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

Rob,
It’s the same old thing, people think the party will never end. until it does. I have a friend who retired with $1million cash, his advisor told him to put it in the market in 2008. Well after a 60% loss he sold I guess anyone would. After this his advisor suggested going back in with the rest to “make his money back stocks, are cheap”. Well after all the dust settled he was left with $150,000. He cant go back to work and now he lives on SSI and depression.
I myself have only 10% allocated to stocks now.
Until you live through this or know someone who has you dont get it, the goons don’t because they cant be wrong.

What really bothers me is the “common knowledge” that markets ALWAYS comes back? Really? all advisors say this, It is in all the financial articles on the web. I know I can’t remember the dates, but 7, 15, 20 years to recover. in the past,I for one do not want to sit and wait in fear hoping the market will come back for the rest of my life.

Thank you for working so hard to get the word out, some of us get it Rob.

Am I trying to get the word out or am I trying to learn myself? I think that the bottom line here is that I am trying to learn myself.

There’s a message that I push. But, when you boil it all down, that message is: “Not one of us knows as much as he thinks he does, so we should all be willing to hear the other fellow out and learn what we can from someone coming at things from a different perspective.” That’s a process that serves us well in our efforts to learn in all other fields of human endeavor and it seems to me, that given how important investing is, it makes sense for us to apply the same learning process there that works in every other other field of human endeavor.

Thanks for stopping by, Max.

Non-Dogmatic 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:

“It’s his abusiveness.”

Really? Here are just a few of your quotes from those pesky Post Archives.

“The “4 percent rule” has caused millions of busted retirements”

“When you calculate the SWR accurately, you find that the withdrawal rate that is described in the Old School studied as “100 percent safe” has only a one in three chance of working out for those who retired at the top of the bubble. That means that there are going to be millions of busted retirements resulting from just this one error”

“I think the Old School safe withdrawal rate studies caused millions of busted retirements by getting the numbers so wildly wrong.”

“There are going to be millions of busted retirements resulting from the demonstrably false claims put forward in the Old School safe-withdrawal rates studies.”

There’s no conflict between those statements and what I am saying here.

The 4 percent rule will have caused millions of failed retirements in the days following the next crash (we obviously will not have any problem if it turns out that the last 36 years of peer-reviewed research is not legitimate research).

Who is responsible for those millions of failed retirements? If it was all a mistake, no one was responsible. If it all was a mistake, then we all just have to be careful not to repeat the mistake.

But that’s not the situation that we are dealing with. I pointed out the mistake in a post that I put to the Retire Early board at the Motley Fool site on the morning of May 13, 2002. Thousands of our fellow community members expressed excitement over the post, saying that they saw it as the most valuable post in the history of the board. Big-name experts like Rob Arnott endorsed the post, saying it checks out with what the last 36 years of peer-reviewed research says in every way and that it opens up the way to hundreds of big advances in our understanding of how stock investing works. A fellow with a Ph.D. in Economic saw how excited people were over the things they were learning in the debate that followed the post asked me if I would be willing to co-author research showing that this post led us to the future of investing analysis and to get it published in a peer-reviewed journal and to get it featured on the front page of the New York Times. All good stuff, right? So what’s the problem? Why would we be seeing millions of failed retirements when so many wonderful people helped us out in so many wonderful ways to accomplish so many wonderful things?

Death threats. Demands for unjustified board bannings. Thousands of acts of defamation. Threats to get academic researchers fired from their jobs. A 15-year Campaign of Terror against our board and blog communities led by Mel Lindauer, John Greaney and Jack Bogle. Criminally abusive acts. By the thousands. A level of abusiveness never seen before in the history of the United States. Over the pointing out of an error in a mathematical calculation that could have been checked out in five minutes.

No one goes to prison when a hurricane destroys millions of lives. Because hurricanes are not man-made. But if some scientist had an advanced technology that permitted him to see a hurricane coming 15 years in advance and he tried to warn people and some evil genius devoted 15 years of his life to stopping the word from getting out, that evil genius would be sent to prison for a long, long time, no? Is there any possibility whatsoever that he would not?

Does all of that not sound at least roughly right even to your Goon-impaired ears, my good friend?

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:

“I believe that Greaney has caused millions of failed retirements.”

Exactly how? You’re still waffling on that. If it’s his 4% rule you should forget about nobody Greaney and focus on famous Bengen, who says 4.5%. If Greaney busted millions of retirements, Bengen certainly busted billions. If it’s Greaney’s abusiveness, how does his abuse bust the retirements of millions of people who never heard of either of you?

It’s his abusiveness.

Greaney didn’t come up with the 4 percent rule. He is not responsible for the intellectual mistake.

I don’t think it would be fair to blame the people (like Bengen) who ARE responsible for the intellectual mistake for the millions of failed retirements. People made mistakes. That’s just one of those things. There is no evidence that the mistake was intentional, that the aim was to cause millions of failed retirements. So I don’t see that there is any blame to cast there.

Greaney’s abusiveness IS intentional. That’s why I cast blame on him in a way that I do not cast blame on Bengen or lots of others.

You suggest that Greaney’s abusiveness has not hurt the millions of people who have never heard of him or me. I disagree. I built the Retire Early board at Motley Fool into the #1 discussion board at that site with a purpose in mind — I wanted to teach millions of people how to achieve financial independence early in life. It was my intent to spread the word about what we learned about safe withdrawal rates to everyone on the planet. Greaney blocked that process from moving forward with his criminally abusive behavior. Wade Pfau and I intended to work together to get our grounds-breaking study showing that Valuation-Informed Indexing is superior to Buy-and-Hold featured on the front page of the New York Times. Greaney stopped that from happening by threatening to get Wade fired from his job if he continued doing honest work in this field. He destroyed millions of middle-class lives with that criminal act.

Has anyone ever been more deserving of a long prison sentence? Valuation-Informed Indexing is a pure good. It’s all upside and zero downside. And millions of middle-class people who very much need access to honest and informed reports of what the last 36 years of peer-reviewed research teaches us about how stock investing works in the real world have been denied such access because this guy is embarrassed for people to learn about a mistake of his that he learned about 15 years ago? Huh? What the f?

I believe that our laws against financial fraud are good and necessary laws. I believe that they need to be enforced in a reasonable manner and I believe that in the days following the next price crash they will be enforced in a reasonable manner. I could be wrong. We will have to wait a bit to see how it all plays out, you know? But that is certainly what I believe we will see happen.

Do I still care about my old friend John Greaney and do I still want to help him out any way I can? I do. And I believe that there are things that I will be able to say at the time that will indeed help him out and I intend to say those things.

Do I believe that the things I will say will be enough to keep him out of prison altogether? I think that they will probably not be enough. I think they will help. This is a strange case. I don’t think that anything like this has ever happened before. So I don’t think it is possible to make predictions with any high degree of confidence. If I manage to keep Greaney out of prison altogether, that’s 100 percent okay with me. If I could snap my fingers and get him a Get Out of Jail Free card, I would do it. But I don’t have that power. This thing is bigger than me. I will do what I can while staying on the right side of the felony line myself and then I just need to let it go and accept what happens.

Does that help?

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:

Just because you were able to browbeat Wade into emailing the Trinity guys doesn’t mean I’ll do your bidding too. Set up your own damn forum. But I promise I’ll read the historical transcript.

Okay.

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

“I think Bengen is wrong. I think that I have a responsibility to say so.”

And so you do. Here, behind his back. But you won’t express your math-free gut-feel opinion in a comment section where he might see it. How is that living up to your responsibility?

No. I engaged in an e-mail conversation with Bengen a number of years back. I told him that I think he is wrong re safe withdrawal rates.

Set up a debate at the Bogleheads Forum. We can have Bengen there. We can have me there. We can have Bogle there. We can have Shiller there. We can have Greaney there. We can have Linduaer there. We can have Pfau there.

See how it goes. No death threats. No demands for unjustified board bannings. No thousands of acts of defamation. No threats to get academic researchers fired from their jobs.

We’ll make history.

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:

No, you said your beef with Greaney is that he got the SWR numbers wrong. You’ve been hammering that for years. “Personally responsible for millions of busted retirements”, you said. If so, then Bengen’s numbers are even wronger. And he is well known, unlike Greaney. So why are you not at least posting a comment to that linked article? Don’t you have any convictions at all?

I haven’t read the Bengen article. I am going to read it. It is the sort of piece that I often write Valuation-Informed Indexing columns on. It is possible that I will do that in this case. I need to read the article to decide whether it is a good fit for that or not.

The issue is not how far off the mark the numbers are. Peter Lynch was at one time saying that the safe withdrawal rate was 7 percent. He was a lot more off the mark than Greaney was and is. But Lynch responded to criticism of his numbers very differently than Greaney. Lynch was informed of his mistake by Scott Burns. He acknowledged the mistake and thanked Burns for pointing it out to him and then hired Burns to write a column for a magazine that he owned. That’s the right way to go about things.

I 100 percent think that Greaney got the numbers wrong. But I also believe (I wrote this in an article that I posted at this site years ago) that Greaney personally believes that his numbers are not in error. The way that I wrote it was that, if Greaney’s best friend asked him what the SWR is, Greaney would tell him that it is 4 percent. Another way of saying it is that, if Greaney took a lie detector test and was asked if the SWR is always 4 percent, he could answer “yes” and pass the test. I do not believe that the objective evidence supports this belief. But I also believe that he is suffering from cognitive dissonance — as we all [including Old Farmer Hocus!] do from time to time. I believe that Greaney believes that the number is always 4 percent.

Is it possible that Bengen believes that the number is 4.5 percent? I believe that that is possible. If that is the case, I believe that Bengen is wrong. But of course it is possible that I am wrong. The way that we resolve matters like this in our society is that we let both people speak and then people interested in the subject listen to both sides make their case and try to figure out the realities for themselves. I have had a few interactions with Bengen. They have been pleasant. My view of Bengen is that he got something wrong but that he is HONESTLY wrong. That’s very, very, very different from Greaney, who I believe will be going to prison for a long, long time in the days following the next price crash.

You of course know the difference. Greaney has advanced death threats in an effort to cover up his mistake. He has demanded unjustified board bannings. He has put forward thousands of acts of defamation He has advanced threats to get academic researchers fired from their jobs. Greaney has destroyed millions of middle-class lives with his insanely abusive behavior. Those people obviously have a right to bring civil suits against him to recover their losses. Those losses are in the trillions. Greaney is obviously not going to be able to make them whole. They obviously have a right to seek criminal prosecutions. I believe that, when this story is written up on the front page of the New York Times, Greaney will be prosecuted in a criminal action and will be placed in a prison cell for the remaining days of his life. I would be very surprised if the same thing happened with Bengen. So the two cases are very different.

In the event that Bengen makes strong points in his article, he could help us all. I can write a response piece and then interested parties can look at both articles and form their own conclusions as to who has the best of it. That’s how our system works. It is my strongly held view that it is a very good system indeed. So, presuming that Bengen is sincere (as I believe he is), he is doing a good thing for all of us by making his case. I think it is wonderful and, if I can advance the ball a bit by responding to his article, I will do so.

Greaney has done that sort of thing from time to time. All of you Goons have. The reason why I am writing these words is that I want to encourage you to do more of that. I learn from you when you challenge me. I could be wrong. If I am wrong, I want to learn that and I am more likely to learn it from people who challenge me than from people who tell me that my every word is gold. So thanks for that. And I of course am grateful to my good friend John Greaney for the times that he has challenged me and thereby taught me and helped me.

But I did not build that Motley Fool board into the #1 most successful board in the history of the Motley Fool site for the purpose of seeing any of my friends thrown in prison cells. I consider Greaney a friend. So, when I saw him walking a very dark path, I got about the business of working up the courage to call him out on his b.s. and thereby to help him set things right before he destroyed his own life and the lives of millions of other middle-class people. I believe strongly that the site administrator at Motley Fool should have booted him from the board long before Greaney found himself in circumstances where he would be going to prison down the line a bit. The site administrator was more concerned about the dollar bills that Greaney brought in with his relentless promotion of the pure Get Rich Quick investing strategy than he was with keeping John out of prison. I think he was wrong to fail to execute his job responsibilities reasonably and thereby to ruin John’s life for the sake of a few crummy dollar bills. Not this boy, you know? I am proud to say that I tried very hard to take things in a very different direction. I asked the site administrator to do his job and, when he failed to do so, I asked my fellow community members to join together and to demand of him that he do his job. That is all in the Post Archives.

I see all the difference in the world between the behavior of John Greaney and the behavior of Bill Bengen. John has taken himself and the rest of us down, down, down, down, down, Bill has been helping us all out. You couldn’t have a bigger contrast. I only wish that all of my fellow community members felt the same measure of friendship towards John that I still feel to this day and would thus join me in trying to make the best of his very bad situation.

Does all of that not sound at least pretty much on the mark, my old friend?

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:

You’d need a phrase, something like “twisting, burning train wreck on top of a dumpster fire inside a toxic waste dump”.

That’s why Wade Pfau’s conclusion after studying Valuation-Informed Indexing in great depth for many months was: “Yes, Virginia, Valuation-Informed Indexing works!”

Makes sense!

Rob