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 been widely banned. That speaks volumes. You have been widely ignored. That speaks volumes. You are broke. That speaks volumes. Your wife divorced you. That speaks volumes.
It says something.
It says that we really, really, really life irrational exuberance. Our Get Rich Quick urge goes deep.
But so does our desire for irrationality. We don’t just hand out Nobel prizes because we like somebody’s haircut. We really want to be able to fool ourselves into believing that we are richer than we really are. But we also really want to learn how to invest effectively for the long run, It’s the struggle between those two desires that makes stocks both an amazing asset class and at times a highly risky one.
I’m a bad guy. I pointed out the error in a study that a lot of people were using to fool themselves into believing that they had saved enough to be able to hand in resignations from high-paying jobs. The idea!
Rob
Your wife divorcing you was cause by irrational exuberance? How so?
Because it set off all this insane emotionalism that produced the CAPE value that applies today. In ordinary circumstances, people would view it as a good thing to point out an error in a retirement study. For about 10 percent of Buy-and-Holders, it is the end of the world. And most of the remaining 90 percent tolerate the abusiveness of the 10 percent.
It would be one thing of the Buy-and-Holders just got the thing about valuation-based market timing wrong. People make mistakes. It happens. It is something else altogether to insist that, because you got something important wildly wrong, no one else can ever get it right. That’s sick, dangerous stuff. If the Greaney study had truly contained a valuation adjustment, we never would have seen a single abusive post, much less any of the criminal stuff.
Where I’m coming from.
Rob
So you wife was suffering from insane emotionalism?
No, you Goons are suffering from insane emotionalism. And everyone living in the United States today has paid a price for it. She suffered more than most because she was married to the man who worked up the courage to point out the error in the Greaney retirement study (it lacks a valuation adjustment).
I don’t want to see anyone experience more pain. The publication of Shiller’s Nobel-prize-winning research in 1981 was the biggest intellectual advance in the history of personal finance. We can now all know how stock investing works for the first time in history if we only work up the courage to stand up to you Goons and post honestly. It took me three years to work up the courage to do that but I did finally do it. Good for me, you know?
There is no valuation adjustment in the Greaney study. I am sure.
Rob
So the goons talked your wife to divorce you? You previously said she divorced you because she wanted you to get a job, but you declined .
Which is the truth?
She wanted me to get a job different than the one that I am working today, making the case that we need to open every discussion board and blog on the internet to honest posting re the last 44 years of peer-reviewed research in this field, without a single exception.
Rob