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 am losing track. How many death threats have been made?

Enough to keep the Greaney retirement study from being corrected for 18 years from the date that he was made aware of the error in it.

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 100 percent think of myself as a victim re these matters. The clarification that I make is that it is not only me. Arnott is a victim. Bill Bernstein is a victim. Wade Pfau is a victim. ”

No, you are the only one sitting around complaining and doing nothing. The others you mentioned are not. You can’t even get a job, let alone finish a book. There are whiners and then there are doer’s.

I DID something of great importance on the morning of May 13, 2002, when I pointed out the error in the retirement study posted at John Greany’s site. That post changed the nature of the discussions held at the Motley Fool board from that day forward. All of your criminal garbage stopped people from talking about the error. You consider that a victory. But the reality is that the change was permanent. A lot of people left the board and never returned after they saw the death threats and all the rest. And those who remained, like you Goons, have never again been able to feel the same about the board project. So that post changed things forever. That’s DOing.

Shiller did something important in 1981, and. going by the laws of the United States, his Nobel-prize-winning research should have changed the investment advice field forever. It didn’t turn out that way. The advance that he achieved was just too big for people’s minds to accept. So Buy-and-Hold has remained dominant for 39 years after it was discredited. But that’s not a situation that can remain in effect indefinitely. We cannot continue as a society if we do not find some means to overcome you Goons and provide millions of investors access to honest and accurate reports re what the peer-reviewed research teaches us all about how stock investing works in the real world. So we have to face up to the Goon problems and overcome it. There is no other way forward.

I am facing it. I am not ducking the question. If everyone who believes that Shiller’s Nobel-prize-winning research is legitimate research faced up to the problem before us, we could overcome it by the close of business today. I cannot make decisions for all the others. But I can be a model for them. I can show them how it is done and invite them to join me. So that is what I do.

I believe that lots of good and smart people will join me in the days following the next price crash and that it will be all downhill sledding from that point forward. We’ll see, you know?

Wish me luck!

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 silly comments about prison, felonies, huge paydays, made up death threats, etc., all demonstrate that you deserve the continued ban on the investing forums. There is no place for abusive posting like that.

Them’s the breaks, Anonymous.

I obviously hold a very different viewpoint. You Goons are responsible for your own behavior and should be held accountable for it. But we humans live in communities and so to some extent we are responsible for each other too. The site administrator at the Motley Fool should have given John Greaney the boot when Greaney advanced his first death threat. I wrote to him and asked him to at the time. Because he failed to do his duty as a site administrator, Greaney is looking forward to a long prison sentence today. That’s not what I have ever wanted for my old friend John and I am of course sad about it.

But I am not king of the world. I only get one vote re these mattes. I have always made clear what I think needs to be done. Once I have done that, all that I can do is to sit back and watch things play out and hope for the best. So that’s what I have done for 18 years now and what I will continue to do for the next 18 million years, if I am around that long and if The Great Safe Withdrawal Rate Debate extends that far into the future.

I do wish you all the best that this life has to offer a person, in any event. I hope that that helps at least 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:

“Word games don’t pay the electric bill when it gets cold outside.”

Exactly. And who is playing word games? I would be happy to compare my portfolio to your’s and we will see who is paying the bills”

Is a big portfolio going to make you feel better when you are sitting in a prison cell, Anonymous? I would rather have the smaller portfolio and the knowledge that I have remained on the right side of the felony line PLUS the promise of a huge payday that will put your portfolio amount to shame.

If I truly believed that Greaney included a valuation adjustment in his retirement study, I would say that. I do not truly believe that. So I do not say that. I care about my friends and I view a failed retirement as a serious life setback.

I naturally wish you all good things, in any event.

Rob

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

“ That’s what Bernstein is up against. That’s what Wade Pfau is up against. That’s what Michael Kitces is up against. That’s what Robert Shiller is up against. That’s what Rob Bennett is up against.”

You consider yourself to be in the same league as these other people?

Every one of those people, including me, would like to see you Goons placed in prison cells so that they can do honest work in this field. No one got into this field to destroy people’s lives. We all want to help people. Which means telling them when we see that a retirement study lacks an adjustment for the valuation level that applies on the day the retirement begins.

Helpful 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:

Where  is the link to the threats and criminal stuff?

Shiller, Pfau and Swedroe want proof.

The link has been supplied.

When a large enough percentage of the American people wants you to be prosecuted, they will insist on that and it will happen.

One of the problems with Get Rich Quick schemes is that people are happy with them until they explode in their faces. Madoff wasn’t prosecuted until his fund blew up. That’s the way these things go.

There’s nothing else that I can do for you. I can wish you luck with it. That’s as far as I can go.

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:

No one can have a rational discussion with you. You are so delusional that you cannot even see and understand the most obvious of things.

I believe that the retirement study posted at John Greaney’s web site lacks an adjustment for the valuation level that applies on the day the retirement begins. That much is certainly fair to say.

My best and warmest wishes to you and yours, Anonymous.

Delusional 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:

Rob,

Over the last 18-20 years, which goon has caused you the most harm?

In the early days, I would have said it was John Greaney. We had a wonderful community at the Motley Fool site. We certainly had a large number of Buy-and-Holders. So there was a lot of skepticism re Valuation-Informed Indexing. But we also had lots of smart and good people who possessed a strong interest in knowing more about how stock investing works in the real world. If Greaney had not poisoned the discussions. we would have all enjoyed an amazing learning experience. And then we would have taken what we had learned and shared it with other boards all over the internet and eventually the first true research-based model would have become the dominant model for understanding how stock investing works.

So, if I were forced to name one person, it would be Greaney. But I no longer place the same percentage of blame on Greaney. There were times when I went to sites that Greaney had never visited. He obviously was not able to poison discussions at such places. But I ran into the same general problems. So I don’t think that it is fair to place all the blame on him. We had a unique opportunity at the Motley Fool board to advance knowledge because we all cared about the subject and we all liked each other. So he did play a huge negative role by messing things up at that particular place. But this problem is bigger than Greaney or that one board. If one were in an especially charitable mood, one could even say that Greaney was the victim of an exceedingly odd set of circumstances in much the same way that I was.

There was a test that I used when I was recording a RobCast about the discussion that I had with Scott Burns. I certainly did not agree with Burns when he said that my efforts were “catastrophically unproductive.” But I have a great deal of respect for Burns. So I spent a lot of time trying to understand why he said the things that he said. The test that I applied was to ask whether he would pass a lie detector test if he were asked certain questions. I believe that both Greaney and Burns would pass a lie detector test if they were asked “Is a 4 percent withdrawal safe?” and they answered “yes.” I do not believe that either of them would pass a lie detector test if they were asked “Are death threats acceptable in discussions of how stock investing works?” and they answered “Yes.”

The death threats and the other Goon stuff were advanced out of frustration. I believe that Greaney truly believes that a 4 percent withdrawal is safe. But he is not able to formulate effective responses to my challenges to his study. And he sees that my challenges cause people to lose confidence in the study. I think he rationalizes the death threats and the other garbage on grounds that his study really helps people and the only way to maintain confidence in it is to engage in criminal acts. It’s the sort of thing that Nixon did when he obstructed justice. He believed that he was doing important work to bring peace to the world and that the only way to continue it given the circumstances that applied at the time was to obstruct justice. So he did what he did.

Shiller’s research represents a mind-blowing advance. It changes our understanding of every question that comes up in the stock investing field. It’s the equivalent of a cure for cancer. It is 100 percent positive, there is no negative to it. But it threatens all of our existing knowledge in this field. So it is PERCEIVED as a negative by people who have invested their entire lives on developing and promoting an understanding based on the old model.

So I believe that this is a lot bigger than John Greaney. If I were forced to provide one name in response to your question, his is the name that I would offer. But I do not think that it is fair to give that one-word answer. Greaney is caught up in something a lot bigger than him. As am I. As is each and every one of us. None of us asked to be caught up in this controversy any more than any of us asked to be born. Things happen in life that you do not expect. And no one hands out a rulebook as how to respond to various sets of circumstances. We all do our best to figure out what to do while feeling pressure from all sides during the decision-making process. “And there’s no time to think,” as Dylan once argued in song.

My sincere take.

Philosophical 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 hope that that helps at least a tiny bit.”

You are not paying attention. We are not looking for help. Your the one with the problem and you are looking to blame everyone else.

My strong sense is that you are indeed looking for help, Anonymous. If you weren’t looking for help, you wouldn’t be posting here.

I am 100 percent willing and happy to offer you some help. As just one example of how I can help, I can report that Greaney’s retirement study caused a good number of people at the Retire Early board to go with lower withdrawal rates than they would have gone with had Greaney not posted and promoted his study. That’s a positive. I can honestly say that that’s the case. So I have no problem doing so.

Does that mean that you will have no prison sentence? I don’t think so. There has never been a situation like this. So I cannot say for sure what will happen. But I would not feel comfortable promising you that the things that I say will get your prison sentence reduced to zero. I’ll give it my best shot. That much I can promise.

I cannot say that I believe that Greaney included a valuations adjustment in the study. That’s always been the sticking point. I have zero willingness to go to the wrong side of the felony line myself. So I think that it would be fair to say that we are just going to have to wait to see how things play out in the days following the next price crash.

I hope that that works for you, dear Goon friend.

Helpful (But Not the the Point of Committing Felonies) 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:

What about the research that refutes your conclusions from work done more recently than Shillers 1981 paper and concluded the following:

“Our search over economic relations that us to study the price divided by 30-year moving average of earnings may have stumbled upon a chance relation with no significance. In other words, the relation studied here might be a spurious relation, the result of data mining. Neither the statistical tests nor the monte carlo experiments take account of the search over other possible relations.

It is also dangerous to assume that historical relations are necessarily applicable to the future. There could be fundamental structural changes occurring now that mean that the past of the stock market is no longer a guide to the future.”

There are millions of good and smart people who still believe in Buy-and-Hold. Those people obviously need to be heard as well. When those people share their thoughts, they are helping. Those people are our friends.

But every last person on the planet should agree that the criminal stuff needs to be brought to a full and complete stop by the close of business today. There is no legitimate controversy re that one. The debate cannot produce good fruit until as a society we insist that both sides follow the laws of the United States in making their case. There is no place for death threats or for demands for unjustified board bannings or for thousands of acts of defamation or for threats to get academic researchers fired from their jobs.

Obviously.

I should add that those words sound like Shiller’s words to me. I am not sure. But it would not surprise me even a tiny bit if that turned out to be the case. That’s Shiller’s spirit — humble, willing to acknowledge that he does not know it all.

Think where we would all be today if Greaney had that spirit, if Greaney included a paragraph in his study noting that there is 39 years of peer-reviewed research showing that the market is not efficient and that therefore the safe withdrawal rate may be a number that varies and that all the numbers in his study may be wildly off the mark. If Greaney’s study had included such language on the morning of May 13, 2002, there would have been no hysterical reaction to my famous post, the Buy-and-Holders would have just said “oh, Rob must be one of those Shiller guys” and we all would have enjoyed an amazing learning experience. That’s the way it it supposed to work in these United States. That’s the way in which I believe it WILL work in the days following the next price crash, when millions of people will have suffered horrible life setbacks as a result of Greaney’s unwillingness to evidence Shiller’s wonderful humble spirit in his own work.

Captain Obvious Rob