Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently posted to the discussion thread for another blog entry at this site:
Should other board owners be obligated to allow you to peddle your failed timing scheme? Should other board owners be obligated to let you lie and tell stories on THEIR websites? Of course not. We should thank board owners for maintaining decorum on their websites.
Every site owner should permit honest posting re the last 43 years of peer-reviewed research in this field. The question is an absurd one.
It’s clear from the first 22 years of discussions that the majority of site owners would prefer to permit honest discussions. The problem is that to do so would expose the 43-year cover-up and that makes all Buy-and-Holders (which today make up 90 percent of the population) look bad. So the site owners “feel funny” about going there.
We obviously have no choice but to go there eventually. Every Buy-and-Hold Crisis that we have experienced in U.S. history has been a terrifying experience. It’s not a sane choice to just continue to experience them now when there is 43 years of peer-reviewed research making them optional. If we are going to go there sooner or later, it is better to go there sooner. Continued delay hurts every single person involved (you Goons even more than the rest of us — the rest of us are not looking ahead to long prison sentences). So I always advocate that we open every site to honest posting re the peer-reviewed research within the next 24 hours.
I also try to be careful to note that we need to open every site to honest posting “without a single exception.” You never know where the next powerful research-based insight is going to come from. We certainly do not want to leave anyone out!
My best wishes, etc.
Rob
Rather than discuss any of your theories (which have, in practice, failed spectacularly) you’re discussing having been banned from websites that mostly don’t even exist anymore while refusing to post on the far more popular websites that exist today. Believe me, YouTube and reddit will not ban you for your investing theories. You’re free to post to all even remotely prominent sites except for Bogleheads (which is a pretty small website in the grand scheme of things).
Bogleheads is not small in terms of its influence. The people who post there are smart and well-informed. The vast majority are Buy-and-Holders but the majority are open to hearing the other side of the story.
It’s not an accident that I met Wade Pfau at Bogleheads. He liked all the same thing about it that I liked. And lots of people there liked him. Lindauer didn’t. But lots of people did.
It’s also not an accident that Bogle put up a post there saying that he had come around to believing that there are circumstances in which market timing can work. Bogle was searching for a compromise. His statement was not quite an endorsement of Valuation-Informed Indexing. But it was a very positive sign. Had we explored Bogle’s statement in some depth, we could have changed the world.
What if Bogle had assured Pfau that he would take care of Lindauer? That would have changed the world.
Those who posted in defense of Lindauer held us back just as those who posted in defense of Greaney held us back at the Motley Fool board. But that board has huge potential. I see it as pretty much the perfect place to spread the word re Valuation-Informed Indexing. I certainly do not have majority support there or anything even remotely close to it. But there are smart and well-informed people there who would be dynamite in their efforts to spread the word if only we could make progress in reining in the abusiveness of the Lindauerheads.
Please mark me down as being pro-Bogelheads (but anti-Lindauerheads).
Rob
Reddit is probably the most influential website. Its personal finance groups like their “Financial Independence” group are definitely influenced by Bogleheads, but reddit influences the other social media sites. You could go to reddit and discredit the Bogleheads before their ideas get to the bigger sites like Facebook or YouTube. What’s stopping you?
I don’t know anything about Reddit. I don’t have either a positive or a negative impression. My priority today is finishing my book on investing. Once I’ve done that, I can easily imagine bringing the Valuation-Informed Indexing concept to Reddit I’m not willing to spend time there until the book is finished.
Rob
If you don’t have time for Reddit, then you don’t have time for any other website, so your demands to have websites reverse their bans lack any substance.
If every site were open to honest posting re the peer-reviewed research, I wouldn’t even need to write the book. The purpose of the book is to make the case for considering the last 43 years of peer-reviewed research.
I think that’s the answer, Anonymous. I’m sure of it!
Rob
If posting was a priority over the book, you would post on Reddit right now. A simple Google search will show you that the Bogleheads forum has a small sliver of space on the internet compared to Reddit. Further, the reach of any book would also pale in comparison to the reach of Reddit.
If I ran a restaurant for 20+ years and customers would not eat there because they didn’t like what I served, would you say that I just need to advertise more? Of course not, because people don’t like what I have.
Similarly, you have made hundreds of thousands of posts all over the internet. No one is following you or supporting you. Having more access to the internet and a book won’t change a thing for your message is still the same. To the first example, no one likes the food your are serving. Your restaurant failed.
I don’t care how many people there are at Bogleheads. The people who are there are quality. We need quality people working this to get to where we want to go.
The book won’t have any reach until we have opened every site to honest posting. If I am at a place like Reddit and someone expresses interest, I want to be able to hand them the book.
Rob
If the people at Bogleheads are quality people, then you admit that they know what they are talking about. They have rejected you and that is their right to. They don’t think you are honest and they don’t approve of your abusive behavior. Stop trying to tell them what to do and reflect on your own issues.
People showed intense interest in Valuation-Informed Indexing at every site at which I posted. The interest level is off the charts. The only problem has been the abusive posting. People hate that stuff. We need to get that stuff reined in. Once we do, we all live better lives from that point forward.
The abusive stuff is desperate stuff. If Greaney truly believed that he had included a valuation adjustment in his study, he would have pointed at it within the first 24 hours. We never would have seen a single abusive post. I mean, come on.
Rob
The majority of people at Bogleheads are fine with me posting there. That’s why they adopted rules prohibiting the sorts of tactics we saw employed by the Lindaerheads. You Goons are not the majority in any board community. You are 20 times more intense than the Normals, that’s all It’s an intensity born of desperation.
Rob
No, the Bogleheads are clear that they don’t want you there. If anyone had interest in what you said, they would be over here. They are not. You even admitted that no one in the community even speaks with you directly.
Okay, Anonymous.
Rob
“My priority today is finishing my book on investing.”
Do you have an estimate of when you will be finished writing your book?
About how much of it have you written?
Are you willing to publish any juicy excerpts of it?
You read excerpts here every day. Nothing in it will be new. The writing of the books is just arranging all of the material in a single coherent narrative. That is hard.
My current target date for completion is July 1, 2025.
More than 50 percent had been written for several years now. There are a few sections that have been giving me an enormous amount of trouble. The last section — “From Buy-and-Hold to Valuation-Informed Indexing” — has been tough. I’ve also struggled with “The Theory Behind Valuation-Informed Indexing.” That sets everything up. So I feel a new to be careful with that. The section on “Our Goon Friends” was easy. (That was a joke.)
Rob
I think George RR Martin will finish The Winds of Winter before you finish Investing for Humans: How to Get What Works on Paper to Work in Real Life.
And I’ll be honest, I don’t hold out much hope of The Winds of Winter being finished any time soon.
It seems like your progress gets slower with each passing year, would that be a fair assessment?
It would be fair to say that it is taking far longer than I expected to finish the book.
That’s true of our entire society. Shiller provided us with the missing piece of the stock investing puzzle in 1981. And we have a CAPE value of 36, 22 years later. Shiller wrote a great book on his amazing research. But he doesn’t address safe withdrawal rates in his book. Huh? What the f?
I’m not the only one who has had a hard time working up the courage to tell millions of people that “when you make up stock gains out of nothing, they don’t last.” It’s a hard message to deliver to people. It hurts people to hear that and we all have a voice within us that says “don’t say things to people that hurt them.”
I’ll get there. It won’t matter how long it took me to get there once I get there.
Rob
“You read excerpts here every day. Nothing in it will be new. The writing of the books is just arranging all of the material in a single coherent narrative. That is hard.”
So if you just took your 700+ Value Walk articles and put them in a book would it not amount to just about the same thing.
And regarding Value Walk you used to publish there on a once a week cycle, recently it seems to be a bit more irregular. Are you submitting less articles or has something changed on their side.
Sometimes the people who edit the articles go on vacation.
There’s a lot of value in putting the material from the 700 columns into one continuous narrative of a manageable length. That’s why books exist. Having the entire story in one place helps people appreciate how different aspects of the question relate to each other.
Rob
So what you are saying is that you don’t have any new material and that your book is just a repeat of what you have already said. If that is the case, why wasn’t the book done many years ago? Afterall, the ValueWalk articles are all repeats of things you have said many times before.
If it were an easy thing to write this book, thousands of people would have written it many years ago. Nobody has pulled it off. It’s Shiller’s research and he hasn’t written this book.
There’s nothing complicated about it. Shiller’s research is common sense. The price you pays for stocks affects the amount of risk you take on! Who would have thunk it? That’s the story.
It’s like telling your kid that he can’t have a second bowl of ice cream. People can retire years earlier by keeping the realities in mind. The Bennett/Pfau research shows that as clearly as anything can be seen. But people like thinking that the phony irrational exuberance gains they create are real. Woe to the guy who dares to tell them otherwise, you know.
It’s a simple and yet difficult message to convey. I think people need to hear this message. So I stick at it.
Today’s CAPE value is 36. That should tell you what you need to know.
Rob
There is a reason no one else has written a book like you describe. It is because it is a bunch of hocomania. No one wants to waste there time like you do.
Okay, Anonymous.
I wish you all good things, in any event.
Rob
“ There’s a lot of value in putting the material from the 700 columns into one continuous narrative of a manageable length. That’s why books exist. Having the entire story in one place helps people appreciate how different aspects of the question relate to each other.”
So it is just a repeating the same information that you have already posted thousands of time and the production of a book is merely an organizational exercise. This is simple work and should be MUCH faster versus writing a book from scratch. Either you don’t intend to finish the book or your are just stretching it out as long as possible to avoid having to get an actual job.
There’s not a lot of intellectual content to this on either side, Anonymous. There are thousands of markets out there and in every single one price discipline is absolutely essential, the thing that makes the market work. It’s hardly a big surprise that Shiller showed that that’s how it works in the stock market as well. But he was awarded a Nobel prize for his work. There must be something about his research that impressed people. What impressed people is that what he said (timing is required) is the OPPOSITE of what most of today’s “experts” say. To acknowledge the obvious reality would save us all from future bull markets and bear markets and economic collapses. So it’s not a small deal, it’s a huge deal.
The challenge is not an intellectual one, it is an emotional one. Say that I went over to Reddit today and posted there. There would be a few people there who would be intrigued by what I said. I know that from experience. I also know that there would be some who would be very upset. There would be some guy who over the course of a lifetime has accumulated savings of $1 million and who ids proud of the work that it took to pull that off. And I come along and tell him that his portfolio has a lasting value of only half that, that the rest is just irrational exuberance. I would be taking $500,000 out of that guy’s pocket. He’s not going to like me for saying that and I am not going to like not being liked. That’s the dynamics we have seen at play here since the first day. Do we as a nation of people want to know the truth about stock investing or do we prefer to continue to cover up the truth and suffer the consequences associated with that.
When a person writes a book, he has a reader in his mind’s eye. He thinks about the effect on that reader as he puts his sentences together. I know from a lot of experience that a lot of my readers are not going to enjoy the experience of reading my words. I assume today that they are not going to read my words until after the onset of the next Buy-and-Hold Crisis. So I think that people may be more open to the message of the book when they read it than they would be today. But I don’t believe that everybody is going to be entirely happy to read my words. That affects the writing process.
The usual goal of a writer is to make things as clear as possible. In this case, making things more clear makes things more painful. You don’t want to call your readers stupid. That’s a very bad persuasion strategy. But it’s a pretty darn stupid phenomenon we’re talking about here. Today’s CAPE value is 36. We know from history how much human misery follows from that. And every reader of the book has contributed to that in some way. If a person jumped up and down when the CAPE went from 35 to 36, he played a role in causing all that misery. It was not done by one person. Yes the Wall Street Con Men lie to us all about how stock investing works on a daily basis. But they do it because we love them so much for doing it. So all of the people that they are lying to are liars too, no? Calling your readers stupid liars is not the conventional path to journalism success. But to tell this story clearly and fully and accurately its something that must be said.
How about the fraud? I love John Bogle. It was byb reading Bogle’s book that I learned that Greaney’s study is in error. But Bogle saw what was going on at the Bogleheads Forms and he kept it zipped re Lindauaer’s behavior. Had Bogle reassured Wade Pfau that he would protect him from Lindauer and his goon squad, Wade never would have flipped. So Bogle’s role in all this is a topic that must be addressed. But it is not easy to write the sections dealing with that sort of thing.
Intellectually, it’s a piece of cake. Paying attention to price is just as important when buying stocks as it is when buying anything else. One sentence does the job. It’s not hard to understand why it’s so. But if everyone took that comment-sense insight into consideration, we wouldn’t have a CAPE value of 36 today. If we want to bring an end to the pain that Buy-and-Hold causes, we are going to need to talk about these matters. So it is both a very easy book to write and a very hard book to write.
Valuations matter. So easy. Self-evident. Millions of people ignore this obvious truth and destroy their own lives and the lives of others by doing so. Writing that up is a very hard thing to do. That’s why no one had done it in the 43 years since Shiller published his amazing research, including Shiller himself. So I am not going to get too down on myself for taking some time getting there. I want to get there as soon as possible. But the bottom line is that it doesn’t matter how long it takes so long as I do a good job. I just need to hang in there and get a little closer day by day.
My sincere take.
Think about how slow Greaney has been about correcting his study! That’s the truly amazing one!
Rob
A long response that doesn’t really say anything. It just confirms that only have a few pages of content and lack the substance required in a real book.
Okay, Anonymous.
I wish you well.
Rob
It is funny to watch a broke guy with a failed retirement who has admitted to “not being a numbers guy” telling a bunch of millionaires as to how they all got it wrong.
Even so, I sincerely believe that the Greaney retirement study lacks a a valuation adjustment. Had he included a valuation adjustment, the study would have reported very different withdrawal rates as safe. Stock investing risk is not stable but variable, depending on how much irrational exuberance there is in the stock price at a given time.
And I think we should be talking about how much of a difference valuations make on a daily basis at every site. If we talked about it daily at every site, we could never again get the sort of CAPE value that applies today. I believe that that would be a good thing. I believe that the Ban on Honest Posting re how stock investing works hurts us all in very serious ways.
Where I’m coming from.
Rob
Thousands have already replied to you about your made up Greaney error story. I think Evidence summed it up best with his response just days ago when he said the following:
“ But that won’t stop you endlessly repeating that the study doesn’t contain a valuation adjustment despite the fact no one thinks it does.
What you won’t do is articulate a convincing argument as to why you think it should contain an adjustment because that would take analysis and thought.
Simply repeating that Greaney’s study doesn’t contain a valuation adjustment is so much easier.
I think I have worked out why you do it. You are wrong about virtually every investing topic you discuss. One of the few things you got right is that there is no valuation adjustment in the studies. Therefore you keep repeating it because you think that if no-one can contradict you you must be doing something right.
It is like someone repeatedly saying that the world is round and thinking they are great because no-one proved them wrong.”
Despite all this, you keep banging the same drum of nonsense. Your posting is far from “honest”.
Do you believe that Robert Shiller’s Nobel-prize-winning research showing that valuations affect long-term returns is legitimate research?
Rob
I believe Robert Shiller when you told you not to time the market with CAPE. I believe Evidence when he set you straight on Greaney. I believe Wade Pfau when he told you that you caused him harm. I believe you ex-wife when she told you that you need to get a job to support the family.
I believe that Shiller’s amazing research is legitimate and that we should be discussing its far-reaching how-to implications at every site on the internet, without a single exception.
I naturally wish you all good things.
Rob
It has been. We just don’t need silly hocomania comments cluttering up the boards.
Okay, Anonymous.
Please take good care.
Rob
It is good that Rob Bennett was banned at most boards. The risk was that some uneducated and unsuspecting person might actually believe his garbage and ended up just as broke as Rob.
Yeah, yeah.
Rob