the 21-year cover-up. But I intend to leave that one for the people of the Uniuted States to decide. We are all in this thing together and we are going to have to figure out how we will make the journey to a far better place together.
My best and warmest wishes to you and yours in any event, Anonymous.
Rob
The story is over, Rob. The person referenced has now been retired for over 6 years and is close to 60. You are over 60. At this age, it is too late to change your outcome as the ability to earn and save is extremely limited.
On the prison topic, you are the one that has told people they are going to prison. You are the one making this up. No one else is.
No, we are not all in this together. Each person has to take responsibility for themselves and their families.
I believe that, in the days following the onset of the next Buy-and-Hold Crisis, it is likely that people who participated actively in the 21-year cover-up will be going to prison. I am not going to be deciding the matter. I am obviously not going to be serving on your jury, Anonymous. And I do not intend to lead a campaign to have you sent to prison. If I am asked to testify as to whether or not I believe that the Greaney study containd a valuation adjustment, I am going to say that I believe that it lacks one. I am going to say that I believe that partly to keep MYSELF out of prison.
I mention the prison sentenves from time to time for two reasons. One, the fact that there are people willing to risk prison sentences to suppress research-based discussion of safe withdrawal rates and other critically important investment-related topics shows how emotional stock investing can become, especially for those who follow pure Get Rich Quick/Buy-and-Hold strategies. Two, I think of you Goons as friends (in the days before I pointed out the error in the Greaney study, the feeling was mutual in many cases). If there is anything that I can do to get your prison sentences reduced a bit, I obviously want to do that. I think it would be fair to say that the single most important factor determining the length of your prison sentence will be how many people you hurt and that number obviously increases with each say that the cover-up continues. So I don’t think it hurts to ever now and again post a reminded that it is not only millions of middle-class investors that you hurt with your abusive and in some casees criminal behavior, it is you and your Goon pals too.
My best wishes, etc. Yes, really.
Rob
Is there any scenario now, in your mind, where you finally decide that you need to get a job and earn some money or is your plan just to keep the status quo?
There’s no scenario that I can imagine in which I would accept full-time paid employment prior to completing the book that I am writing on Valuation-Informed Indexing. I don’t see it as entirely out of the question that I would accept part-time employment. After the book is completed, I expect to accept full-time employment. But I doubt that I will do that if we have seen the onset for the next Buy-and-Hold Crisis by that time.
Does that help?
Rob
You said the book was 80% complete over a year ago. It should be done or nearly done, so that doesn’t sound like a road block to getting a job now, given your need.
There’s a big difference between a book being done and a book being nearly done. I think it would be fair to describe the issue of when we will finally open every internet site to honest discussion of the last 42 years of peer-reviewed research in this field as the most importnt public policy issue facing our nation today. So it’s pretty darn important that I get the words in the book just right.
I am highly confident that I will be able to pull it off. I am thrilled with the sections that are complete. But I don’t intend to accept anything out of myself that is short of my best possible work. All the work that I have done over the course of my lifetime has led me to this moment. Getting the book right is my top priority times 20.
Anything else is inconsequential in comparison. I will make this contribution to the world. The world gets to decide how it will respond. But I will make a contribution that shines in my assessment.
Wish me luck!
Rob