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 seem a bit “touchy” today, Rob. Things not going well?

I’ve been equally touchy since the first day, Anonynous. And about the same thing.

I don’t like Goon talk. It hurts everybody. It’s all negative and no positive.

Things are not going well in one respect — we are still hearing Goon talk. We are all worse off than we would be if there had never been any Goon talk or if we as a society had dealt effectively with it at some earlier time.

But things are going in an amazingly wonderful way in all other respects. For the last 35 years, we have had available to us all the major pieces we need to solve the stock investing puzzle. No earlier people have had access to all the good stuff that follows from that reality. We have it. We should be dancing in the streets rather than quarreling over nonsense or trying to gain the upper hand re things that don’t matter much in an ultimate sense.

We are working through a process that takes us from the rotten place where we are today to the wonderful place where we all deep our hearts long to be tomorrow. The good news here is 50 times more good than the bad news here is bad.

Would I change our situation to one where you Goons did not feel threatened because we had not gained access to the last big piece of the stock investing puzzle 35 years ago? I would not. Not in 10 billion years. Not for 10 billion dollars.

Does it drag me down that you Goons continue to live in negativity? Sure.

But whachagonna do, you know?

I don’t control the world, Anonymous. I control me to some extent and that’s about it. I have to live with what the rest of the world does, both the stuff I like and the stuff I don’t like. Like everybody else does.

I try to focus on the positive. There’s some negative that has been added to the mix. I don’t deny that. But I make an effort not to focus on it too much. I try not to let it stop me or hold me back. It has slowed me down a bit. That much is certainly fair to say. But it hasn’t stopped me for 15 years running now. I am proud and happy to be able to say that much.

I hope that helps a bit.

I naturally wish you all the best that this life has to offer a person, my good friend.

Rob

Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently posted to the discussion thread for one of my columns at the Value Walk site:

What you stated at the last election with Obama and Romney is that the crash would occur within a year. You keep repeating the claims of a crash, yet your predictions are wrong time after time.

In the last week, we have seen yet another 2 articles that have come out explaining how you have been wrong. It was pointed out on your site and you decided to throw out the prison threat yet again, which shows your sign of desperation. This desperation is not surprising as you stopped working with only $400k, hoping your hocomania routine might result in a few bucks, but that failed as well.

Now all you are left with now is the same delusional rants.

My record re short-term predictions is poor, Sammy. This is entirely consistent with Shiller’s research. He says quite clearly that short-term timing doesn’t work. I of course noted at the time when I made those predictions that there is no reason to believe that anyone has the ability to make good short-term predictions and that I was only putting them forward for fun. It can indeed by fun and at times even educational to discuss possibilities but the same historical return data that shows that long-term timing always works also shows that short-term timing never works.

You Goons brought those two articles to my attention at my blog and I thanked you because they do indeed make important points. They of course do not say what you suggest here they say. Surprise! Surprise! I wrote briefly about those two articles in the comments section of my blog. I also have written columns that will appear here in future weeks exploring those two articles in considerable depth. They raise important points but of course in no way shape or form do they show that I am “Wrrong.’ I have a funny feeling that the authors of the articles would agree with me and not with you Goons if they were asked to provide their take re this matter.

I believe that a good number of you Goons will be going to prison following the next crash, Sammy. I have been saying that for years now, ever since you threatened to destroy Wade Pfau’s career if he continued to tell people about the peer-reviwed research paper that he and I wrote together. That paper shows that investors who follow a Valuation-Informed Indexing strategy can thereby reduce their investing risk by close to 70 percent. That’s huge. I think it would be fair to say that that paper is the most important research paper published in this field in the past 35 years. Every investor alive needs to know about it. People are going to be angry at you Goons following the next price crash and I believe that, when the New York Times report all that has gone on over the past 15 years, you will be going to prison.

We will have to wait to find out for sure, you know? I obviously have no power to send you to prison. And i obviously am not seeking such power. I intend to argue for a somewhat shorter prison sentence than most are arguing for at that time on grounds that you are suffering from cognitive dissonance and that that should be a mitigating factor. But it is your jury that will decide the length of your prison sentence, not me. That one is not my call.

I do think it is my responsibility to let people know my view re the matter when asked. The fact that we are even talking about prison sentences for Goons shows how far out of hand this matter has gone. When both Fama and Shiller were awarded Nobel prizes on the same day, the New York Times noted how odd it was that two economists saying entirely opposite things about how stock investing works were both awarded the highest honor in the field on the same day. Everyone who works in this field should be engaged in the debate to determine whether it is Fama or Shiller who is right. The continued viability of our economic system lies in the balance.

We don’t see that. The problem is that lots of wealthy and powerful people have built their careers around promotion of the Buy-and-Hold strategy. So they tolerate abusive posting practices that are banned by the published posting rules (and indeed by the laws of the United States!) of every site that I have ever visited. It’s a shame. The reality is that there are two academic models for understanding how stock investing works, not one. Had Bogle come out with a clear statement to that effect when he first learned about Shiller’s “revolutionary” (his word) research in 1981, you wouldn’t be headed to a prison cell today and I wouldn’t have to worry about you Goons following me from site to site with your abusiveness.

Things are what they are. I don’t like the abusiveness. I DO like you Goons as people. So I will continue to do what I can to get the story of what you have done exposed and thereby to bring the ugly side of this to a full and complete stop. Until we all see that wonderful dream come true, we will just have to try to step around the nasty stuff to the best of our ability and keep our eyes on the prize — the wonderful learning experience that thousands of my fellow community members (including some of the biggest names in the field) have told me they have enjoyed as a result of my 15-year effort to examine the practical how-to implications of Shiller’s revolutionary research findings in great depth.

I naturally wish you all the best that this life has to offer a person, 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:

Your conditions for ending your wait are delusional. So you will wait forever. Because you have no choice. Doesn’t that make you sad? People, in general, like to have choices.

And what about that recent article about PE10 being above average over 95% of the time since 1990? When you bailed on stocks, you thought such a thing was utterly impossible. Because your read of Shiller’s book told you it was impossible. Isn’t your real beef with Shiller, for leading you astray?

I don’t believe that I will wait forever. I acknowledge that it is theoretically possible. Does it make me sad that this is so? It does. But not as sad as it would make me to not wait. Fate deals us a hand and out job is to play it the best of our ability. Yes, people like to have choices. But telling lies to ourselves that our choices are unlimited always take us to a very bad place. We have a limited number of choices. Some things are just outside the realm of possibility. For me, telling lies about the numbers that my friends use to plan their retirements is outside the realm of possibility. It is what it is, like the rain and the wind.

That last phrase comes from “Percy’s Song,” where Dylan discusses Fate and how it teaches us over time about the limits it places on our ability to choose where out lives will go:

I sat down and wrote the best words that I could write…

I stood up so slow with no other choice but for to go….

I walked down the courthouse stairs and I did not understand…

The only song my guitar could play was “Oh, the cruel rain and the cruel wind.

That’s the real turtle soup and not the mock, in this boy’s opinion.

I’ve written a number of columns about the research paper that you refer to that will be showing up at the Value Walk site in weeks to come. I have four prepared as of today. I have considered writing a fifth column re that paper but I am not sure whether the last one is a good idea or not, I am still thinking it over. The fact that I would devote four or five columns to that paper shows any reasonable person that I believe that its publication is an important development. I certainly do not agree with the conclusions stated by the authors of the paper. But I just as certainly believe that they have advanced the debate by putting their energies into writing the paper and I just as certainly am grateful to them for doing so. That research paper is good stuff.

I have also considered writing a column about the article in the Washington Post (by Barry Ritholtz) pointing out that the P/E10 has been above average 95 percent of the time since 1990. I agree with your suggestion that that is an important point. The reason why I am unsure whether to write a column on it is that the same basic point is made in the research paper noted above and I devoted one of the four columns on that paper to this particular point. So I tend to think that it would be redundant to write a column on the Ritholtz article as well. If I can think of a way to come at the point from a fresh angle I will add that one to my list of upcoming columns.

I hope that I would not have described what has happened from 1990 forward as “impossible.” Shiller’s research does not show it to be impossible. Nor does the 35 years of peer-reviewed research that confirmed and expanded on Shiller’s “revolutionary” (his word) findings. I would certainly agree that, if you had asked me in 1990 what the likelihood was that we would see what we have seen since 1990, I would have said that the odds of such an outcome were exceedingly low. That much I can agree to.

My take is that it is the promotion of Buy-and-Hold as a research-based approach to stock investing that caused the unlikely turn of events. People love, love, love the idea of rooting their investing strategies in research. The one thing that people don’t like about stocks is the risk. Root your strategy in research and you mitigate the risk of investing in stocks dramatically. So people have flocked to the Buy-and-Hold strategy.

But the people who do research are humans and we humans are flawed creatures. We make mistakes. Most of us understand that, when we do, it is critical to admit the mistake and get it behind us. But the hardest mistakes to acknowledge are the ones that hurt the most people. If I get a traffic ticket on my way home from the grocery store, it would not be too hard to tell my wife. I wouldn’t want to. I would be embarrassed that I had cost us that money by behaving irresponsibly. But if I had an affair, that would be about 500 times harder to acknowledge. The reason I would feel such an inclination to keep it zipped re the affair is not that the affair does not matter so much, it’s that the affair matters so terribly much more.

The bigger a mistake, the more harm it does, and the more harm a mistake does, the harder it is to come clean. The Buy-and-Hold mistake — the idea that it is not necessary to practice price discipline — is the biggest mistake ever made in the history of personal finance. So it is understandable that the Buy-and-Hold mistake has gone uncorrected longer than any earlier mistake and has thus caused more damage than any earlier mistake. We can measure how bad a mistake is by looking at how much resistance we feel to acknowledging it. Given what we have seen from you Goons over the past 15 years and from our tolerance of your insanely abusive behavior, I think it would be fair to conclude that the Buy-and-Hold mistake was a true whopper.

It’s because this mistake was such a whopper that I was not able to anticipate back in 1990 or even in 2002 where the mistake would take us. I am in good company re this one. Shiller predicted in 1996 that those sticking with high stock allocations would regret it within 10 years because Buy-and-Hold was in the process of bringing on the biggest economic crisis in U.S. history. He was right, but he was two years off. We did not see the Buy-and-Hold Crisis begin until September 2008. Shiller was not able to appreciate how high prices would go over the following four years because they had never gone that high before. We went into completely uncharted territory with this particular bull market and so there was simply no way for anyone who relies on the historical return data to anticipate how much harm we would do to ourselves.

Shiller uses the historical data to inform his thinking re how stock investing works. People followed Get Rich Quick strategies prior to 1965. But, until 1965, there was no one saying that there was peer-reviewed research supporting the pure Get Rich Quick approach (Buy-and-Hold). Shiller was not proven wrong re his take on how stock investing worked when we did not see an economic crisis by 2006. The way in which things have played out is 100 percent consistent with his take and 0 percent consistent with Fama’s take. But he was wrong on the details. We entered a new and more dangerous world in 1965, when people who put themselves forward as disinterested scientists started saying that the historical data supports the pure Get Rich Quick approach.

Those claims did not change the fundamentals of how the market works (valuations still affect long-term returns) but they did affect how high valuations can go before crashing and of course how much damage we can do to our economic and political systems by promoting the Buy-and-Hold “strategy.” Shiller got the important thing right and the details wrong. I have done the same. I don’t know of anyone who got the details right. What we saw in the late 1990s is something we have never seen before. Even the Buy-and-Holders acknowledge that. It has taken some time for us all to come to grips with how much damage we did to ourselves during those years of insanity. We will get there. We are coming around slowly (according to me!).

Now that I have written these words, I am thinking that I might have my fresh angle for the Ritholtz column. I am now leaning in the direction of writing that one up. So we are looking at four or five articles re the research paper and one re the Ritholtz article, both of which were brought to my attention by you Goons.

People ask me all the time why I even bother to talk with you given your obvious hate for the last 35 years of peer-reviewed research and all discussions of the implications that follow from it. I talk to you because, even though your hate is a huge negative, you truly do believe in Buy-and-Hold yourselves and you truly in your heart want to understand how stock investing works in the real world. The conflict between those two realities causes you to bring research papers and articles of this sort to my attention and my efforts to be responsive to your sincere questions help us all to come to a better understanding of this important subject matter (according to me!). I am grateful for your help in this regard. It makes a difference.

I hope all that helps a bit, 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 guess it is all one big massive conspiracy.

A conspiracy of ignorance. The humans didn’t know everything on the first day. They had to learn things over the course of time. In this particular case, some didn’t like the idea that we were making important advances. They felt an inclination to defend their turf by blocking the learning experience. Some of us went along because this group had the power and money to crush those who “crossed” them by doing honest work. Shame on those of us who went along.

But a chorus of cheers for those of us who did NOT go along. We are in the process of changing the world for the better in a very big way. And we are very close. One more price crash should do it.

My sincere take.

My best and warmest wishes to you.

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:

So, unless Jack Bogle agrees with you on VII, the entire world economy will collapse.

He doesn’t have to agree with me or anyone else. He needs to show a willingness to follow the laws of the United States, the country in which he lives and which I am certain on some level of consciousness he loves.

I often make a comparison between the “revolutionary” (Shiller’s word) advances we have achieved over the past 35 years in the investing realm and the revolutionary advances we achieved in the 1960s in the Civil Rights realm. The race relations problem has been with us since the founding of our country. Where do you think we would be today had the people who opposed a change in our understanding of what constitutes civil rights for blacks succeeded in shutting down efforts that were engaged in to advance our understanding? I think we would be in a very bad place. Yes, it is possible that the Republic would have fallen by now had we taken that dark path. There are no guarantees that the republic will always stand if as a people we elect to follow a very dark path.

That’s how it is in the investing realm. Bogle was the main figure leading us to huge advances. Buy-and-Hold roots investing advice in a scientific process of scientific discovery. That is its primary appeal to millions of middle-class people. But we learned in 1981 that Buy-and-Hold can never work in the real world; for a research-based strategy to work, honest and accurate reports of what the research says must be permitted and the Buy-and-Holders have been engaging in criminally abusive behavior to block the spreading of knowledge re what the new peer-reviewed research says since 1981. We are now in an economic crisis that has cost millions of people their jobs and is in the process of causing millions of failed retirements as a result. Yes, the anger that people will feel when they see with their own eyes how much human misery has been caused by Bogle and the other Wall Street Con Men and by you Goons that the world economy might collapse and we may see huge political instability as well.

If you have any doubts re this, please just read up on what happened in the First Great Depression, one of the earlier economic crises caused by the widespread belief that it is not necessary to exercise price discipline when buying stocks. When millions of people become persuaded that it is a good idea to follow a pure Get Rich Quick approach, things always end badly. It is not even possible for the rational human mind to imagine a scenario in which large numbers of people would come to follow a pure Get Rich Quick approach and things would not end badly. Buy-and-Hold ALWAYS destroys the economic system in which it is tolerated for a time and it can never be any other way.

We have a huge edge this time that we did not possess in the late 1920s. This time we have 35 years of peer-reviewed research showing us how stock investing works in the real world. Once we spread the word re the implications of the last 35 years of peer-reviewed research, we can all realistically expect to see the biggest surge of economic growth ever experienced in our history. It’s no little deal to bring an end to bull markets and bear markets and economic crises and the boom/bust cycle that has made capitalism a dirty word in the minds of so many smart and good people.

I don’t think we are going to see a collapse in the world economy because I think we are as a people going to work up the courage to stand up to you Goons and to send you away to long prison sentences. We were smart enough to deal with this sort of problem before this particular manifestation of it appeared before our eyes. But we do need to work up the courage to take effective action. The 35 years of peer-reviewed research does us no good unless we all feel free to talk openly about it at every investing board and blog on the internet. Right now the huge advances we have achieved over the past 35 years are only intellectual. We need to give them practical significance. We do that by announcing long prison sentences for those who have posted in “defense” of Mel Linduaer, John Greaney and Jack Bogle. That’s the act that gets us over the one-yard line and brings on our second independence day.

Yes, we are at risk of a collapse in the world economic system if we don’t get off the dark path we are on today. We are already seeing the effects of poor choices we have made in recent years. Take a freakin’ look around you, Anonymous. Go to YouTube and play last week’s debate and tell me after hearing that exchange of words between between the two remaining candidates for President of this nation that you think everything is just hunky dory.

There are consequences that follow from committing huge acts of financial fraud. That’s why as a people we adopted laws making it a FELONY to do this foolish and destructive thing.

Rob

Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently posted to the discussion thread for one of my columns at the Value Walk site:

What a pathetic and uniformed response. The growth is ACTUAL revenue, not the stock price. The capital is what helps you find programs that cause the revenue growth.

When a company has a double digit growth rate, the value is higher than a business that has flat growth.

So, tie it all together……tight capital leads to slower or no growth, which then impacts valuation.

What do you think the word “overpriced” means, Sammy?

Stocks were priced at three times fair value in 2000. That means that, to know the true value of your portfolio, you had to divide by three. Does that not follow?

The dollar value of the overvaluation was $12 trillion. Where do you think that all that money went? It went into the pockets of consumers, who used it to buy things, and those purchases caused the profits of the sorts of companies you are talking about to increase.

During a bull market, everything is running on Pretend Money. Money is fungible. It flows everywhere. Bull markets mess up our entire economic system.

Either you believe that the nominal price of stocks is real (the Buy-and-Hold position, rooted in the research of Eugene Fama) or you believe that valuations affect long-term returns (the Valuation-Informed Indexing position, rooted in the research of Robert Shiller). Both cannot be right. They are saying opposite things.

Is Shiller “pathetic and uninformed”? Why was he awarded a Nobel prize? Has the committee that awards the prize gotten in the habit of handing it out to people who are “pathetic and uninformed”?

The words “pathetic and uninformed” mean something very different to Buy-and-Holders than they mean to anyone else who uses them. To a Buy-and-Holder, anyone who thinks that Eugene Fama is wrong and Robert Shiller is right is “pathetic and uninformed.”

I don’t buy it. If Buy-and-Hold were a legitimate strategy, it would be possible to make the case for it without resorting to the use of words like “pathetic” and “uninformed.” Discussions with Buy-and-Holders always end with them resorting to that sort of language because since 1981 there has been no rational case that can be made for it. Once Shiller showed that valuations affect long-term returns, the intellectual case was settled.

What has been keeping Buy-and-Hold alive for the past 35 years is that it is a huge money maker for the people advocating it and they don’t want to give up their cash cow. There is nothing else. Either the market is efficient or valuations affect long-term returns and there is now 35 years of peer-reviewed research showing that valuations affect long-term returns.

That’s my sincere take re these terribly important matters, in any event.

Rob

Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently posted to the discussion thread for one of my columns at the Value Walk site:

Here is another point of reference for you Rob. Prior to the 2008 banking crisis, I was working in a business that had a 5year CAGR growth rate in the double digits. To continue that growth, obviously access to capital and the cost of that capital, is important. With the banking crisis, the money dried up. You would have been lucky to even see anything better than a 3x lever and WWAC doubled in a short period of time. As a result, growth went flat going into 2009. Clearly, the value of the company dropped because the growth rate dropped. It had NOTHING to do with emotion. This happened to a large number of companies. You can look it up. Tell me again about emotion being the cause.

I’ll give it a shot, Sammy.

You call it “the banking crisis.” I call it “the Buy-and-Hold Crisis.”

You say “the money dried up.” I say “valuations dropped.”

You say “growth went flat.” I say “irrational exuberance diminished.”

You cite “a 5 year CAGR growth rate in the double digits”. I cite “the most out-of-control bull market in U.S. history.”

You suggest that we are talking about different things. I suggest that we are talking about the same things using different words.

You claim that the bad economic developments caused the poor stock returns. I claim that the poor stock returns caused the bad economic developments.

You argue that these things happen from time to time. I argue that in 1981 we learned why they happen and thus gained the ability to stop them from ever happening again.

You advocate Buy-and-Hold. I advocate Valuation-Informed Indexing.

You point out that Buy-and-Hold remains dominant. I point out that those who see the dangers of Buy-and-Hold are holding back from saying so in clear language because of the intimidation tactics employed by those who make money from advocacy of the dominant model.

You observe that it appears that I’m not listening. I observe that it appears that we are working at cross purposes.

I hope that helps a tiny bit.

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 are indeed at the one yard line. Only 99 more to go.

Seriously though, you don’t think it is deluded to believe you are on the verge of success? There is essentially zero evidence after one and a half decades!

I couldn’t possibly disagree more, Laugh. I view the first 14 years of The Great Debate re Whether to Permit Honest Posting on the Last 35 Years of Peer-Reviewed Research as a series of successes, one building on top of another until we reached a point where we were learning things that at the beginning not one person (including myself) would have imagined possible.

I now can say (and back up the claim with a mountain of evidence and argument) that it was the promotion of Buy-and-Hold strategies in the late 1990s that was the primary cause of the economic crisis that began in 2008. I had no idea on the morning of May 13, 2002, that the promotion of Buy-and-Hold strategies could cause an economic crisis; I thought it was just an investing thing. That’s exciting. We are not just helping people to retire earlier and with far less risk. We are saving capitalism. The big beef with capitalism has long been the economic crises that always seem to occur in capitalist economies. We now understand where they come from. We all possess a Get Rich Quick urge and Buy-and-Hold possesses a certain intuitive appeal that causes us to employ such strategies. Now that we have 35 years of peer-reviewed research showing us just how dangerous the pure Get Rich Quick approach is, we are well on the way to developing a form of capitalism that will be better in 10 different ways than the form that caused so much trouble (while also offering huge benefits, to be sure) in our many years of pre-1981 ignorance.

This is how our system works, Laugh. Our system is not perfect. We make mistakes. Buy-and-Hold was not the first big mistake we ever made. There have been thousands of big mistakes made over the course of U.S. history. What makes our system better than all others is that we have built into it processes that cause mistakes to be exposed and corrected over time. We’ve been at this for 35 years now. In first impression, that sounds like a long time for “experts” to continue endorsing such a dangerous strategy. But in the grand scheme of things, 35 years is not so long when you think about how huge an advance this is.

The bigger the advance, the harder it is to incorporate the new way of thinking into the mindsets of millions of people. Valuation-Informed Indexing is a HUGE advance; it is by far the biggest advance in our understanding of how stock investing works ever achieved in our history. So, when you take a step back and try to look at this stuff objectively, you begin to see that perhaps it is not so terribly shocking that it has taken 35 years for us to turn the huge intellectual advance that we achieved in 1981 into a flesh-and-blood reality that helps millions of people live far richer lives than they ever before imagined possible.

We are almost there, Laugh. I am 100 percent sure. All that any fair-minded person needs to do to see that is to examine the materials at this site. Over 300 columns at the Value Walk site. Another 200 columns at other sites. Five unique and powerful calculators. 200 in-depth articles. 200 hour-long podcasts. Thousands of blog entries. Over 100 guest blog entries. Several speeches. Hundreds and hundreds of thousands of discussion-board posts. Over 20 sites run by Buy-and-Holders who became so exasperated at their inability to defend Buy-and-Hold within the rules of their own sites that they gave up on the effort and banned honest posting instead. We have a tiger by the tale here.

There are two sides to this story — the process side and the content side. I have lost every battle on the process side. I have lost THOUSANDS of battles. It is hard for the human mind to accept how many battles I have lost on the process side. What gives me comfort is that at the same time as I was losing thousands of process battles, I was winning content battles. The process stuff matters only for a few years. None of those battles mean two cents once we all make the transition from Buy-and-Hold to Valuation-Informed Indexing. And we MUST make that transition or else we all go down together; not one person alive, including my good friend Jack Bogle, wants to see that happen. So we can’t lose in the end. And, from the day we all win forward, all that matters are the thousands of content-side victories and the thousands of process-side losses don’t make two cents of difference.

I am very encouraged by what I have seen over the first 14 years of our discussions.

I wish that I had won the first battle. We all would be in better shape had I opened the Retire Early board at Motley Fool up to honest posting on safe withdrawal rates on the morning of May 13, 2002. Motley Fool would be the biggest, most successful site on the internet today had I pulled that off. There never would have been an economic crisis had I done that; instead we would today be living through the greatest period of economic growth in our nation’s history. I would be one of the richest men in the United States today had I done that. You Goons wouldn’t be on your way to prison today had I done that. Greaney would be a national hero today had I done that. Millions of Americans who today are worried about how they are going to make ends meet would instead be retiring early had I done that. Hundreds of my bloggers friends would have hugely successful sites today had I done that.

I tried, you know? I worked it hard. I left everything on the playing field. I gave it my all and I have scars all over my body to show it.

They say that God works in mysterious ways. I have found that to be so. For some reason that I am not capable of comprehending, God wanted me to work this hard but for ultimate victory to be denied me for at least 14 years and perhaps for a bit longer than that. Whachagonna do, you know? I cannot tell God how to play it. He’s the Big Guy in the Room, I am his humble servant reporter.

So long as God continues to bless me with huge victory over huge victory on the content side, I am going to continue to give this my best fight. I remain 100 percent confident that we all (not just me — my Buy-and-Hold friends are good people even if they are highly confused at the current moment in time) win in the end. Everything that I have seen, and I have seen a lot, shows me that that is so. You don’t buy it, or at least you see some reason to pretend in your public statements that you don’t buy it. We will just have to wait to see it all play out before our eyes following the next price crash. I am not able to come up with any other realistic options for us given the realities that prevail at this point in the proceedings.

I love you, man. If that offers you any comfort, please enjoy that comfort. If it enrages you that I love you, I suppose that I just need to accept that reality. But I love you; that’s the reality. All of the powerful investing insights explored at this site and in my writings at other sites help you as much as they help the millions of middle-class investors who have expressed (through the thousands of similar minds who have posted at our various boards and blogs) a desire that honest posting be permitted at every investing site on the internet.

I love those millions of middle-class people too. I don’t love only you. That’s what I am not willing to post dishonestly re safe withdrawal rates or re any other investing-related topic. This stuff is too important for me to agree to post dishonestly just to be able to easily turn a quick, smelly buck. But my love for you is real all the same. If you read my words carefully, you will see that that has been so going back to the morning of May 13, 2002. I believe that loves prevails in the end. You can take the boy out of the 60s but it would appear that you can never take the 6os entirely out of the boy.

I love you and I love the millions of middle-class investors whose lives you are in the process of destroying with your smelly Buy-and-Hold garbage and with your insanely abusive and violent and criminal postings. It is BECAUSE I love you (as well as the millions whose lives you continue to destroy with every additional post that you put forward) that I continue to insist so forcefully on my right (and on the right of Jack Bogle and Bill Bernstein and Larry Swedroe and Robert Shiller and Wade Pfau and Michael Kitces and all the others) to post honestly re these various, terribly important matters.

It’s working. We are making slow but certain process. We are almost there. We are on the one-yard line. Please don’t despair. It gets better and better and better. We all are in this thing together. We can’t lose. We all want the same thing. Love truly is the answer. Love conquers all. It is darkest just before the dawn. We live in a great country. Our laws make sense. This economic crisis is in the process of teaching us all why we adopted laws against financial fraud in the first place. Serving prison sentences can redeem us by softening our hearts and causing us to feel a compassion for out fellow humans that had turned cold in days when things came too easy for us. We can feel better about ourselves after our prison sentences are served than we did in the days when we had allowed corruption to lower us to doing things that in our youth we thought ourselves incapable of doing.

My take.

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:

Whoops.

“On the other hand, the data also reveals that in the ultra long term (e.g., 20+ years), market valuation actually becomes less predictive of equity returns. In other words, while market valuation is predictive for long(er) term market returns, eventually so much time has passed – and so much has changed – that the starting valuation is just no longer predictive of how markets grow and compound 20-30 years later. In fact, valuation is even less predictive of 30-year returns than it is in predicting 12-month returns!”

John Walter Russell posted research showing that at the Safe Withdrawal Rate Research Group about 10 years ago, Laugh.

I have copies of every thread that appeared at that board.

They all will be coming out when the entire internet is opened to honest posting on the peer-reviewed research of the past 34 years.

This is exactly what you would expect to see if Shiller is right and Bogle is wrong. These sorts of results are logical impossibilities in a world where the market is efficient. The only way we could have such results is if it is investor emotion that determines stock prices, as Shiller proved in his “revolutionary” (his word) research of 1981. This makes perfect sense if it is investor emotion that determines stock prices. Prices go up for roughly 20 years running because investors like how it feels to vote themselves raises. Then prices get so insanely high that investors freak out and send prices to levels as insanely low as they once were insanely high.

That’s how it works. That’s how it has always worked. For 145 years. No exceptions. Not one.

If you Goons hadn’t committed multiple felonies, we would not be in an economic crisis today. You are personally responsible for destroying the financial futures of millions of middle-class Americans.

Those are the people who will be serving on your jury.

We’ll find out together how it all plays out following the next price crash.

My best and warmest wishes to you and yours.

Rob

Set forth below is the text of a follow-up post:

There are Post Archives.

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:

Even if there is a crash, no one will believe your story about buy and hold being the cause. In 2008/2009, it was blamed on the real estate bubble and bad debt bubble. During the past few weeks, we have seen a number of drops and we see it is blamed on China as well as the oil glut. Crashes/drops always get blamed on some kind of economic event. As such, nothing will ever change for you and there will not be any pot of gold at the end of the rainbow. Sorry, but the $500 million you seek just isn’t going to happen.

You are right about the history, Anonymous. I don’t say otherwise.

But I remain optimistic. Perhaps I will be proven wrong. I acknowledge that this could happen. I sure don’t want to see it happen. But I have been known to get them wrong from time to time. We’re just going to have to wait to see how it all plays out.

Is there any reason on your end why we cannot be friends while we wait it out together? That would certainly be my preference.

Rob