Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently posted to the discussion thread for another blog entry at this site:

The comment was present tense. You immediately shifted to past tense. The question was why are you doing nothing NOW? Your answer: “I have never done one smidgen less than all that I can do.” So right now, nothing is absolutely all you can do. You’re as helpless as a newborn babe in the snow.

You may not have noticed, but newborn babes in the snow generally aren’t rich and famous. And they have the excuse of being newborn. What’s your excuse for your helplessness?

We live in communities. The community in which I live has not offered the amount of help that I need to bring down Buy-and-Hold and replace it with Valuation-Informed Indexing. That’s my explanation for why I am not rich and famous today, for why I am instead a newborn babe in the snow.

Say that you were one of the women who was attacked by Bill Cosby. And say that you tried to do something about it when it happened. And that no one cared. He just kept committing his crimes because no one cared enough to take effective action. The world would be telling you that you were helpless, right? That’s the message that the world has been sending me for 16 years.

Now —

If the world sends you a message that you are helpless, should you give up on your efforts to do good?

In some circumstances, you should. If a woman who was attacked by Bill Cosby in 1965 made efforts to seek justice and received no help, I certainly wouldn’t have blamed her if she stopped making those efforts. And I wouldn’t blame someone who has made efforts to tell the world how stock investing really works if they ran into the sort of resistance that I have run into. We are all given only so many years of life and we have to make judgments as to how to employ those years of life energy. There’s a case for me saying after 16 years:”Oh, I gave this a good shot and it hasn’t yet paid off, I think I will direct my energies elsewhere.”

But there is also a good case — I think a much better case — for me soldiering on.

Bill Cosby wouldn’t be in prison today if a few of the women who he attacked did not eventually work up the courage to testify against him. They were no doubt afraid that the community of people around them would ignore them once again. But that’s not what happened this time. Cosby is now in prison. The community came through. It took a long time for that to happen. But it eventually happened. By continuing to fight the good fight, those women made the world a better place. Good for them, you know?

That’s what I expect to be able to do in time. The community of people around me has not helped me to the extent that I need it to help me to get the job done. But it has sure helped me in hundreds of very exciting ways. The research that I co-authored with Wade Pfau is the most important research published in this field in 30 years. That research wouldn’t exist if I hadn’t made efforts to do the right thing without having certainty in advance as to what the payoff would be. My decision to do the right thing in the face of uncertainty as to what the payoff would be paid off big time in that case.

And that is of course not the only time that happened. There are hundreds of cases in which something similar happened. The catch-phrase that I use is that the good news here has been 50 times more good than the bad news here has been bad. I don’t deny the bad news. I don’t say that the community of people around me has done enough for us as a society to bring down Buy-and-Hold and replace it with Valuation-Informed Indexing. But I don’t deny the good news either. I try to let in both realities.

The fact that we as a people have enacted laws against financial fraud reveals what we think of the tactics employed by you Goons, Anonymous. If you Goons are so powerful, why don’t you get those laws repealed? You can’t do it. You are newborn babes in the snow in your own way. You are helpless in the face of a community of people not willing to help you out when it comes to getting the laws against financial fraud repealed.

Will I be able to get more people to help me out in the days following the next price crash? I sure think so. I am not the only person who loves this country. There are millions of us. We will all be working together in the days following the next crash to do good things.

You are the Bill Cosby of Investoworld. Not this boy, you know? The women who testified against Cosby did a good thing. They made the world a better place. We will see fewer cases of people behaving as he did as a result of their courage. Good for them.

I believe that I can make the world a better place by insisting on my right (and the right of all others) to post honestly re the implications of the last 37 years of peer-reviewed research in this field. So I am going to soldier on. I won’t ever make it to the other side of The Big Black Mountain without more help from the community of people around me than I have seen in the first 16 years of this, I believe that I will enjoy more help in the days following the next crash. I believe that we will all make it together to a better place and that the Bill Cosby’s of InvestoWorld will end up in prison cells.

We’ll see, you know? Me saying it doesn’t make it so. I have been wrong before. If it were happening again, I would probably be the last to know.

But that’s what I believe. I believe that as a society we are very close to making some amazing leaps forward in our understanding of how stock investing works in the real world. Good for us. And good for me for hanging in there despite some temporary setbacks on the road to that better place.

I wish you all good things, dear Goon friend.

Newborn Babe Rob

Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently posted to the discussion thread for another blog entry at this site:

“Yours comes with death threats and demands for unjustified board bannings and thousands of acts of defamation and threats to get academic researchers fired from their jobs.”

Death threats? You mean this link you sent to the police that is obviously not a death threat?

https://boards.fool.com/sydsydsyd-theyre-taking-them-down-as-fast-as-we-18207722.aspx?sort=postdate

I did indeed show that to the police. And, yes, that is indeed a death threat.

Posts like that do not belong in discussions of how stock investing works. And it is ALWAYS the Buy-and-Holders who advance such posts. It is only a small number of Buy-and-Holders who do that sort of thing. But it is a LARGE percentage of the population of Buy-and-Holders who TOLERATE that sort of thing.

Motley Fool should have banned the person who advanced that post. The post is clearly in violation of their published rules. They didn’t ban the person who advanced the post because the majority of the population of the board was Buy-and-Holders and Motley Fool wanted the money that came in as a result of having those people at the site.

This is why Buy-and-Hold is so dangerous. It is an emotion-based strategy. It cannot survive in a world in which posting based on the last 37 years of peer-reviewed research is permitted. So it is not just that the Buy-and-Holders get it wrong. Getting it wrong is a small thing in relative terms. It is that the Buy-and-Holders cannot tolerate anyone else getting it right. Buy-and-Holders attack those who advocate research-based strategies because, when people come to see the merits of research-based strategies, it makes the Buy-and-Holders look bad for promoting the OPPOSITE of what works. What works is to always practice price discipline when buying stocks. Buy-and-Holders tell investors NOT to exercise price discipline (long-term timing). Huh? What the f?

I OPPOSE that sort of post, Anonymous. Please feel free to spread the word all across the internet. I would feel that you were doing me a favor by doing so. That sort of thing is not my particular cup of tea. It’s not a close call. The primary reason why I chose to build the Retire Early at Motley Fool is that they had the strongest rules on the internet protecting people from that sort of posting behavior. Motley Fool should have enforced its published rules in a reasonable manner despite the fact that it would cost them a few bucks in the short term to do so. You Goons wouldn’t be going to prison had they done that. So we would all be better off had Motley Fool just done its job.

That’s my sincere take re these terribly important matters, in any event. I naturally wish you the best of luck in all your future life endeavors, in any event.

Death-Threat Critic Rob

Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently posted to the discussion thread for another blog entry at this site:

“My fantasyland comes with a Nobel prize.
Yours comes with death threats” etc etc.

No, those are both your fantasies. That’s really the heart of the problem, isn’t it? Everything you write is fantasy. You used to toss in a bit of reality every once in a while. Back when people actually sent you emails. But those days are long gone. Your post-Wade psychotic break changed everything.

The bottom line is that the Buy-and-Hold retirement studies have not been corrected to this day. I pointed out in my famous post from the morning of May 13, 2002, that the Greaney study lacks an adjustment for the valuation level that applies on the day the retirement begins. All of the words that have been spilled over the following 16 years show that I was right. Thousands of people have looked at the Greaney study during that time. Not one has been able to identify a valuation adjustment. A failed retirement is a serious life setback. Greaney should have corrected his study within 24 hours of the moment when he learned of the error he made in it.

Now —

The backstory is that Greaney’s retirement study would be perfect in a world in which the market was efficient, which is the world that Bogle thought we lived in at the time when he developed the Buy-and-Hold strategy. The idea that the market is efficient was born in 1965, when Fama published research showing that short-time timing doesn’t work. Lots of good and smart people jumped to the conclusion that no form of timing works. Shiller showed in 1981 that this conclusion was a false one. He showed that long-term timing (price discipline) always works and is always required for investors seeking to keep their risk profile roughly constant over time. Shiller has described the intellectual leap from the finding that short-term price changes are unpredictable to the Buy-and-Hold conclusion that the market sets prices properly as “one of the most remarkable errors in the history of economics.” That’s the core dispute. Buy-and-Hold is rooted in error, the error was revealed by the peer-reviewed research in this field 37 years ago, and now that the error has been covered up for 37 years, the Buy-and-Holders are very, very, very, very much opposed to seeing it exposed.

I refuse to post dishonestly re the numbers that my friends are using to plan their retirements. So you see me as your enemy. I don’t see it that way. The way that I see it is that we all want the same things and so we all should be working together to learn how stock investing really works in the real world. But there are no words that I can put forward that can persuade you. You don’t want millions of middle-class investors to learn that you got the numbers they have been using to plan their retirements wrong and I am 100 percent unwilling to post dishonestly re the matter, no matter how much in the way of intimidation tactics are applied, so we work at cross purposes.

I don’t like that reality but it remains the reality that I must deal with all the same. I agree with what Wade Pfau said in the days before you Goons threatened him with career destruction and John Bogle failed to step in and help the man — the Buy-and-Hold retirement studies are “dangerous.” They should be corrected. At the very bare minimum, anyone who points someone to one of the Buy-and-Hold retirement studies for use in planning a retirement should let that person know that there are today two schools of academic thought as to how stock investing works, not one, and let that person make the decision as to whether to rely on the numbers generated by the Buy-and-Hold studies or the numbers generated by the Valuation-Informed Indexing studies.

We will learn together how it all plays out in the days following the next price crash. I can wish you the best of luck with it because I think of you Goons as friends. But that’s as far as I can go. I cannot post dishonestly re the numbers that my friends are using to plan their retirements. No way, no how. Zero chance. Not in 16 years, not in 16 billion years. I truly wish that you would make an effort to find somebody else.

I naturally wish you the best of luck in all your future life endeavors in any event, my dear Goon friend.

Fantasy Man Rob

Set forth below is the text of a post that I recently put to the discussion thread for another blog entry at this site:

“Please tell me the downside, Anonymous.”

We can’t all live in Rob’s fantasyland. We have to live in reality.

My fantasyland comes with a Nobel prize.

Yours comes with death threats and demands for unjustified board bannings and thousands of acts of defamation and threats to get academic researchers fired from their jobs.

Reason vs. Emotion.

My best.

Fantasyland Rob