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, you are not “good” with people who don’t bend to your will. You call people goons, you make up stories about death threats and job threats, you label people con-men, you tell people they are going to prison, you block posts, etc.

I don’t call people “Goons” because they believe in Buy-and-Hold. I believe that the Buy-and-Holders made huge, positive contributions. I feel great respect and affection for them. I believe that as a nation we are in the process of making a transition from Buy-and-Hold to Valuation-Informed Indexing. 90 percent of the population today believes in some form of Buy-and-Hold. So the Buy-and-Holders must be part of the national debate that we need to have to take ourselves from the dark place where our understanding of how stock investing works resides today to the very bright place where we all deep in our hearts want it to reside tomorrow. I have learned much from my Buy-and-Hold friends and I am of course grateful for the effort they put into the task of helping me to learn those things. Buy-and-Holders are the best!

Goons are not the best. Goonishness comes from a dark place. Every last one of us should be in agreement that there is zero place in discussions of stock investing 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. That sort of garbage is not a Buy-and-Hold thing, it is a human sickness thing. A group of Buy-and-Holders has turned to that sort of thing in a desperate effort to keep discussion of the last 38 years of peer-reviewed research off of this powerful new communications medium. All normal Buy-and-Holders should disassociate themselves from that sort of ugliness in the strongest possible way.

Unfortunately, most Normals are afraid of you. People who have lived in the United States are not accustomed to seeing threats of violence and career destruction as part of their daily routine. They often speak up once or twice in opposition and then slink away in fear, telling themselves that it is not their job to address this sort of matter (it is a site owner’s job to address it but most site owners are fearful as well or else like the money that Buy-and-Hold brings in to their site because of its popularity and its Get Rich Quick appeal).

I love Buy-and-Hold (not its damaging aspect but all of the good in it, which is considerable) and I love Buy-and-Holders. I hate goonishness and all the harm it has done to humans and other living things. You Goons combine the two things. You do believe in Buy-and-Hold. You follow it. I sometimes learn from you. I sometimes have good discussions with you. But you include at least a small measure of nastiness and ugliness and deception in the vast majority of your posts and a very big measure in a number of them.

That’s why I refer to you as “friends” in nearly every post of my own while also referring to your goonishness in nearly every one of my posts. Both things are true. You really are Goons seeking to destroy conversations that we all very much need to have and you really do have something positive to contribute to those discussions. I try to make the point that there are both positive and negative elements to your contributions as often as I can because both sides of this story must be told for people to come to understand what we are up against and what we stand to achieve if we learn how to take on what we are up against in an effective way.

Goon Exposing 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,

Have you tried branching out to other personal finance forums lately? This site seems like just you and Anonymous bickering at one another!

Warm Regards,

Bennett Fan

I haven’t tried posting at a new place in a long time. I did that often in earlier days.

The same pattern repeated over and over again. There are always people interested in what I have to say. I always try to be responsive to the questions asked by those people. You Goons are always insanely abusive when the merit of your strategy is questioned. And that always scares away the people who have an interest in learning more. You Goons are more intense than the people who have an interest in learning about the new ideas. 50 times more intense.

Nassem Taleb wrote about how a small minority of a population can gain influence far out of proportion to its numbers by being more intense. Buy-and-Hold Goons comprise about 10 percent of most communities of investors. But their intensity gave them an effective veto power over what I said in those communities.

It’s emotionally painful for me to involve myself in the sorts of conflicts that evidence themselves whenever Buy-and-Hold is challenged. I have done it on thousands of occasions. Those of us who have doubts about the strategy need to do that if progress is ever going to be made. So I see it as my job to place myself in the firing line. But I have taken a lot of hits over the years and I am not inclined to take on more hits today unless I have reason to believe that there is going to be a payoff. I continue to take on hits when you Goons post comments to my columns at the Value Walk site because I think it is important that I experience the learning that follows from writing new articles every week about the Valuation-Informed Indexing concept and taking on those hits is part of the price that must be paid for doing so. So I post there. But I no longer have much appetite for going to new places and seeing the same ugliness play out one more time.

After I finish the book, I may elect to go to some new places. It would be a good thing to do. But my expectation is that I will not be seeking out lots of new places until I see reason for believing that site owners will be standing up to you Goons. I believe that we will see that in the days following the next price crash. At that time I believe that I will be posting at lots of new places. Eventually, I believe that we will see a day where honest posting re the last 38 years of peer-reviewed research will be permitted (and encouraged!) at every site on the internet. Let us pray.

I hope that helps a small bit, Bennett Fan.

Research-Based Investing Fan 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 problem is that you are only focused on your views and perceptions. People don’t believe what you say and have long grown tired of you. Even when given evidence contrary to your views, you ignore it or twist in a way you think suits your view. You need to correct your own errors rather than asking others to bend to your will.

I don’t ask anyone to bend to my will. I would not want anyone to bend to my will because I asked them to. I seek to persuade. If people are persuaded, that’s good. If they are not, that’s good too. So long as I gave it my best effort, I did my part. In cases in which people are not persuaded, there’s always the chance that they will persuade me. Which leaves me better off if I needed to be persuaded of that thing. So that’s a good way for things to turn out too.

Your problem is that you speak for people who you have no business speaking for. You say: “People don’t believe what you say.” No. YOU don’t believe what I say. You can say that much. You cannot speak for all others. There are lots of others who, like you, don’t believe what I say. But there are also lots of others who do believe what I say and who want to hear more and who want to ask questions and who then might want to share what they have learned with still more others. That’s how it is done. That’s how a community engages in a learning experience.

I am focused on what makes sense to me. And the idea that market timing might not be required when buying stocks makes precisely zero sense to me. Market timing is price discipline. Price discipline is what makes markets work. Without it, they become dysfunctional. A dysfunctional stock market hurts all of us. So I am going to continue to say that market timing is 100 percent required for those buying stocks.

I wish you all good things.

Evidence-Twisting Rob

Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently posted to the discussion thread for one of my columns at the Value Walk site:

What is funny is that after several years of watching your predictions fail time after time, you were asked about your predictions given your track record of failure. You stated that if a market crash did not happen by the end of 2015, we should all question using CAPE as a predictor as well as VII. Well, 2015 was a long time ago.

You keep telling us as to how some day you will be vindicated. Even if people see a temporary big drop in their portfolios, they are all so far ahead by not following your advice. These people would all be searching for jobs like you instead of enjoying retirement. What a horrible track record.

I agree in part re this one, Sammy.

I ask myself every night before I go to sleep if it is possible that I have missed anything. Lots of people do not agree with my views on stock investing and lots of people who were once friends have become angry with me over them. So I need to question whether I have gotten on the wrong track somehow.

The only thing that I have ever come up with that supports the Buy-and-Hold case is the missed predictions. You are certainly right that I thought we would see another stock crash a long time ago. I give you that one. And it does cause even me to experience a tiny bit of doubt.

I don’t agree that Buy-and-Holders will end up ahead even if we do experience the price crash that Shiller’s reseach indicates that we should be expecting. That one’s a math exercise. The three earlier bull/bear cycles that we have experienced in U.S. stock market history did not end until the CAPE level reached “8.” That’s a 70 percent drop from where we are today. If people going with high stock allocations experience a 70 percent price drop, they will not be ahead. That’s a crushing blow.

I believe that I will be vindicated. I absolutely believe that. Too many people have told me how excited they are about these ideas for me to believe otherwise. And even the behavior of you Goons tells me that I will be vindicated. If you possessed a deep confidence in Buy-and-Hold, we could have friendly discussions and try to learn from each other. You have never been willing to engage in friendly discussions with me, not one time in 17 years. That’s defensiveness. And defensiveness on your part is not a good sign for the investment strategy that you advocate.

I don’t say that I know it all. But I believe strongly that Shiller showed us all something important with his research. He would not have been awarded a Nobel prize if he had not done so. I believe that every investor alive should be trying to get clear on what that something important is. If some of us end up sticking with Buy-and-Hold after doing that, that’s fine. But we all should be seeking to develop a deep understanding of the far-reaching implications of Shiller’s Nobel-prize-winning research before deciding on what investment strategy to follow on a going-forward basis.

That’s my sincere take, in any event, dear 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:

“Going the purely emotional route ”

Going the emotional route? You mean like calling people goons? Telling them they are going to prison? Making up death threats? Making up job threats?

Our laws against extortion and against financial fraud and against threats of physical violence are good and necessary laws. It is not an emotional act to report such crimes. The emotional thing is to IGNORE such crimes when you see them taking place before your eyes. Our system cannot work when such crimes go unreported.

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:

Do you think your mental status will improve once you get a job?

I think that the financial future of everyone who lives in the United States will improve once you Goons are placed in prison cells, where you belong, and the rest of us are free to talk over what we have learned about how stock investing works from the last 38 years of peer-reviewed research. Being afraid of you doesn’t help. When one of us shows fear of you Goons, it causes others to become more afraid. When one of us works up the courage to stand up to you, it helps others to work up the courage to stand up to you. Each of us has an effect on the community as a whole. We each have to consider how our actions affect the actions of everyone else.

Criminal acts reveal desperation. Your reliance on criminal acts shows that Shiller is right, investors are NOT purely rational creatures, investors are at times HIGHLY emotional. So we need to adjust the numbers that we get when we assume 100 percent rationality with additions or subtractions relecting the effect of investor emotionalism.

Evidence of your abusiveness is part of the research that we need to be looking at to come to a full understanding of how stock investing works. The data that Shiller and Pfau and Russell and Arnott look at helps. But we also need to look at the death threats and demands for unjustified board bannings and the thousands of acts of defamation and threats to get academic researchers fired from their jobs. That stuff is just as important. It was Greaney’s first death threat and the fact that 200 of my fellow community members endorsed it that told me that Buy-and-Hold is a big pile of smelly garbage. Everyone needs to be able to see that it is emotion that rules the Buy-and-Hold mind.

Those of us who are trying to help people come to a deeper understanding of how stock investing works (high prices are caused by emotion and do not not last!) should not be afraid of the Buy-and-Holders (the Get Rich Quickers!). We have the law on our side. The Get Rich Quickers do not.

Will those laws be enforced immediately? They will not be.

Will those laws be enforced after millions have been hurt by the Get Rich Quick/Buy-and-Hold stuff in very serious ways? I believe so. And then we will all have to come to terms with what we did to ourselves by not incorporating Shiller’s insights into our understanding of the subject going back to 1981.

We need to go through what we are going through today to get to the place where deep in our hearts we all want to be tomorrow. What we are seeing from you Goons (out-of-control emotionalism on the subject of stock investing) is what causes price crashes. I don’t like how price crashes hurt people. So I am going to tell the story of what causes them. And we now have 17 years of Post Archives available to us for the telling of the tale.

I think that the book that I am writing will be the most important book ever published in the field of personal finance. Others don’t want to write it because they don’t want to face all of this ugliness. But it is by facing the ugliness that we come to terms with it and overcome it and free ourselves from it in the future.

I think that the mental status of the community of investors will improve once my book is published and we experience the price crash that brings it a big readership. We have to go through this dark stuff to unlock in a practical sense the magic that Shiller tried to deliver to us 38 years ago.

That’s my take, Anonymous. Call me madcap.

Mental (In the eyes of Buy-and-Holders) Rob

Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently posted to the discussion thread for one of my columns at the Value Walk site:

Yes, you make stuff up and you are a prolific liar. In fact, a group of people created a website just to track all of the things you have made up and lied about. Your response is always how all these masses of people are wrong and how you alone are right. Just look at the results.

There’s been more than one such web site created over the course of the 17 years in which I have writing about this stuff, Sammy. That much is true enough.

More people would be saying what I am saying if that were not the case. I think that web sites of that nature hurt us all. I think that all of us, including all Buy-and-Holders, should be speaking up in opposition to that sort of thing. Because that sort of thing causes people who have doubts about Buy-and-Hold to self-censor themselves.

I was a Buy-and-Holder myself once upon a time. It was when I saw things like that that I lost confidence in the strategy. Shiller’s big insight is that investors are not purely rational but are capable of acting emotionally. When I saw things like that, it persuaded me that Shiller was onto something.

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:

After rereading these words, I feel the need to put forward an addendum to them.

Valuation-Informed Indexing is the new idea, Buy-and-Hold is the long-established strategy, the dominant model today for understanding how stock investing works. So, yes, I carry the burden of proof when it comes to persuasion. People who hear my words should be skeptical of them because they challenge conventional thinking, thinking held and advanced by millions of good and smart people. The burden of proof is on me when it comes to PERSUASION.

But the burden of proof is not on me when it comes to whether or not I should post my honest views. People who hold minority viewpoints are required in our society to post their honest beliefs. If I were to say that I believe that Greaney’s retirement study contains an adjustment for the valuation level that applies on the day the retirement begins, I would be guilty of financial fraud. I obviously do not believe that. There are thousands and thousands of posts in the record in which I state very forcefully that I do not believe that. I hold a minority viewpoint. I am required by the laws of the United States to express that minority viewpoint each time that I speak re these matters. That’s as clear as anything could be clear.

This difference in how the two burdens of proof are set up is critical to the proper working of our economic and political systems. It would be a bad idea if we all changed our views on important issues each time some fellow or gal came along and expressed a new idea. That would be a disaster. So we have a social norm that says that new ideas must be challenged, that the burden of proof must be placed on the person advancing the new idea. All of that is right and just and proper and life-affirming. So one of the two burdens of proof really us on me.

But the other burden of proof — the burden that must be met for you Goons to avoid prison time — is on you Goons. People should not be easily persuaded of what I have to say. But I don’t have to persuade anyone of anything to win the right to post honestly. That is established in our society’s social norms and indeed in our criminal code (which of course has its roots in our long-held social norms). I have an absolute right to post honestly, as does everyone else. Even if it turned out that you were right about Buy-and-Hold, you would still be guilty of crimes when you advanced death threats and when you threatened to get Wade Pfau fired from his job and so on. That stuff is completely over the line even though my viewpoints on how stock investing works are minority viewpoints.

Now — the practical reality is that you are not going to be prosecuted for your crimes unless as a society we come to have serious enough doubts about Buy-and-Hold for a significant number of people (more than 10 percent of the population!) to be concerned about the effects of your criminal acts on our entire society. Not every criminal transgression is prosecuted. Not every person who commits a crime lands in a prison cell.

If a significant percentage of the populations becomes concerned about what has happened to them after they lose 60 percent or more of their life savings, you will go to prison. If no one becomes concerned, or if only the 10 percent who currently are concerned are concerned at that time, you will in a practical sense be off the hook. I believe that we are going to see more people become concerned in the days following the next price crash. But we of course are going to have to wait to see how that one plays out.

There are two burdens of proof. One is on the substance issue — Can Buy-and-Hold work, given the 38 years of peer-reviewed research showing that valuations affect long-term returns? The burden of proof is on me re that one. The other burden of proof is on the question of whether I have a right to post honestly and whether people who are interested in hearing what I have to say have a right to hear what I have to say even though you Goons would prefer it if people could not hear the minority viewpoint expressed on every discussion board and blog on the internet. Re that one, the burden of proof is on you Goons.

We have as a society adopted laws protecting the expression of minority viewpoints. We believe as a society that it is important that new ideas be entertained. Even though most new ideas are not going to pan out, it is important that death threats and threats to get academic researchers fired from their jobs not be permitted because in a small number of cases new ideas will prove to have great value and, unless we protect those ideas from criminal acts of the people who profit in some way from the continued promotion of the old ideas, we will never hear the new ideas that are the lifeblood of our system. It is new ideas that make our economy so productive that our stock market has been able to generate an average annual return of 6.5 percent real for many, many years. Cut off the possibility of new ideas ever again being heard because established interests prefer to see people continuing to believe in the old ideas and we are all a far poorer people than we have ever been at earlier times in the history of the United States.

I am 100 percent confident that I can meet the burden of proof that will rightly be imposed on me to show that Valuation-Informed Indexing is superior to Buy-and-Hold so long as the burden of proof is imposed on those who have elected to engage in criminal behavior to block people from hearing the case for the new model. I will be interesting to see how things play out in the days following the next price crash.

My best wishes to you, Goon friend.

New-Ideas-Guy 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 John Greaney issue has also been explained to you thousands of times as well.

You say you want a “discussion”. Far from it. You want to make your comments and then for people to say “We agree with you, Rob”. The problem is that people did not agree with you, so you kept repeating the same things. Eventually, people grew tired of it, and your behavior in how you handled it, so they had no choice but to ban you.

I want the people who agree with me to say “I agree with you, Rob.” And I want the people who do not agree with me to say “I do not agree with you, Rob.” And I want the people in the middle to say “I agree with you in part and I disagree with you in part, Rob.”

The problem is that the Buy-and-Holders outnumber the Valuation-Informed Indexers by 10 to 1. So they feel that they can get away with insanely abusive behavior, including in some cases criminal behavior. Those in the 10 percent object from time to time. But in general people do not like to expose themselves to the absolutely insane stuff (like death threats). So lots of people who would never engage in the sorts of behavior that we see from you Goons TOLERATE that behavior when they see you engage in it. And civil, reasoned discussion becomes impossible.

Our laws against financial fraud and against extortion and against threats of physical violence serve an important purpose. So long as those laws are respected, there are ways for new ideas to come on the scene and to gradually over time become more popular and eventually to replace the old ideas. We have not seen that happen in the 38 years since Shiller published his “revolutionary” (his word) Nobel-prize-winning research findings showing that valuations affect long-term returns. That has hurt all of us. It is a national tragedy. It is a shame.

The question that remains on the table is — When millions of people lose more than 50 percent of their life savings, will there be enough people who work up the courage to stand up to you Goons and to thereby launch the national debate that in an ideal world would have been launched 38 years ago? I think that that is how this will play out. I think that we are a good people and I think that, when the chips are down, we will do the right thing. There’s a big difference between knowing as a theoretical matter that Buy-and-Hold is a big pile of smelly garbage and seeing in a real-world sense what it has done to all your friends and neighbors and co-workers and fellow community members.

So I believe that this story will have a happy ending. And I believe that Shiller’s huge leap forward will be so liberating and enriching for all of us that we will in not too much time put our memories of the ugly stuff behind us. That stuff doesn’t amount to much in the grand scheme of things compared to the thousands of life-affirming insights into how stock investing works that we will all be able to mine together once we give ourselves permission to talk honestly about this stuff (not just in published rules but in a practical, real-world sense too).

We’ll see, you know?

I could be wrong. I thought that Greaney’s Campaign of Terror against us would last all of two days, three days tops, before we would pull together to bring it to a full and complete stop. I think it would be fair to say that the joke turned out to be on me re that one. But I believe that the story will have a happy ending all the same. We are all just going to have to wait to see how things play out in the days following the next price crash to know for certain.

I wish you the best of luck with it, Anonymous. I look forward to enjoying a few cold ones with you when we both make it to the other side of The Big Black Mountain and are laughing together about the stuff that went down in the old days. I wouldn’t be too surprised if we ended up being on the same side at that time, you know? But we are just going to have to wait a bit to find out for sure.

My best wishes.

Goon Pal 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 any of it was true, you would post links backing it up (links that are not just to your comments at your website).

If you drop the criminal stuff, you will have people at hundreds of sites discussing what the last 38 years of peer-reviewed research teaches us all about how stock investing works in the real world. You’ll have links coming out of your ears.

The rub is that you have to drop the criminal stuff for that to happen. I believe that you will drop the criminal stuff when you are prosecuted. And I believe that you will be prosecuted when millions of people experience a price crash that takes away more than 50 percent of their life savings.

At that point, everything will move forward. I wish we didn’t have to wait. But I only get one vote. So we are where we are.

I wish you the best of luck with it. I hope that that helps at least a tiny bit.

One-Vote Rob