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

Here you are, decades later, talking about death threats. Why?  Because no one really believes you.  You have been asked countless times to provide links, but you have not.  Everyone is against death threats, but only if it really happened.  You can easily bring this to a conclusion if you had actual proof, yet here you are again with zero proof.

People believe me. I have talked to many people about this and no one outside of you Goons has ever questioned that death threats were advanced.

There are two things going on.

One, the story is so fantastic that people have a hard time figuring out what is going on. People have a need to relate something they hear to something that they have seen happen before. And this one is unprecedented. I pointed out an error in a retirement study and it has not been corrected for 19 years. It takes more than death threats for something like that to happen. A lot of people have to want very much not to know the realities of stock investing for something like that to happen. There is no other field of human endeavor in which something like this has happened. So it is hard to process.

Two, people don’t want to get involved. Lots of people have objected to the death threats. But most people do it once or twice and then drop it, People find the criminal stuff off-putting. So they feel that they would prefer to have someone else take care of it. When everyone feels that way, the bad stuff continues because it achieves its purpose of blocking people from learning what the research says,.

There will either be a change after the next crash or there will not be. I believe that there will be. I believe that it will make all the difference in the world for people to see what the relentless promotion of the pure Get Rich Quick/Buy-and-Hold “strategy” always does to people in the long run. But 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:

You claim to have all these supporters, yet you can’t even get one of the them to post anonymously on this site.

You claim that threats were made, yet you can’t post just one link here.

Everything you say requires us to just take you word for it. In many cases, we would also have to believe that there is also a mass conspiracy and that all these experts out there are liars.

You don’t have to take anybody’s word for anything, Anonymous. It wouldn’t take you 1o minutes to pull up Greaney’s study for yourself and see whether it contains an adjustment for the valuation level that applies on the day the retirement begins.

People used that study to plan their retirements. I was there. They talked about it every day at the old Retire Early board.

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 can’t name just one person and provide a link, yet Wade Pfau has denied that there was ever any threat made against him.  So the whole premise is false to start with.  When you send out 30,000 emails making the claim, you were just spreading something that lacks any proof.

The guy spent 16 months of his life studying whether long-term market timing always works or not. He sent me scores of e-mails describing his excitement over our findings. He posted numerous articles at his web site summarizing our work. He contributed to discussions about it at the Bogleheads Forum on many occasions, He sent our paper to several peer-reviewed journals and had it published in one. Then you Goons threatened to destroy his career unless he took the articles he had written down from his web site and agreed to stop doing honest work on these matters in the future. And he wrote to me and told me that he was scared of you and that one of the journals he had contacted had told him that they had received hate mail from Buy-and-Holders. He told me that he thought that he might lose his job if he continued doing honest work and that he thought that the best thing he could do was to keep quiet. That’s extortion, Anonymous.

And of course this is not the only case. There’s the fact that I was banned from many sites where hundreds of posters have expressed a desire to be able to hear what I have to say and despite the fact that I have never once in 19 years violated a published posting rule. There’s the fact that I have had financial advisers call me on the telephone because they want to pick my brain on Valuation-Informed Indexing but they ask me not to tell anyone that they have spoken to me. Rob Arnott said that he would like to help me but that he is dealing with too much “controversy” of his own because he has spoken honestly about the effect of stock valuations on long-term returns. Bill Bernstein said that the safe withdrawal rate studies were off by two full percentage points at the top of the bubble but then never said that when he was posting at the Bogleheads Forum. The Wall Street Journal ran a story in which Bret Arends said that the ides that long-term timing doesn’t work is “a bunch of hooey” and that the Buy-and-Holders leave out half the story when they talk to investors. Numerous professors who teach this stuff in universities have told me that my work is top rate and yet I am banned everywhere that matters. Call me madcap but, yes, I have come to believe that there is some funny stuff going on.

A nation cannot survive indefinitely if there is no means to communicate to millions of investors what the peer-reviewed research teaches us all about how stock investing works in the real world. The people of the United States are going to find a way to overcome you Goons. Because we have no choice. It will happen in the days following the next price crash, when millions of people will be able to see with their own eyes the consequences of the relentless promotion of a pure Get Rich Quick approach to stock investing without people even being able to hear about the downside of it and to deide for themselves. We’ll see, you know?

I will continue to wish you all the best things that this life has to offer a person. And I will continue to maintain that the retirement study posted to John Greaney’s web site lacks an adjustment for the valuation level that applies on the day the retirement begins. Because I believe that it is best for you Goons and for Greaney himself that this cover-up brought to a full and complete stop. I don’t believe that any of us is capable of knowing everything there is to know about a subject. So we should always be willing to let the other guy say what he thinks and to keep our minds open to learning from it. That’s where I am coming from, Anonymous. That’s the story here. I truly do not believe that that study contains a valuation adjustment. So that’s what I say when discussions of safe withdrawal rates come up on the internet.

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:

I think every board and blog should be open to my ideas and opinions, but that is not the way that things work.

Every investing board and blog should certainly be open to your ideas and opinions on investing. That’s the entire purpose of boards and blogs — to provide places for people to share their thoughts.

I have never seen a board or blog that banned posting by Buy-and-Holders. I have seen many that ban honest posting on Shiller’s Nobel-prize-winning research. That’s why today’s CAPE is 36. People are only hearing one side of the story. Not good.

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:

Here is the link to what you call a death threat:

https://boards.fool.com/sydsydsyd-theyre-taking-them-down-as-fast-as-we-18207722.aspx?sort=postdate

It is a post talking about personal protection and ends with tips on gun safety. It is not a death threat, nor are you even mentioned or part of the conversation. It is time for you to apologize for spreading false information.

I was a Buy-and-Holder at one time because it was promoted as science and that is what I was looking for. That post ain’t science, Anonymous. Buy-and-Hold is not today what it was when it started out.

My sincere take.

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:

Nothing you say is accurate or factually based.  It is just your opinion.  End of story.

Okay, Anonymous.

I do wish you all good things, 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:

If a reporter for The New York Times as you for actual 3rd party links to the alleged death threats and job threats, would you provide those to the reporter?

Sure.

When the first death threats were made, I called the police. They had a policeman come to the house and interview me and he asked me to provide links. I did so, So this is all in an official police report if a reporter at the New York Times wants to look at it.

I also provided links when the site administrator at Morningstar.com asked about the death threats. A long-time community member observed that a number of people who had never posted at the Vanguard Diehards board suddenly showed up and began posting abusively when the accuracy of the Greaney retirement study was challenged. I explained that you Goons had been doing things like that dating back to May 2002. The site administrator asked me for links and I provided them.

I would provide links to a New York Times reporter. But I would also point out that all that anyone needs to know to understand what is going on is that the error in the Greaney study has not been corrected in the 19 years since I pointed it out. What matters is the huge act of financial fraud. Death threats are of course a very bad thing. But the death threats affect only a few people. The financial fraud affects every investor on the planet. And there is simply no way to cover up the error in the study without making use of death threats and career threats. How else would you pull something like that off?

So, yes, people trying to get to the bottom of this should certainly look at the death threats and the career threats. But they need to come to terms with the fact that the cover-up has continued for 19 years if they want to understand what is going on. Lots of people aided the cover-up. Only a tiny percentage of those who aided the cover-up posted death threats. None of this makes sense until you come to understand that, while just about all of us oppose the use of death threats and career threats to continue a massive act of financial fraud, just about all of us find appeal in Get Rich Quick/Buy-and-Hold investing strategies. We feel more sympathy for those using death threats to “defend” Get Rich Quick/Buy-and-Hold investing strategies than we would for people who employed death threats for other purposes.

It is the Get Rich Quick/Buy-and-Hold urge that resides within all of us that is the driver of all the strange behavior that we have seen over the past 19 years. Yes, death threats are weird. But wanting to go with a wildly wrong safe withdrawal rate is pretty darn weird too. And there’s a lot more of us showing a desire to go with a wildly wrong safe withdrawal rare than there are people among us who have advanced death threats. The Goons couldn’t get away with what they do if we didn’t all love Get Rich Quick/Buy-and-Hold investing strategies so much.

The death threats should be examined, I’m all for it. But, if it weren’t death threats, it would be something else. I am not aware of any death threats directed at Wade Pfau. But acts of extortion were used to shut him up. It’s always something. The driver here is the conflict between what the last 40 years of peer-reviewed research shows and what all investors desire in an investing strategy — a way to get something for nothing. We are not going to solve the problem until we come to terms with the problem. And the problem is the Get Rich Quick urge that resides within all of us, not the fact that you Goons made use of death threats on several occasions to keep those seeking to post honestly re the research from doing so.

The question that matters most is: Why are so many of us willing to tolerate the use of death threats when they are used to protect the Buy-and-Hold strategy from effective questioning when we would be appalled at the use of death threats employed in other contexts?

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 universal consensus is that you are wrong. You know we are right and you try to deflect by calling everyone Goons. That is why you make up stories about criminal acts (such as death threats). You refuse to allow civil and reasoned back-and-forth discussions on this website by deleting/block most posts.

Yeah, yeah.

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:

Fine, everyone thinks you’re right. Enjoy your self-imposed isolation.

Okay, Anonymous.

And backatcha, dear friend.

Rob