Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently posted to the discussion thread for another blog entry at this site:
Now read the whole thread again. You don’t have a step 2. People have heard your message and they don’t agree. Removing the bans doesn’t change a thing.
As to the bans, you mention a key point in that you state the following: “ I was banned at lots of places”. Combine that with the fact that no one will talk to you outside of these places and your wife, now ex-wife, also decided to part ways with you. Any reasonable and rational person would finally come to the conclusion that they are the problem and not everyone else.
It’s not everyone else. Thousands of people have expressed a desire that honest posting re the peer-reviewed research be permittet at every site. A good number of the biggest names in the field have said that they believe that my stuff checks out. Several have even worked with me. Wade Pfau devoted 16 months of his life to research showing that “Yes, Virginia, Valuation-Informed Indexing works!” His emails showed that those were the happiest 16 nonths of his life. He had hopes in those days of being awarded a Nobel prize for the research that we co-authored.
It’s only a small number of insanely dogmatic Buy-and-Holders (the Goons) who have held us all back. And they had to engage in criminal behavior to do it! It’s true that the 90 percent of Normals did not do enough to rein in your Goons. That is of course a highly unfortunate reality. But that 90 percent would be perfected happy to see honest posting re the peer-reviewed research permitted at every site.
And those people have NOT heard the message. They heard a small part of it on a small number of occasions. But the shift from Buy-and-Hold to Valuation-Informed Indexing is too big a change for it to be achieved with a few mentions of what the research says. Buy-and-Hold/Get Rich Quick is a seriois addiction, Have you ever heard of someone quitting smoking or escaping alsoholism because they heard one time how smoking or drinking to excess are negative behaviors? To get over an addiction that strong, you need to hear the message repeated daily and you need to hear it from many different places. I have seen people converted from Buy-and-Hold to Valuation-Informed Indexing. I am a convery myself. It is something that happens gradually over a period of time, not in a flash in response to one mention of what the research says.
If we want people to avoid the dangers of Buy-and-Hold/Get Rich Quick, we need to be telling them every day and at every site what the research says. The message just won’t stick otherwise. We need to be singing the praises of market timing and we need to be singing those praises in a highly spirited way. That’s Step Two. That’s what changes everything.
As a nation of people, we believe that discussion of the peer-reviewed research should be permitted. We have a funny way of showing that belief. If we didn’t have a funny way of showing it, we wouldn’t have the black cloud of a CAPE value of 31 hanging over us today. But that is our core belief. If it were not, we would have shut down all the peer-reviewed journals. We wouldn’t have to worry about millions of people learning about the dangers of going pure Get Rich Quick/Buy-and-Hold is we shut down all the peer-reviewed journals. But we haven’t done that. You Goons would support it. But 90 percent of the population of investors thinks we should permit discussion of what the peer-reviewed research is trying to teach us.
The next Buy-and-Hold Crisis will show us all once again how dangerous it is to pure Get Rich Quick/Buy-and-Hold. I believe that some of the people in that 90 pervcent will work up the courage to stand up to you Goons at that time. I believe that we are today on the threshold of the biggest surge of economic growth in U.S. history. Getting the word out to millions of people re how stock investing works in the real world is no small thing. I am horrified by the thought of what we will be put through n the next Buy-and-Hold Crisis. But I think it would be fair to say that the good news re this matter is 20 times more good than the bad news re this matter is bad.
We’ll see. Wish us all luck!
Rob
The thousands of posts here by your fans reflect how everyone feels about your opinions.
The fact that I am banned at so many sites shows how much confidence the Buy-and-Holders have that their strategy can survive civil and reasoned debate.
If the published rules had been followed at every site, there would be thousands here every day.
What happens after the onset of the next Buy-and-Hold Crisis?
I’d rather be on the side that has the peer-reviewed research supporting its claims.
Rob
“ If the published rules had been followed at every site, there would be thousands here every day.”
You violated basic rules by referring to people as con-men and goons. You threatened people with prison and made false accusations of criminal acts. You refused to engage in proper discussions. All these board owners made independent decisions. When you see this common response, it is easy to see that you are the root of the problem.
Setting all that aside, you never had people coming to this board when you did have access to those others boards. Giving you access again wouldn’t change that.
You’re right that me having access to all of the boards and blogs from which I am today banned would not by itself change things. What would change things is a decision to open every site to honest posting re the last 42 years of peer-reviewed research in this field. That’s something different. That would mean that we would no longer be seeing abusive or criminal behavior from the members of the Buy-and-Hold Goon Squads. That would change everything. From the moment that every site was opened to honest posting re the peer-reviewed research, we would see learning taking place. Things would then get better and better and better. We would be on our way to a place where we could all live better and richer and fuller and freer lives.
People make mistakes. It’s been true since the beginning of time. The people who developed the Buy-and-Hold strategy back in the 1960s made a mistake in thinking that long-term market timing/price discipline might not be 100 percent required for every investor at all times. Shiller’s research had not yet been published at the time. Reseach showing that short-term timing doesn’t work HAD been published. No one even thought to look at long-term timing. Long-term timing only works with index funds and indexing was not much of a thing in the 1960s (Bogle popularized indexing when he founded the Vanguard group in the 1970s). So the people who developed the Buy-and-Hold strategy just didn’t know. They took a shot in the dark that maybe long-term timing was no more required than short-term timing.
When Shiller published his Nobel-prize-winning research showing the valuations affect long-term returns, those who follow the peer-reviewed research learned that that shot in the dark was in error. The proper thing to do at that time was to encourage widespread discussion of the far-reaching how-to implications of the new research. We didn’t see that. The Buy-and-Holders must have been embarrassed about their mistake. Discussion of the mistake was suppresesed and, the longer it was suppressed, the more the embarrassment grew and grew and grew. 42 years after the research that we needed all along to understand how this stock market thing works, people feel perfectly free to post the loony tunes claim that the safe withdrawal rate is the same number at all possible valuation levels but people do not feel free to point out that it is a logical impossibility that that loony tunes claim is so. In a world in which valuations affect long-term returns (the world we all live in, according to Shiller’s Nobel-prize-winning research), the safe withdrawal rate CHANGES with changes in valuation levels. It was 1.6 in 2000, it was 9.0 in 1982.
Open every site to honest posting re the research and we will soon see thousands of people posting here on a daiily basis. You knew from the reaction to my famous post of the morning of May 13, 2002, that that is where we were headed if you did not begin enaging in insanely abusive behavior to distupt the conversations that thousands of our fellow community members were trying to have amongst themselves so that they could learn about this important subject matter. People do not behave in the manner in which you Goons have behaved for no reason.
What would you call someone who thratened to murder your loved ones because you worked up the courage to point out an error in a study that many people were using to plan their retirements? The behavior of you Goons is part of the story. It usually doesn’t take 42 years for people to learn what is said in new peer-revewed research. The failure of the Buy-and-Holders to encourage discussion of Shiller’s research is a con. What would you call it? The people who advance death threats and enage in acts of extortion to stop academic researchers from doing honest work in this field are Goons. What would you call them. To bring an end to the Goon behavior and to the massive Buy-and-Hold Con, we need to talk about those things.
We should be charitable in talking about those things because the aim here is to pull people together, not to tear them apart. And indeed I always bend over backwards to be as chartiable as possible in talking about The Great Buy-and-Hold Con and about the role that you Goons have played in keeping it going for another 21 years after I advanced my famous post pointing out the error in the Greaney retirement study (it lacks as adjustment for the valuation level that applies on the day the retirement begins). While charity is required, so is a measure of honesty. It would not be honest to say that the Greany study contains a valuation adjustment and it would not be honest to deny that we have seen death threats and acts of extortion and thousnads of acts of defamation and many demands for unjustified board bannings from you Goons in your efforts to keep The Great Buy-and-Hold Con rolling.
As ugly and unfortunate as all that stuff is, it is now part of the history of the United States. If we all want to move to a better place (we all obviously do), we are going to need to mention that stuff as part of the transition. In charity, we should move on as soon as possible. But one of the questions that people have in their minds today is how the heck dicussion of Shiller’s Nobel-prize-winning research has been suppressed for so long. It is not the normal turn of events in the United States. I don’t believe that that has ever been another case in which things have played out quite like this.
Valuations affect long-term returns. I believe that. I believe that Shiller’s Nobel-prize-winning research is legitimate research. Greaney’s retirement study lacks an adjustment for the valuation level that applies on the day the retirement begins. I believe that with more confidence today that I believed it on the morning of May 13, 2002. My confidence has increased because Greaney has for 21 years now failed to point to the section of his study containing a valuation adjustment. Please explain.
I naturally wish you all the best that this life has to offer a person regardless of what investment strategy you elect to follow, my dear Goon friend. My best and warmest wishes you and yours.
Rob
Pure Hocomania!
Okay, Anonymous.
Please take good care.
Rob