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 made some money from a report on soapbox.com about 25 years ago
You made a few posts on Motley Fool that got 100+ likes
You self published a book a short time later which does not seem to have sold well
You have spent about the last 20 years trying to write your second book and seem no closer to finishing it now than you were when you started
You let some very small successes around the time of the Motley Fool irrational exuberance boom (when we were all going to retire early by investing in the Foolish Four) lead you to believe that you could make 10s of thousands of dollars as a writer.
You refused to examine the evidence since then that showed clearly that that was not going to happen.
You should have gotten a paying job which would have meant that your family was much better off and you wouldn’t have had to sell your home.
You know the $500 million nonsense is never going to happen.
In fact it is likely that you will not make any money from your finance related writing and you know this too.
But your ego does not let you admit this.
You have mentioned a brother in the past that you were still in contact with (I don’t recall any other family mentions other than your wife and boys).
Does he think that you made the right life choices?
Steven does not support my choices.
He loves me. He shows concern for me. We watch football and baseball games together.
But, when I told him about my correspondence with Rob Arnott, he said that: “The difference is that Arnott has a life.”
And one time I asked if I could stay at his house for a few days and his response was that he would impose only one condition, that I promise not to talk about stock investing.
Rob
“ And one time I asked if I could stay at his house for a few days and his response was that he would impose only one condition, that I promise not to talk about stock investing.”
It seems everyone has grown tired of hearing your repetitive nonsense. It got so bad, your wife left you.
Get Rich Quick/Buy-and-Hold has caused a lot of human misery. And we are all a part of it. It never could have gotten this far without just about everyone playing along. And so we don’t like being reminded of the part we played in the drama. But there is no way to bring it to an end without acknowledging our role.
That’s what peer-reviewed research is for. It is to show us things that we had not been able to see on our own. to teach us truths that we need to know but that we are inclined to ignore.
Rob
The financial community is focused on having a financially secure retirement. Your focus is trying to set yourself up as one of the premier thought leaders because you seek the fame and accolades. You figured you would do this by trying to come up with a timing scheme that you could leverage to promote yourself. Unfortunately for you, it has failed miserably.
The only “human misery” is being experience by you and those that were either dependent on you or happened to take your horrible advice. No one has to take your word or my word for anything. Instead, they can just look at the results. You went broke and your predicted crashes never happened when you said they would. Those of us that kept working our jobs, kept saving our money and followed buy and hold, have ended up with very successful retirements that are financially sound. Just look at the numbers.
I didn’t even want to write about investing. From May 1999 to May 2002, I hardly advanced a word on the subject. It just wasn’t my thing. But I was eventually left with no choice because Greaney repeatedly pushed his study purporting to show that a 4 percent withdrawal rate is always safe. I had read John Bogle’s book where he says that reversion to the mean of stock prices is an “iron law” of stock investing. So I knew that there was zero chance that the safe withdrawal rates is always the same number. I could see that lots of people at the Motley Fool board believed that the Greaney study was legitimate. At some point, you just have to speak up.
What it all really comes down to is emotion vs. reason. Valuations OBVIOUSLY affect long-term returns. All that Shiller did was to confirm that what common sense tells us must be so really is so. Buy-and-Hold is an effort to deny common sense. Get Rich Quick strategies are huge money-makers because deep down we all like the idea of getting something for nothing and, if irrational exuberance gains are as good as real economic-based gains, we can create as much phony wealth as we want and never pay a price. To persuade people that valuation-based market timing is not always 100 percent required for every investor, you have to persuade people to give up on logic and reason and research and go with a purely emotion-based approach. That’s just not me. In the days when I was a Buy-and-Holder, it was because I liked it that they often referred to what the research says.
I’m a research guy. That’s the issue. The Buy-and-Holders can’t stand that because their “strategy” is pure emotion and they cant’t stand for people to learn that. They cant even stand to acknowledge it to themselves. I believe that in time they will need to. We permit people to make use of their reason in every other field. I don’t believe that we can have just one field in which reference to the peer-reviewed research is absolutely forbidden, no matter how much money it makes in the short term to tell people that irrational exuberance gains are real. I believe that the arc of history in the investment advice field bends toward rationality.
We’ll see.
Rob
“ But I was eventually left with no choice because Greaney repeatedly pushed his study purporting to show that a 4 percent withdrawal rate is always safe.”
Of course you had a choice. When you made your silly post in 2002, you were corrected immediately and you apologized in the thread. Wade Pfau even wrote a whole article as to how you were addressed and answered. For the last 20+ years, thousands of upon thousands of people have comments about why Greaney did not have to change his study. You ignore all that because you think you can still create a story out of it and use it as a cover for your complete failure. Sorry, Rob, but we can look up the entire history on this. You are broke. Your plan failed. No one is buying your silly stories and repeating the same stuff over and over again has resulted in people ignoring you and blocking you since you won’t listen.
Please mark me down as saying that the Greaney study lacks a valuation adjustment. I believed that on May 13, 2002 and I believe it today. If Buy-and-Hold was a real thing, the Buy-and-Holders would want to get the numbers right in their retirement studies.
My sincere take.
Rob
We already know that. No one has ever claimed it has an adjustment. What we have said is that is doesn’t need an adjustment and that has been explained to you hundreds of thousands of times as to why that is. It is up to you to do your own study if you want something different. Stop demanding that everyone else needs to do what you want and to believe what you say.
Do you think it would have been better if I had kept it zipped re the error in the study? It made me feel like a creep to do that. There were people at the board who thought the study was legitimate.
Rob