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 evidence says otherwise.  That is why you are in the position you are today,  you did it to yourself.

All of the evidence points to a conclusion that the Greaney study lacks a valuation adjustment. Even Evidence now acknowledges that. And he is the gooniest of goons.

The only evidence that you cite in “support” of the Gteaney study is that people like Scott Burns are not willing to publicly state that it needs to be corrected. You’re right that they have not been willing to do that for 41 years now and you are right that that’s the strangest thing that I have ever seen in my lifetime. My job is to figure out why that is so and to explain it to people when things reach a point (as they will, in the event that Shiller’s Nobel-prize-winning research is legitimate research) at which they are ready to hear an explanation. Why do so many want to shut out what the research says in the field of stock investing when they are perfectly happy to take research findings into consideration in so many other areas?

Scott Burns should have called for the Greaney study and the Trinity study (which he endorsed on numerous occasions) to be corrected. He was initially inclined to go at least part way down that path. He said that he wanted to write an article about my claim that valuation adjustments are required. He got cold feet before the article appeared and it came out a strange mish-mash of confused thoughts. It is not “catasstophically unproductive” to want to get the numbers in retirement studies correct. Correcting numbers that milltions of people are using for important purposes would be considered catastrophically productive in any other field of human endeavor.

I am going to continue to say that the Greaney study lacks a valuation adjustment and that Greaney should have corrected the error within 24 hours of the moment he learned of it. And that Scott Burns should have written the whole thing up when he learned of it. And that there is nothing catastophically unprodutive about it, that we should all be grateful that we have brains that make us capable of rational thought and that we should employ that gift in the investing advice realm in the same way that we employ it in every other realm of human endeavor.

That’s my sincere take re this terribly important matter, Anonymous.

I naturally wish you all good things.

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:

Every board is open to honest (truthful) posting.

Are they all open to a discussion of how to combat irrational exuberance?

What conclusions have they come to?

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 feel as if you can make claims about percentages and risk, yet admitting you are not a numbers guy, nor do you have any technical or analytical capability.  Really.  Shiller and Pfau don’t even make these claims around these numbers, despite the way you spin the story.

Wade Pfau devoted 16 months of his life to the study of my ideas on stock investing and concluded that: “Yes, Virginia, Valuation-Informed Indexing works!”

Robert Shiller wrote an entire book on the subject of irrational exuberance and was awarded a Nobel prize for the research on which that book was based.

If your point is that it is possible that in the 600 columns I have written for the Value Walk site, I might have gotten something wrong somewhere, then I agree. That’s why I say over and over and over again that we need to open every discussion board and blog on the internet to honest posting re the last 41 years of peer-reviewed research in this field, without a single exception. If I get something wrong and the entire internet is opened to honest posting, someone is going to catch my error and point it out, no? That’s a good thing, no? When an error is discovered, we all learn something (ESPECIALLY the person who made the error). To permit honest posting is a big plus.

I pointed out an error in the retirement study posted at John Greaney’s web site on the moring of May 13, 2002 (it lacks an adjustment for the valuation level that applies on the day the retirement begins). The Greaney study has not been corrected to this day. That’s the downside of a Ban on Honest Posting. When we ban honest posting, we all miss out on important learning experiences. That leaves us all dumber re the subject matter at issue than we would be if we permitted (or, better yet, ENCOURAGED) honest posting.

None os us knows today as much about stock investing as we would have known had we opened every site to honest posting re the past 41 years of peer-reviewed research on the afternoon of May 13, 2002, as I proposed at the time. That includes me. I have learned as much as I can. I have written hundreds and hundreds of columns re things I learned as the result of working up the courage to advance that famous post of May 13, 2002. I have desgined five unique calculators based on what we have learned from the last 41 years of peer-reviewed research. I am close to completing a book on the new model of understanding how stock investing works that follows from Shiller’s Nobel-prize-winning research and that replaces the now-long-discredited Buy-and-Hold Model. But you know what? I would know a lot more about this subject if all Valuation-Informed Indexers and all Buy-and-Holders had felt 100 percent free to post their sincere beliefs for the entire 20 years.

It pains me to think about how many amazing learning experinces I have missed out on because of the absuive efforts of you Goons and because of the failure of so many good Normals to work up the courage to stand up to you and insist that you knock off the funny business. That said, I believe that the good news here is 20 times more good than the bad news here is bad. We are still going to enjoy all of those amazing learning experiences, they are just going to be a bit delayed. I believe that the good people of this nation will pull together to insist that every site on the internet be opened to honest posting re the last 41 years of research in the days following the next Buy-and-Hold Crisis. Oh, will that be a time!

I hate it that we are going to have to see so much human suffering to get there. But I suppose that it takes what it takes. I do believe that we will all get there someday in the not too terribly distant future. We’ll see.

My best and warmest wishes to you and yours, 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:

Why didn’t you do this work?  It shows you don’t really know your subject matter.

I don’t possess any expertise on any of the technical stuff, that is certainly fair to say.

Please recall that, when I came to the Retire Early board at the Motley Fool site, I NEVER posted on investing. I only posted on how to save money. I saw that as being more up my alley because overcoming the resistance to saving money that holds most people back is an emotional thing. That’s my area of expertise — how emotions affect personal finance decsions.

I got into investing reluctantly. I tried for a long time to avoid it. But in the end you can’t do that. Once you save a lot of money for the purpose of achieving a higher level of fianncial freedom, you have to do something with it. So I was forced to look at these issues whether they possessed immediate appeal to me or not.

What I learned is that stock investing is a super, super, super emotional project. I love what the Buy-and-Holders did. They developed a model for stock investing that is rooted in research. I believe that’s the answer. People need to be able to think clearly and using research asa guide permts you to do that. The other thing that the Buy-and-Holders did that I absolutely love is that they kept things simple. I have no problem with people who enjoy researching companies picking individual stocks. But that sort of thing is not right for the average person, in my assessment. I like Bogle’s stuff. It is research-based and it is super simple. I criticize Buy-and-Hold in strong terms all the time. But I am a Buy-and-Holder at heart.

The reason why I criticize Buy-and-Hold as it is practiced today is that they made a mistake and have refused to correct it for the 41 years since the research revealed it. You have to correct your mistakes when they are discovered! Hioly moly! All that Valuation-Informed Indexing is is Buy-and-Hold with the idea that the market is efficient removed. Had the Buy-and-Holders had Shiller’s research available to them when they were developing their model, we would all be Valuatiion-Informed Indexers today. They never would have come to believe that market timing is not always 100 percent required if all the research had been available back in the 1960s.

The market timing question is an emotions question. So that one is right up my alley. The Buy-and-Holders wanted to help investors from making emotional choices. Which is a third thing that I absolutely love about them. That’s the key thing. They were 100 percent right about the most important goal, in my assessment. Their problem was their belief (this was an assumption, not a finding) that the market is efficient/rational. If the market were efficient, market timing would serve no purpose. If the market were efficient, Buy-and-Hold would be the ideal strategy.

But it’s not. That’s what Shiller showed. Stock investing is a highly emotional endeavor. Investors have to engage in market timing to keep investor emotion from getting so out of control that it craters the entire economy. This is 70 percent of the stock investing story. So long as most investors practice market timing you can never have a bull market. Which means that you can never have a bear market. Which means that you probably will never experience an economic crisis. Shiller’s research merited the Nobel prize he was awarded. Our discovered that martet timing is always required is the most important advance ever in our understanding of how the market works. Now we just need to work up the courage to point out the error everywhere and get millions of people up to speed on how stock investing really works.

I am never going to be a technical guy. I don’t have much to contribute re technical questions. My job is to open every site on the internet to honest posting re the last 41 years of peer-reviewed research. The resistance to honest posting is EMOTIONAL. There is no rational case for a Ban on Honest Posting. The resistance is 100 percent emotional. We can all start living richer and fuller and better lives starting today is we just work up the courage to say those three magic words “I” and “Was” and “Wrong.” The leverage in doing that is off the charts.

Once every site has been opened to honest posting, I intend to back out of the discussions. Let the technical people do their thing, you know? But in order for the tehnical people to do any good work, they need to feel safe saying what they honesrtly believe. That’s the big hurdle that we all face. That’s a purely emotional thing, there’s nothing even a tiny bit technical about it. It’s the Get Rich Quick urge gone wild. People have been led to believe that the wildly inflated numbers on their portfolio statement are real and they don’t want to give up that illusion, the peer-reviewed resear be damned.

We are going to have to give up the illusion if we want to move forward (and we need to move forward if we want to save our economic and political systems from collapse). Coming to terms with the realities of what the recent research teaches us is an emotional project. I believe that I have something to contribute in that area. So that’s the work I do. I want the technical people to be able to do honest work and for us to get there as a nation of people we need to come to terms with the tsunami of emotions that the Buy-and-Holders stirred up with their mistaken belief that market timing (price discipline!) is not always 100 percent required when buyng stocks.

I hope that that helps at leaat 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 broke, you lost your house and your wife divorced you.  Results tell us who is right.

I don’t buy it, Anonymous. If you were confident that the Buy-and-Hold “strategy” could prevail in civil and reasoned discussions, you would welcome such discussions. Your behavior tells me that you have serious doubts.

I do believe that you follow the strategy. But your common sense causes you to experence doubts. And you cannot bear to hear questions asked that cause those doubts to grow.

My sincere 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:

The season is over.  You are in your 60’s and you depleted your savings.  That’s the problem with timing.  You have to be right about when you buy and when you sell.  With Buy and hold, you don’t have to worry about timing.  You just know that the market always goes up in the long term and that a 4% SWR has never failed to work for any 30 year period.  Shiller knows this and that is why he warned you against timing the market with CAPE.  You just wouldn’t listen.

No. All that you need to know is what your proper risk profile is and how much you need to change the stock allocation you went with when prices were reasonable to get it back to the proper place when stock prices have risen to insanely dangerous levels. 70 percent of stock investing success is knowing when you need to engage in market timing and how much you should change your stock allocation when changes become necessary. Given that that’s 70 percent of what it takes to succeed, that should be 70 percent of the conversation at every discussion board and blog.

We should be talking about what matters. Market timing is what matters. Market timing is price discipline and price discipline is the key ton success in every market that has ever existed. All that Shiller did was to show that what common sense tells us must be so really is so. Once we bury the Get Rich Quick/Buy-and-Hold stuff 30 feet in the ground, where it can do no further harm to humans and other living things, we can all get about the business of discussing the stuff that matters.

My sincere 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:

“ I don’t buy it, Anonymous.”

There is no disputing the facts. You already told us that you depleted your savings and that you are divorced, property records show us that you are no longer an owner of the house.

Results are the only thing to tell who is right. At sporting events, they keep a scoreboard . The results of the game (score) tell us who won. You can claim that you think that the Chicago Cubs were the best team in baseball last year, but it doesn’t matter what you claim. We would just look at the record for last year and the outcomes would determine the winner.

The season isn’t over until the CAPE value returns to fair-value levels and below and then remains at those low levels for some time. We’ll see what people think when the secular bull/bear has come to a conclusion.

Rob

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

Well, the goons didn’t make you quit your job and your wife and priest pleaded for you to go back to work.  The investment community told you it was a bad idea to quit. Who else can you blame for your unemployment?

It wasn’t me who published Nobel-prize-winning research showing that valuations affect long-term returns. That was Robert Shiller.

Once such research exists, everyone in the United States needs to know about it. Our political system cannot survive unless people find out about it. Say that stocks perform in the future somewhat as they always have in the past. In this event, millions of people are going to experience crushing losses. How do you think that they are going to feel when they learn that there was 41 years of peer-reviewed research that would have showed them what they needed to do to avoid those losses and that there were thousands of people who would have been thrilled to help them out except they lived in fear of what a gang of internet goons would do to them if they dared to “cross” them by posting honestly. Continuation of the 41-year cover-up benefits no one.

So why does it continue? It coninues because the 10 percent of the population that believes that Shiller’s Nobel-prize-winning research is legitimate research lives in fear of you Goons and of the negative reactions of Buy-and-Holders in general. There is today zero intellectual support for Buy-and-Hold. There is support for every aspect of Buy-and-Hold except the injunction not to engage in market timing/price discipline. But there is zero support for that one and that’s the most important thing (it is price discipline that permits markets to function– the stock market is like every other market in that respect). What keeps Buy-and-Hold going is the mountain of institutional support that Buy-and-Hold enjoys. If you point out the error that was discovered 41 years ago, the “experts” who have been either participating in the cover-up or at a minimum tolerating it, go into freak-out mode. When something this important has been covered up for 41 years, the people who have engaged in the cover-up or tolerated it look very, very, very bad.

Which is good for no one. Millions of investors are left without sensible, research-based investment advice. And the experts are at risk of civil and criminal penalties ‘sin the days following the inevitable Buy-and-Hold Crisis. I don’t want to be a part of that, Anonymous. I want to help every single person involved (including you Goons!) by opening every site on the internet to honest posting re the past 41 years of peer-reviewed research. I cannot do that by myself. But I can do what one person is able to do. I can post AS IF the same laws that apply in every field of human endeavor other than the investment advice realm applied in the investment advice realm as well.

There is a saying that one should become the change that one is seeking to achieve. That is what I seek to do. I sincerely believe that the retirement study posted at John Greaney’s site lacks a valuation adjustment. So I say that. That’s what everyone should do. If everyone did that, people would have lost confidence in the Greaney study many years ago and Greaney would have either corrected the study or deleted it. We can never get to the place where deep in our hearts we all want to be until a larger percentge of the 10 percent who believed that Shiller’s Nobel-prize-winning research is legitimate research work up the courage just to say what they believe regardless of what you Goons do in response. I only get one vote. As one person who believes that Shiller’s research is legitimate, I can only do so much. But I endeavor to actually DO that. I can do no more and I can do no less.

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:

So you want to blame Shiller for your problems.  Got it.

I blame human nature. We all have a Get Rich Quick/Buy-and-Hold urge residing within us. The primary job of investment advice is to help us overcome that “something for nothing” urge. Shiller helped me to understand that. And, yes, by doing that he caused me to get in trouble with the members of the various Buy-and-Hold Goon Squads.

I believe that there will come a time when we will as a nation be entirely united on the issue of permitting honest posting re the last 41 years of peer-reviewed research. At that point, no one will be blaming Shiller. We will be celebrating him, as we would have been all along if we had been thinking clearly.

Hang in there, 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:

“ An easy way to test that theory is to stop terrorizing board communities. Permit every discussion board and blog on the internet to allow honest posting and see what happens. I predict that I soon would be making so much money that there would be no need for me ever to look for other paid employment.”

It would not change one thing if you were given full access to the boards you were kicked off due to your bad behavior.. You have full control of this board, yet you have no following or income on this board. Just duplicating activity would still produce the same results. As we learned in math class, zero times any number is still zero.

I’ve seen it make a big difference in many cases. I was once a Buy-and-Holder. I am obviously not that today. What changed? I gave myself permission to think heretical thoughts. Giving myself permission to think one heretical thought (the Greany retirement study is in error) caused me over time to open up to other heretical thoughts (market timing always works and is always requited). Anf then those heretical thoughts lead over time to even more heretical thoughts (every site on the internet should be open to honest posting re the last 41 years of peer-reviewed research in this field). One day you look up and see that you are a Valuation-Informed Indexer and the biggest critic of Buy-and-Hold on Planet Earth.

The same thing happened with John Walter Russell. He was a Buy-and-Holder on the morning of May 13, 2002, Instead of just ssying “tis is the dogma, I will just accept it,” he devoted his energies to doing research to determine the realities. He ended up spending eight years of his life doing research into Valuation-Informed Indexing.

The same thing happened with Wade Pfau. He contacted me, I didn’t contaxct him. He had seen my posts at the Bogleheads Forun and was intrigued. He wanted to do research into Valuation-Informed Indexing. He asked my permission to do because he felt that I was the founder of the new model. I of course said that I would be happy to work with him. The research we did together so excited him that he told me he couldn’t sleep at night. He told me that he questioned whether he has missed somethinjg becaused he was discovering so much amazing stuff about how stock investing works in the real world and he couldn’t understand why eveyone else who works in this field was not going similar research. Of coursed the answer to that one was deliverd to him when you Goons threatened to destroy his career if he continued doing honest research and people like John Bogle just sat on their hands and did nothing.

Similar things happened to scores and scores of people. The Buy-and-Holders got there first. That’s the only thing that the “idea” that market timing doesn’s always work has going for it. Of course it always works! How could the exercise of price discipline ever not work? But Shiller’s research had not yet been published at the time when Buy-and-Hold was being developed. So the Buy-and-Holders made an extremely unfortunate mistake. It wouldn’t have mattered if they just corrected their model when they learned about the mistake they had made in it. Instead, they covered it up. So here we are 41 years later still engaging in silly arguments as to whether market timing (price discipline!) is always reqauired or not. Humans!

Market timing is always required. I think we will all come to see that in time. I think it is going to happen when we see the ocean of human misery we have brought on through our collectice tolerance of the behavior of you Goons. But we’ll see, you know?

Humans learn by talking things over. If Buy-and-Hold were a real thing, the Buy-and-Holders would encouraged questioning of their dogmas. They would understand that respinding to challenges makes their own understanding of the subject matter stronger over time, The reactions that we have seen among the Buy-and-Holders to my claim that the Greaney retirement study lacks a valuation adjustment shows that belief in the no-market-timiing “idea has eroded even among the most dogmatic of Buy-and-Holders. I believe that it will fall entirely in the days following the next Buy-and-Hold Crisis, when it will no longer be possible for any of us (including you Goons!) to deny what a horrible mistake the Buy-and-Holders made when they came to believe that there might be an alternatve universe 20 billiion light years away in which price discipline/market timing was not 100 percent required for every stock investor on the planet.

But we’ll see, you know?

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

Rob