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

How many death threats have you received?  When was the last one?  Where is the evidence?  What other criminal activities have occurred and where is the proof?

The death threats are only one of many types of intimidation tactics that have been employed by you Goons, Anonymous. We have seen demands for unjustified board bannings. We have seens thousands of acts of defamation. We have seen acts of extortion aimed at silencing academic researchers who dared to “cross” the Buy-and-Holders by publishing honest research. And on and on.

The proof is that the error in the Greaney retirement study has not been corrected to this day. People use retirement studies to plan retirements. The normal thing would be for the author of a retirement study that was found to be in error to correct the study within 24 hours of the moment that an error in it was brought to his attention. For Greaney, that was on the morning of May 13, 2002. And the second normal thing would be, in the event that the author of a retirement study found to be in error failed to correct his study within 24 hours, every responsible person who learned of the matter would insist that he do so. Motley Fool should not have banned me, it should have banned Greaney. It’s the same with Morningstar. And with the Early Retirement Forum. And with the Get Rich Slowly blog. And on and on and on and on.

It does not take 19 years to determine whether or not a retirement study contains an adjustment for the valuation level that applies on the day the retirement begins. It shouldn’t take more than 19 minutes.

If there haven’t been criminal acts of intimidation, including death threats and lots of other nasty stuff, how could it be that the Greaney retirement study has gone uncorrected for 19 years? Even Evidence-Based Investing, one of the generals in Greaney’s Goon army, now acknowledges that the study lacks a valuation adjustment. But he offers no explanation of why the study has not been corrected. That ain’t normal, Anonymous. The only possible explanation is a mountain of intimidation tactics.

I wouldn’t have believed what we have seen if you had told me on the morning of May 13, 2002. I expected Greaney to react to my post in an abusive manner. But I believed that he would be reined in within two or three days. No one could have anticipated what we have seen. But here we are. Now we have to cover up not only the error in the study and the error in the Buy-and-Hold Model that caused Greaney to make the error in the study and the errors in all the other Buy-and-Hold retirement studies but also the intimidation tactics, including death threats, that we employed to keep more people from learning about the error in the study and insisting that it be corrected.

Not this boy, you know? The normal and healthy thing would have been for a national debate on the far-reaching implications of Shiller’s Nobel-prize-winning research to have been launched in 1981, when the research was published. I believe that the advance achieved by Shiller was so huge that many suffered cognitive dissonance and failed to incorporate Shiller’s findings in their understanding of how stock investing works. Then, when something came up showing the dangers of Buy-and-Hold, they went into cover-up mode. Today we are dealing with the cover-up of a cover-up of a cover-up of a cover-up.

It’s not a healthy situation. If stocks continue to perform in the future anything at all as they always have in the past, we will see in not too long a time an economic crisis that will do great harm to millions of people. Harm that would have been avoided if we had launched that national debate in 1981 or even in 2002. I say that we need to launch the long-deferred national debate by the open of business on Friday morning, if not sooner. That is my sincere take. I think this 40-year cover-up is killing us, you Goons as much as the rest of us.

We are all in this together. We all need to know how stock investing works in the real world. We should all be doing everything in our power to see that we all enjoy an amazing learning experience together. Or so this trouble-making Rob Bennett fellow sincerely believes.

I think that I did a good thing when I worked up the courage to go public re the error in the Greaney retirement study. I see it as my finest moment. I showed in that moment beyond any doubt whatsoever that I was Greaney’s friend. The normal reaction of someone who learns that he has made an error in a retirement study is to THANK the person who brought the error to his attention and thereby spared him further embarrassment.

That’s my sincere take re these terribly important matters, 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:

<i>Sure, I’ll join you. I can hide out in this piddly unknown site and post insane bullshit. I’ll even delete comments if you let me. That appears to cover everything in your power.</i>

Do you think it would have been better if I hadn’t pointed out the error in the study?

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:

“ Over the course of the past 19 years, there have been thousands of community members who have expressed a desire to engage in discussions aimed at identifying the best number.”

Then contact those thousands and have them come here to do the work YOU want. Alternatively, do the work yourself.

Everyone alive in the United States wants that work done, Anonymous. That’s why we adopted laws prohibiting the tactics that you Goons have employed to block completion of that work when thousands expressed a desire to do it.

Are a lot of us afraid of you? Obviously.

Will we work up the courage to overcome our fear in the days following the next price crash? I believe we will. But I am not God. I get them wrong from time to time. We are just going to have to wait and see how things play out to find out for sure.

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

My best 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:

If criminal acts occurred, they would be prosecuted. If you had a valid claim to the $500 million, you would have a line of legal firms all competing to represent you. If you had a successful track record with your VII strategy, you would have millions wanting to invest with the VII strategy. If your had any credibility, you would have thousands posting here every day.

Instead, you have none of the above.

If smoking caused cancer, no one would smoke.

If driving drunk caused accidents, no one would drive drunk.

If dating the wrong person caused heartbreak, no one would date the wrong person.

Humans are not perfectly rational creatures, Anonymous. We are capable of acting rationally. But it does not come automatic. We need to work it. CAPE is the tool that stock investors can use to identify when they have become dangerously irrational and to make corrections. There is a good reason why Shller was awarded a Nobel prize. His finding that stock investors often behave in dangerously irrational ways empowers us all to do better (higher returns, less risk) in the future than we have ever done in the past. It is by talking over the far-reaching implications of Shiller’s research that we come to a deep understanding of his findings and achieve the insights needed to live far richer and fuller and better lives than we ever before imagined that we could live.

If investors were 100 percent rational, the safe withdrawal rate would always be the same number. But they are not. Learning that was the breakthrough. We have wasted 40 years that could have been spent developing Shiller’s insights. We will never get those 40 years back. But there is no law that requires us to waste additional years. It’s a matter of us learning to say the words “I” and “Was” and “Wrong.” Or, at the bare minimum, “I’m” and “Not” and “Sure.” That much would at least open the door to learning about the most amazing 40 years of stock investing research in the history of investment analysis.

My sincere take.

And 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:

I wouldn’t feel comfortable using a timing scheme that has no successful outcome.  I would not feel comfortable not having a retirement nest egg in my 60’s.  I would not feel comfortable relying on some kind of fantasy windfall payment to rescue my failed retirement.

Then you shouldn’t do those things.

Where you go seriously off track is in blocking millions of others who would like to hear both sides of the story and then make their own decisions re what they are comfortable doing.

That’s my sincere take, Anonymous.

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:

<i>“We all have goonishness within us.”

Then why call someone a goon? It is like starting out a post referring to people as breathing human-beings. Instead, what you are doing is immediately denigrating someone with a label. Same thing with the allegations of criminal acts. You are immediately attacking someone without offering up one bit of proof. There is no place for this kind of bad behavior.</i>

I have crafted a second response to this comment.

The comment makes an important point. We all have goonishness within us. We all are drawn to Get Rich Quick/Buy-and-Hold strategies. We all want something for nothing. We all want to believe that we can create a mountain of irrational exuberance and not be made to pay a terrible price for having done so. So why single out those who have posted in “defense” of Mel Lindauer and John Greaney as “Goons”? Are they so different from the rest of us?

They are not entirely different from the rest of us. I had determined that the Greaney study was in error before I ever put a post to the Motley Fool board. I had read John Bogle’s book “Common Sense on Mutual Funds” and it has a sentence in it that “Reversion to the Mean is an Iron Law of stock investing.” If that is so, there is zero chance that the safe withdrawal rate is always the same number. If prices are always reverting to the mean, then the going-forward return is lower starting from a time of high valuations than it is starting from a time of low valuations. So the safe withdrawal rate has to be lower at times of high valuations. I was too afraid of what Greaney and his Goon Squad would do to me to share what I knew with my fellow community members from May 1999, when I first posted, to May 2002, when I put forward my famous post asking if we should consider valuations when calculating the safe withdrawal rate. That was goonish behavior. So I have a little bit of Goon in me.

The reason why I only refer to Lindaurheads and Greaney Goons as “goons” is that these are the people who are stopping us as a society from moving forward in our understanding of how stock investing works. Yes, we all have goonishness within us. We wouldn’t have a CAPE value of 39 today if that were not so. But we all have the capacity for reason (anti-goonishness) within us as well. As a society, we encouraged Shiller to write his book (Jeremy Siegel, a Buy-and-Hold advocvate, suggested the idea to Shiller). We made Shiller’s book a best-seller. We awarded him a Nobel prize (that was done directly by a small number of people but there is a sense in which they were acting on behalf of the larger society around them in making their choice). Thousands of us expressed a desire that honest posting be permitted in their contributions to The Great Safe Withdrawal Rate Debate. As a society, we support the discussion of Shiller’s work in several respects while we also take actions that cause the CAPE level to rise to 39, a level higher than the one that brought on the Great Depression. We are torn between goonishness and non-goonishness.

I believe that, if we permitted honest posting at every internet site, we would work out this conflict. We would all get to hear both sides and over time we would reach some sort of consensus view. It is the Lindauerheads and the Greaney Goons who have stopped this healthy process from taking place. They are so addicted to Get Rich Quick/Buy-and-Hold strategies that they cannot even tolerate the discussion of their dangers. They have taken away our right to discuss these matters through the use of criminal behavior that frightens people into silence. That’s more than the usual amount of goonishness that we all carry within us. That’s an intense goonishness that has made rational discussion and the learning experiences that would follow from it flat-out impossible.

That’s the distinction. I refer to the humans that tolerate goonishness but would be perfectly happy to have rational discussion take place if they were not afraid of what would be done to them if they expressed that view as “Normals.” The vast majority of Normals are Buy-and-Holders because that is what they hear most experts endorse. But they are open to hearing the case for Valuation-Informed Indexing so long as the laws of the United States are respected in those discussions. They are not opposed to Buy-and-Hold. They follow Buy-and-Hold strategies. They possess the same amount of goonishness that we all possess. But they would never engage in criminal acts to “defend” Buy-and-Hold. However, they do on occasion recommend posts in which the Lindauerheads and the Greaney Goons engage in criminal acts. They find the threats of physical violence and similar intimidation tactics highly distressing and will do just about anything to make them go away. They feel that, if the only way that they can make it stop is to permit the discussions to be silenced, they can live with that.

The answer to the question is that I reserve the designation “Goon” for those who are so intense in their goonishness that they are willing to dictate to all of us what we may discuss in the investing realm. As a society we are trying to make the transition from a Get Rich Quick approach (Buy-and-Hold) to the first true research-based approach and the Goons are stopping that process from moving forward. That’s more than your normal amount of goonishness. I think that it is important that we recognize that we all have goonishness within us (that’s what makes Buy-and-Hold so popular). But I also think that we need to make a distinction between those of us who just have a human weakness that makes Buy-and-Hold strategies appealing and those of us who have made it our number one mission in life to stop the world from moving forward in its understanding of the last 40 years of peer-reviewed research in this field. That’s a very extreme form of goonishness that has to be described for any of us to be able to come to terms with why discussion of Shiller’s amazing research findings is still banned at every large investing site on the internet 40 years after it was published.

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:

“We all have goonishness within us.”

Then why call someone a goon. It is like starting out a post referring to people as breathing human-beings. Instead, what you are doing is immediately denigrating someone with a label. Same thing with the allegations of criminal acts. You are immediately attacking someone without offering up one bit of proof. There is no place for this kind of bad behavior.

Financial fraud is a crime. Advancing threats of physical violence is a crime. Engaging in acts of extortion is a crime. Buy-and-Hold would have passed from the scene many years ago is it were not for our collective tolerance of these crimes. The reason why we tolerate these crimes is that we all have a soft spot in our hearts for Get Rich Quick/Buy-and-Hold investment strategies. We all want something for nothing. We all want to believe that our irrational exuberance gains are real and can be counted when we are determining whether we have accumulated enough assets to be able to retire safely.

It is not possible to speak intelligently about stock investing in the year 2021 without making reference to these matters. When the Buy-and-Holders prohibit discussion of the last 40 years of peer-reviewed research, what they are really doing is prohibiting rational discussion of this critically important subject. The ordinary thing would have been that, as soon as Shiller published his Nobel-prize-winning research, we would have engaged in extensive discussion of its many far-reaching implications at every site on the internet.

If you don’t explain why that hasn’t happened, you are not being helpful. It is the criminal behavior of you Goons that has stopped that from happening. Many people have expressed a desire to hear the true story on safe withdrawal rates and on scores of other critically important investment-related topics. But the death threats and the acts of extortion scare people and so you Goons have been able to suppress rational discussion for 19 years now. Leave out that part of the story and you are not telling the real story.

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 really don’t seem to understand the point.  The adjustment is not needed.  It is like pointing out that my car does not have a microwave oven installed in the dash.  My car just doesn’t need it.  How many times do people need to explain it to you.

I believe that Shiller’s Nobel-prize-winning research is legitimate research.

And it is not for you to decide. You can decide for you. Every other investor gets to decide for himself or herself after hearing both sides. No death threats. No demands for unjustified board bannings. No thousands of acts of defamation. No acts of extortion against academic researchers who “crossed” the Buy-and-Holders by doing honest research in this field.

That’s where I am coming from, Anonymous. 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:

But the point is that everyone knows what he is referring to. The number is what worked in the past. It is not a guarantee of future success. If you want a different number to be calculated (an estimate of future success) then you need to either do the calculation yourself or work with others to do that calculation.

Endlessly complaining that Greaney (and Trinity etc) accurately calculated a different number than the one you wanted to be calculated is completely unproductive.

It’s honest. That works for me.

In my famous post from the morning of May 13, 2002, I didn’t say that Greaney got the number wrong. I asked a question: Should we be taking valuations into consideration when calculating the safe withdrawal rate? There were many community members who thanked me profusely for putting that question on the table. They said that I had started the most helpful and exciting discussion ever held at that board. So most people had not thought through how important it is to include a valuations adjustment.

It was the widespread interest in these questions that caused Greaney to flip his lid and resort to death threats and acts of extortion and so on to shut down the discussions of what the last 40 years of peer-reviewed research teaches us all about the realities of stock investing. I want to continue those discussions. I don’t want to shut them down. So I think it would be fair to say that you Goons and I are working at cross purposes.

My aim is to open every discussion board and blog on the internet to honest posting re the last 40 years of peer-reviewed research, without a single exception. I view that as the most productive work that anyone could possibly do. The relentless promotion of the Buy-and-Hold “strategy” has taken us to a place where the CAPE value is higher than the one that brought on the Great Depression. My mother lived through the Great Depression and told me stories about it. Not my particular cup of tea, 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.

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 never called for him to correct his study. A study that calculates the withdrawal rates that survived different historical time periods does not require a valuation adjustment.

It simply requires the calculation of what rate survived.

We agree that Greaney calculated properly the rate that survived all existing 30-year historical time-periods.

Rob