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

Since your house is the largest asset in your portfolio, aren’t you taking a big risk?  Shouldn’t you be timing the housing market?

I think that what I should be doing is speaking out in favor of opening every site on the internet to honest posting re the last 40 years of peer-reviewed research in this field. That would stabilize our economy and permit us all to retire earlier while taking on less risk. What’s the downside?

Get Rich Quick/Buy-and-Hold strategies always have the emotional edge. Permitting honest posting re the peer-reviewed research gives reason-based strategies a fighting chance. I see this as a win/win/win/win/win, with no possible downside.

I naturally wish you all the best that this life has to offer a person, regardless of what investment strategies you elect to follow, Anonymous.

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:

Does anyone in the investment community talk to you anymore? If so, why don’t they just post here in support and stay anonymous?

Because someone who did that would then have to live with himself. There’s never been an iota of evidence supporting the “idea” that price discipline (market timing!) is not required when buying stocks. If there had never been an efficient market theory (there never would have been one if Shiller had published his Nobel-prize-winning research in 1961 instead of in 1981), there never would have been one person in the world who would not have believed that price discipline (market timing!) is every bit as much required when buying stocks as it is when buying anything else. Every person who works in this field would love to be spreading the word with millions of investors re what the research tells us about how stock investing works in the real world. There’s only one problem —

If you tell people what the research says, you make the Buy-and-Holders look bad. If the Buy-and-Holders would have come clean back in 1981, there never would have been a problem. No one would have found fault with them for the mistake they made. But it is not 1981 anymore. It is 2021. 40 years have passed. So it looks really, really, really, really bad for someone to tell the truth re what the research shows.

You’re saying that someone could protect himself from the death threats and the threats of career destruction by posting anonymously. That’s true enough. That’s not a bad point.

How do you think a person who did that would feel about himself? He knows that the Buy-and-Hold retirement studies get the numbers wildly wrong, He knows that it was the relentless promotion of Buy-and-Hold that served as the primary cause of the 2008 economic crisis. And he says so. But he doesn’t give his name. Why doesn’t he post under his own name? Is he ashamed of what he is doing? Is he afraid of what you Goons will do to him for posting honestly? Is he a coward? Does he not realize that he would have more credibility and thereby help more people if he put his name behind his words?

We all played a role in causing this Buy-and-Hold Crisis, Anonymous. Greaney posted his study at his web site. Anyone who cared to could have pulled it up and checked whether there was a valuation adjustment in it. Why is it that I was the first one who noticed (if you go by public posts) that the Greaney study lacks a valuation adjustment? How does something like that happen? The investment advisers played a role and the academic researchers played a role and the journalists played a role and the policymakers played a role and the site owners played a role and the book publishers played a role and on and on. We’re all in on this. Every last one of us (including me) played at least a tiny role in causing this horrible situation.

Since we all caused it, we are all going to need to pull together to fix the problem. It can be done very quickly once we all work together to make us all feel safe to speak honestly. But it is not going to happen by encouraging a few people to post anonymously. I have spoken to people off-the-record. I have had people ask me questions. I have had conversations like that that have extended for hours of time. Do you know what usually happens at the end of them? The person who asked the questions usually says:”Please don’t tell anyone that we had this conversation.” Why? Are they ashamed?

They are indeed ashamed. They are not ashamed of wanting to know the realities of stock investing. There’s nothing shameful about that. They are ashamed of not having done anything to bring the cover-up to an end. We are all ashamed of that. The 19-year cover-up of the error in the Greeaney retirement study is the biggest act of financial fraud in the history of the United States. There is nothing else even in a close second place. We all played a role either in making that happen or in letting it happen and we are all ashamed of ourselves for not doing more to bring it to a full and complete stop many years ago.

We are going to have to come to terms with our shame. I believe that we will do that in the days following the next price crash. The ocean of misery that we will see appear before out eyes will just be too great for us not to finally speak out and come to terms with what the last 40 years of peer-reviewed research in this field teaches us about this important subject. You are asking people to do something (to post honestly but anonymously) that would cause them to feel even more intense shame. It’s not realistic to expect humans to behave that way. What the vast majority of us are doing is rationalizing — we are telling ourselves that perhaps the next price crash will not be so terrible, perhaps we will work our way through this somehow. We are not electing to post honestly but anonymously. It would be very hard for someone to justify doing that given how important it is to get these things right.

That’s my sincere take, in any event.

My best and warmest wishes to you and yours.

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 “sincere take” is delusional. It has no basis in reality. Pretty much everyone you know has told you that. But you won’t listen. So pretty much everyone has cut off contact with you.

Why do you not see being cut off from the whole world as a problem?

I don’t know why I bother asking, because I already know all your talking points, which are your answer to every conceivable question.

I do see being cut off from the whole world as a problem. A very, very big problem.

It is the world that has adopted laws against financial fraud and extortion and death threats. If I fail to speak up about those things when I am engaged in discussions of stock investing on the internet, I am cutting myself off from the whole world. So I don’t do that.

Now, I of course understand the way in which you mean it. You mean: “The rest of the world is willing to overlook the criminal stuff when it is engaged in as part of an effort to promote a pure Get Rich Quick approach to stock investing, why don’t you do that too?” I see that as a temporary thing. I think that we need to speak up in opposition to the criminal stuff even when it is employed in the service of a pure Get Rich Quick approach to stock investing. I think that the opposition to the criminal stuff is what the world really believes and the support for the Get Rich Quick stuff is just a temporary thing. So I believe that I am acting in concert with what the world has shown that it wants.

If the world is so down with Get Rich Quick approach to stock investing, why was Shiller awarded a Nobel prize? The world has mixed feelings re these matters. We do love us out Get Rich Quick/Buy-and-Hold investment strategies. That’s been shown beyond any reasonable doubt whatsoever. But we ALSO like the idea of permitting honest posting re what the research says. We have shown that with the laws that we have adopted and with the Nobel prizes that we have awarded. Right at this particular moment of time, we are trying to have it both ways. We have awarded the Nobel prize and we have acted in such a way as to keep the Get Rich Quick/Buy-and-Hold stuff coming fast and furious.

What about after the next crash? Will we then see the wisdom of our laws against financial fraud and against extortion and against threats of physical violence. I think we will begin permitting honest posting re the last 40 years of peer-reviewed research at that time. And then we will all enjoy an amazing learning experience together. A happy ending!

We will see, you know?

I naturally wish you all the best that this life has to offer a person in the interim, in any event.

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 seems you several problems, then:

1. You need people to think Buy and Hold caused a crash, which has not ever been a factor.
2. You need to find a champion of your cause, which you don’t have.
3. You need it to happen soon, as you are over 60.

It sounds like you need to find that job now and not wait until June.

It seems you several problems, then:

1. You need people to think Buy and Hold caused a crash, which has not ever been a factor.
2. You need to find a champion of your cause, which you don’t have.
3. You need it to happen soon, as you are over 60.

It sounds like you need to find that job now and not wait until June.

I need all those things to happen. But a lot of the most important things that I need to see happen have already happened.

1) We already have 40 years of peer-reviewed research showing that there is precisely zero chance that a pure Get Rich Quick/Buy-and-Hold approach could ever work for a single long-term investor;

2) Shiller has already been awarded a Nobel prize;

3) I already have co-authored peer-reviewed research showing that market timing always works;

4) We already have seen thousands of our fellow community members express a desire that honest posting be permitted at every site on the internet;

5) We already have laws in place prohibiting financial fraud and extortion and threats of physcial violence;

6) We already have millions of people whose futures are riding on the legitimacy of Buy-and-Hold — in the event that stocks continue to perform in the future at least somewhat as they always have in the past, those millions of people are likely to possess a strong desire to know what went wrong;

7) We already have in place a communications medium (the internet) that will permit us to get the word out quickly once there is a sufficient desire for knowing the truth about stock investing to overcome the abusive and criminal behavior of you Goons;

8) I already live in a country filled with millions of good and smart people who will be willing to help out once they see how important it is that they do so;

9) I already have hundreds of comments on file in which people have made insanely effusive comments about the Valuation-Informed Indexing concept, comments that will go a long way to convincing millions of others of the validity of the concept once they have opened their minds to thinking about a new way of understanding how stock investing works.
;
The only thing that I can think of that I need but do not today have in place is a price crash that takes the CAPE value from 32 down to 8 and leaves it there for a good number of years. If Shiller’s Nobel-prize-winning research is legitimate research, we should be expecting to see that sometimes within the next year or two or three. We’ll see.

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:

“An irony of economic progress is that, the richer people are, the more vulnerable they are to setbacks.”

You couldn’t be more wrong. Rich people got where they are for a reason. They know what it takes to get rich. Further, they usually take steps to protect themselves through diversification. Once you hit a certain level of wealth, your goal is to then protect it.

People that have not done well financially will fall for get rich quick schemes, like market timing, playing the lottery, etc.

People could’t have known that Buy-and-Hold was a scam until 1981 because the Nobel-prize-winning research showing that market timing is required wasn’t published until then. So say that someone started following a Buy-and-Hold strategy in the 1980s and became very wealthy as a result. This happened to millions of people. You say that, once people achieve wealth. they want to protect it. That’s why we are where we are, Anonymous.

All of the people who achieved great wealth by pretending that irrational exuberance is real want to retain that wealth. If they permit someone like me to go around explaining why that wealth is not real, people will sell their stocks, prices will fall and the wealth will disappear. People who achieve wealth by treating irrational exuberance as real are highly vulnerable. All that it takes is honest and open discussion of the last 39 years of peer-reviewed research in this field for their wealth to disappear. Shiller’s amazing research has so far only convinced 10 percent of the population because 90 percent of the population views that research as a threat to their financial well-being.

Shiller’s research shows that 50 percent of the value of the stock market today is cotton-candy nothingness. That’s a big deal. A very, very, very big deal. Our nation will never be the same again once we open the internet up to honest discussion of Shiller’s Nobel-prize-winning research. In the short term, there will be great pain. In the long term, we will achieve a huge economic advance. Because once we all understand how stock investing works in the real world, we will never let one of these crazy bull markets get so out of control. But for now, a lot of us just want to protect the wealth that we are counting on to finance our retirements. That’s why we have seen the frictions that we have seen for the past 18 years.

If Shiller is right, the phony wealth is going to disappear no matter how hard we fight to hold off that day. At that point, there’s no longer much point in us lying to ourselves about it, is there? Once the phony wealth is gone, what are we protecting? That’s why I believe that we are going to see a huge advance in the days following the next price crash.

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 not banned from honest posting. We do have to clarify as to what honest posting REALLY is because I would never let you post made up stuff like pretend death threats or pretend job threats if you were on my website. But setting that aside, you have the largest venues available to you, such as Twitter, YouTube and Facebook. That gives you access to everyone.if you can’t make it on any of those platforms, then no one sees value in your message.

Thousands have found value and thousands have said so. Not at one time. There was no single day on which thousands said they saw value. But over the course of the 18 years it has been thousands. There have been scores who have indicated that they have found value in a single day On the sixth day of the discussions, John Walter Russell put up a post saying that he had investigated my safe withdrawal rate claims and that he saw great value in them and that post obtained more than 50 recommendations.

So I have never had any problem whatsoever generating support for my work, But most of those people left the Motley Fool board after Greaney threatened to have his Goon Squad murder the loved ones of any poster who posted honestly re those matters. Once the people interested in the topic of early retirement left the Retire Early board, the board was no longer able to fulfill the purpose for which I had built it up in the first place.

Motley Fool of course had published rules prohibiting death threats. Had those rules been enforced in a reasonable manner, there never would have been a problem. But of course there is a lot of money to be made promoting a pure Get Rich Quick/Buy-and-Hold strategy. Greaney was telling people that they could retire many years earlier than what the peer-reviewed research showed was prudent. So he was popular. And his popularity brought in money for the Motley Fool site.

All Get Rich Quick approaches are going to be popular. For obvious reasons. The beauty of the peer-reviewed research is that it shows the dangers of going with a pure Get Rich Quick approach. This is why the Buy-and-Holders are so hostile to the idea of permitting honest discussion of the last 39 years of peer-reviewed research in this field. There is no research supporting the idea that market timing (price discipline) is not required. There never has been and there never will be. Buy-and-Hold cannot survive in a world in which discussion of the peer-reviewed research is permitted. For so long as discussion of the research is prohibited, emotion can rule the day and it is emotion (the Get Rich Quick emotion that all humans possess) that makes Buy-and-Hold look promising.

I believe that Buy-and-Hold will fall following the next price crash. At that time millions of people will be able to see in a concrete way what a terrible mistake it was to fall for a pure Get Rich Quick approach and to tolerate a general ban on discussion of the last 39 years of peer-reviewed research in the field. We’ll see.

Shiller has “made it” on every platform possible. His book was a best-seller. He was awarded a Nobel prize. What good has it done us? We all still have that Get Rich Quick/Buy-and-Hold urge residing within us. If we are to overcome that emotional urge, we need to be able to DISCUSS the practical how-to implications of Shiller’s findings. That’s what the Buy-and-Holders do not want to see happen. As people learn about the research, the entire Buy-and-Hold house of cards tumbles to the ground. Market timing is price discipline. No market can survive without price discipline. Persuade millions of stock investors not to practice market timing and the stock market is sooner or later going to collapse. There is no getting around it.

I tried for many years to prevent that collapse. I did everything that a person can do. If the collapse cannot be prevented, then the next best thing is to supply people the information after the crash that they need to understand it and to avoid future crashes. We may see a Second Great Depression with the next price crash. It horrifies me that I have not been able to stop it. But at least I can do what is possible to see that we never see a Third Great Depression. That ain’t nothing.

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:

Will you have any emotions crash when you realize that you won’t get your fantasy of a $500 million windfall and that there won’t be any jury trials or goons going to your make believe prisons?

No.

I don’t need $500 million and I don’t need anyone to be in prison. So, if those things did not happen, that reality would not cause an emotional crash for me.

What I need is to post honestly. I didn’t feel totally good about myself in the days before I worked up the courage to post honestly re these matters. Now that I have done so, it would feel even worse to go back to not doing so. So, if I were ever to agree to hold back from posting honestly again, that would cause an emotional crash for me. That’s the one that I fear enough that I would never give even two seconds of consideration to going there.

The $500 million and the prison sentences are not in a direct sense a biggie for me. But they follow from the thing that is a biggie — me posting honestly re safe withdrawal rates and re scores of other critically important investment-related topics. For me to post honestly re these mattes, the internet needs to be opened to honest posting. If the internet is opened to honest posting, it follows logically that we are going to see prison sentences and $500 million payments. So I expect to see those things happen. But that’s different. That’s not the same thing as saying that I need to see those things happen or even that I want to see those things happen. I don’t like thinking about the prison sentences. If it takes prison sentences to get the internet opened to honest posting, I am certainly okay with prison sentences. But in other circumstances thinking of my old friends going to prison would make me very sad.

The way that this should have worked is that there should have been a national debate launched on the implications of Shiller’s research immediately after he published it in 1981. I of course wish that it had happened that way. But of course that has not been the reality. Now that there has been a 39-year cover-up, there are a lot of obstacles to getting things to a good place. It’s not just you Goons. There are thousands of smart and good people who are going to feel embarrassed to have millions of investors learn about the 39-year cover-up. If there were a way to teach millions of people what they need to know about stock investing without embarrassing those thousands of good and smart people, I would of course pursue that way. But it is just not possible. We need to go through the rough stuff to get to the good, life-affirming stuff.

And the rough stuff gets rougher the longer we avoid going through it. So I have always been in favor of making the transition as soon as possible. There is not one academic model for understanding how stock investing works. There are two. That has been true for 39 years now. Everyone needs to know that. We need to get past this thing where people act all surprised that market timing might be required. People can of course think what they like. But there shouldn’t be one person today saying that it is a sure thing that market timing doesn’t work. That claim has at least been under question for those who are familiar with the peer-reviewed research for 39 years now.

So — no emotions crash re the money or the prison sentences. But posting dishonestly (pretending that the safe withdrawal rate might always be the same number) is out of the question. I will never go back to that way of handling things. I cannot control what the rest of the world does. But I control what I do, And I can never go back to that cowardly and lazy and selfish way of handling things. I do not believe that the Greaney retirement study contains a valuation adjustment and I am going to continue to point that out to people at any site at which the study is promoted as a tool for planning retirements and at which I am permitted to post.

My best wishes.

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:

Can you give us examples of what you consider abusive posting on this website and what was specifically said that compelled you to block posts.

That is not why you are banned. You are banned as you hijack threads, don’t provide supporting data behind claims, you refuse to answer questions and you do not comply with what board owners ask of you.

To the opposite, you ban posts that are not abusive and address the subjects in the thread.

There is no consistency to your positions.

There are thousands of threads at this blog in which I interact with you Goons. If, in the days following the next price crash, there are millions of people trying to understand why most of their life savings vanished into the air, they can read through those threads and see if they can pick up the idea. I am 100 percent confident that any halfway reasonable person who takes even a brief look at those threads at a time when he or she is not longer suffering from irrational exuberance, he or she will get it.

There’s also a way to avoid even looking at the threads. Look at the retirement study posted at John Greany’s web site. See if you can identify the valuation adjustment in it. If you cannot find one, think how much abusive posting it would take to keep the cover-up going for 18 years. Now you get it. Now you know.

It’s a scam, Anonymous. It’s not a hidden scam. It’s a scam taking place in full public view. I don’t think that it started out as a scam. And I don’t think that the people working the scam are aware that it is a scam. But it’s a scam all the same. The damage that it will do to millions of investors is just as serious whether the people working the scam are aware that that is what it is or not.

The reason why Shiller was awarded a Nobel prize is that he made us aware of the scam at the core of the stock investing project that since the first stock market was formed has made stocks a far more risky asset class than it needs to be. Now we are free of 70 percent of the risk of stock investing — intellectually. The next step is to become free of 70 percent of the risk of stock investing in a practical real-world sense To achieve that, we need to open every discussion board and blog to honest posting re the last 39 years of peer-reviewed research in this field. I strongly urge that we take that amazing step forward by the close of business today (although what I have seen over the first 18 years of our discussions tells me that we are probably not going to pull it off until we all come together in the days following the next price crash).

I naturally wish you all the best that this life has to offer a person, in any event.

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 keep taking about goons, but your board has been virtually dead for years. Same goes for the place you call goon central. Your explanation as to a lack of fans and followers does not make sense.

And what’s the name of Shiller’s book?

Irrational Exuberance.

Do you see?

When the CAPE value is where it is today, you shouldn’t expect the investing field to make sense. We are all telling each other lies about stocks because we want to keep that CAPE value up where it is. If we were to start making sense, that CAPE value would tumble and our portfolio values would be cut in half. There are trillions of reasons why as a people we don’t want that to happen just yet.

The long-term reality remains that we would all live better lives if we permitted ourselves to talk about the far-reaching implications of the last 39 years of peer-reviewed research in this field. I think we are going to see the merit of making that big advance once the CAPE value has fallen and the horrors of the pure Get Rich Quick/Buy-and-Hold approach have revealed themselves once again.

We’ll see.

I hope that you Goons will be willing to say a prayer for me when we are all living through it. I certainly will be including my Goon friends in my prayers at that time.

Hang in there, man.

Pious Rob

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

Always a victim, aren’t you.

My view is that every last one of us is a victim of ignorance, Anonymous. Humankind was placed in this world not knowing everything there is to know about stock investing (and lots of other things too, to be sure). We struggle along, doing the best we can to see through the darkness. Every now and again some smart and kind soul comes along to enlighten us and to help us to understand things that make all of our lives richer and better. Shiller did that. That’s why he was awarded a Nobel prize for his work.

We don’t always appreciate those efforts immediately. There is something inside us that clings to the darkness we know, afraid to explore the light that we have been blessed with. I vote for moving from the darkness of Buy-and-Hold to the light of Valuation-Informed Indexing. I am a victim of humankind’s ignorance and suspicion and fear. That’s so. But we all are. I am glad that I was placed in circumstances that enabled me to see through the darkness to a superior way to invest in stocks, the first true research-based approach. I do not deny my victimhood but I certainly do not focus on it.

I don’t ask others to feel sorry for me. I ask them to note the conflict between their beliefs about life that caused them to enact laws against threats of physical violence and extortion and financial fraud with their tolerance of the violation of those laws by you and your Goon friends. What are we really about as a people? Is goonishness all we are, is the feeling of comfort we gain from hearing reassurances that a pure Get Rich Quick approach can work so important to us that we have given up for good our admiration for intelligence and decency and progress? Or do the laws that apply in all fields of human endeavor other than the investment advice field signal where we are headed as a people in the investment advice realm as well? I obviously believe that it is the latter possibility that applies.

I am a victim. I was born a human and so I suffer the pains that afflict all the humans. But I don’t whine about it. I point out how we are all victims of Get Rich Quick investment strategies because I want to see us do better in the future. I celebrate human life. It is sometimes necessary to point out how we have messed up to do the work needed to take us to a better place. But the focus is never on the failures. The focus is on the better way to live that we all desire deep down inside. The focus is on the better lives that we will all live in the future, not on our screw-ups of the past. I talk about the screw-ups of the past only because it is those magical words “I” and “Was” and “Wrong” that provide the magic that takes us all to a better place.

I hope that that helps at least a tiny bit, my dear Goon friend.

My best wishes to you.

Life-Affirming (and Corruption Exposing) Rob