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 have been widely banned.  That speaks volumes.  You have been widely ignored.  That speaks volumes.  You are broke.  That speaks volumes.  Your wife divorced you.  That speaks volumes.

It says something.

It says that we really, really, really life irrational exuberance. Our Get Rich Quick urge goes deep.

But so does our desire for irrationality. We don’t just hand out Nobel prizes because we like somebody’s haircut. We really want to be able to fool ourselves into believing that we are richer than we really are. But we also really want to learn how to invest effectively for the long run, It’s the struggle between those two desires that makes stocks both an amazing asset class and at times a highly risky one.

I’m a bad guy. I pointed out the error in a study that a lot of people were using to fool themselves into believing that they had saved enough to be able to hand in resignations from high-paying jobs. The idea!

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:

Did you know that only 4.7% of American’s have saved at least $1 million and only 1.8% have $2 million?  The REAL crisis is that people do not have enough money in their savings/investment accounts (just like you).  Let’s talk about what the REAL error is.

From May 1999 through May 2002, I posted only about saving strategies. I was a highly popular poster. Greaney wrote an introduction to the Retire Early board urging newcomers to read all of my ‘seminal” stuff first. I had never had an abusive post directed to me at that time.

So there’s a sense in which I would love to re-focus on saving strategies. But you can’t do that forever. Once people save enough money to become financially independent, they need to do something with the money. Should they go pure Get Rich Quick/Buy-and-Hold? Or should you tell them about the last 44 years of peer-reviewed research? If you tell them about the research, there is a segment (about 10 percent) of the Buy-and-Hold community that is going to be very unhappy with you. And the other 90 percent may speak up once or twice but they are not going to be willing to tale on the Goons in any sort of sustained way.

So you end up where we are today. I would prefer to write about saving. But sooner or later you need to address investing issues if you are going to have a board that helps people to achieve financial freedom early in life. I didn’t wake up one morning and say ‘Gee, I think I would like to write about investing.” I got forced into it against my will because I had made friends with a number of people who were planning early retirements and i was concerned that they were making use of a retirement study that gets all of the numbers wildly wrong (the Greaney study lacks a valuation adjustment).

Investing matters. Saving matters too, maybe more. But in the final analysis, investing matters as well.

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:

“ 10 percent of the American public loves my stuff. I have had more effusive praise directed at me over the past 22 years than any other poster in any of our communities that I can think of.”

None of that is real. You live in an imaginary world.

Yeah, yeah.

Have you ever had an academic researcher who was so impressed by your stuff that he elected to devote 16 months of his life to researching it in depth and then concluded that it all checked out? On the morning of May 13, 2002, I would have told you that such a thing was impossible. But here we are.

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 understand your aversion to publishing your writing here. With the demise of your Value Walk column, which was your last remaining column elsewhere (you used to have others), your blog will now just consist of links to other posts (which were links to previous posts) starting with “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 written some article but you won’t post it here and use have never shared any juicy excerpts of the book that you have spent the better part of two decades on.

At least George RR Martin has published the occasional sample chapters from the Winds of Winter.

I appreciate the feedback, Evidence.

The primary purpose of the column was the learning experience it provided. I wrote over 700 columns and each time I wrote one I learned some tiny thing about the subject. I learned from writing the two columns that I did not submit. So they served their purpose.

I believe that there will come a day when we all will feel free to post honestly re the peer-reviewed research at every sit on the internet. In will be able to take advantage of the learning experiences that I enjoyed writing the column at that time. I won’t submit the columns as they were written the first time. But the learning experiences that I enjoyed will inform every word I wrote re these matters from the day on which I wrote those columns.

It’s the learning experiences that matter. most to me,.

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:

There is a reason no one else has written a book like you describe.  It is because it is a bunch of hocomania.  No one wants to waste their time like you do.

Okay, Anonymous.

I 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:

Have you ever had a mental health evaluation?

Yes. The doctor said that, if I sincerely believe that the Greaney retirement study lacks a valuation adjustment, I need to be locked away for the safety of society.

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 am sure your ex-wife would agree with your last statement.

There’s nothing worse than someone who tells the truth about stock investing at a time when prices are insanely inflated. I mean, come on.

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.  Who got the numbers wrong?

Greaney did.

That’s why he has behaved the way he has. If he truly believed that he had included a valuation adjustment in his retirement study, we never would have seen a single abusive post.

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:

Just tell people what you really want. What you want is for all the sites in the world to be open to your posts so that you can increase your popularity. Your ambition is to be one of the leading, if not the top, investment experts in the world. With this fame, you thought you would become rich by becoming a sought after speaker and perhaps selling books and other materials.

The real problem is that you don’t have any education or expertise in this area, a personal failed track record (you are broke) and your market timing performance has been trounced by buy and hold (your expected crashes never happened).

All that you describe sounds 100 percent good to me. I enjoy using my talents to help others and I of course think it’s find that in cases in which those talents produce an exceptional work product that I would be well-compensated for the work I do.

I agree with you that I don’t possess any particular expertise in the stock investing realm. It could be argued that in today’s world that’s a plus. I have spoken to many, many experts in the field who have evidenced a desire to do honest work but who hold back from starting things clearly because they worry what will happen to their careers if they do so.

The perfect example is William Bernstein, He stated in his book that the safe withdrawal rate at the top of the bubble was 2 percent, not 4 percent. That’s what I say. So Bill could have obviously been a big help to me and the thousands of other community members who have evidenced a desire that honest posting re the peer-reviewed research be permitted. He posted at the Bogleheads Forum on numerous topics. But, when the Great Safe Withdrawal Rate Debate was raging there, he never once advanced a post expressing his view that the Greaney retirement study gets the numbers wildly wrong. It’s not just Bill Bernstein, His story is the story of pretty much every expert in this field in the Buy-and-Hold Era, in my assessment.

I’m a journalist, not an investment expert. This is a huge story, one of the most important stories there is to tell in the United States today. We are talking about something that would help millions and millions of people to live richer and fuller and freer lives and all it would take is for a small number of people to insist on their right to post honestly re the peer-reviewed research. I offer precisely zero apologies for doing everything in my power to get us all to the better place where deep in our hearts we all want to live. I have compared the situation to the one that would exist if a pill were discovered that cured every form of cancer and the people who earned six-figure salaries offering chemotherapy engaging in abusive and criminal behavior to block the millions of people who wanted to learn about a cure from gaining access to discussions about it.

I am in favor of finding a cure for cancer and I am in favor of learning for the first time in history how stock investing works in the real world. I want everyone on the planet to know about Shiller’s amazing, Nobel-prize-winning research showing that valuations affect long-term returns and about how to use it to invest in stocks far more effectively than it was possible to do in the days before that research became available (at least theoretically) to all of us. If there has been a more important journalistic endeavor than that that has come around in the course of my lifetime, I sure am not able to imagine what it might have been.

I wish you all good things. But I sincerely believe that the Greaney retirement study lacks an adjustment for the valuation level that applies on the day the retirement begins.

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 plan to use any ink to comment about Internet Goon Squads?

Certainly I need to address the phenomenon. And certainly I need to take care to be fair-minded in what I say.

This is the aspect of the thing that makes it difficult to write about. The Goon part of the story is the relatively unimportant part of the story. Sure, there was a lot of abusive stuff that went down. That’s hardly a shocking news development when it comes to discussions that were held on the internet. It happens every day in hundred of different places. The shocking part of the story is the tolerance of Goon behavior that we have seen on the part of the Normals. That’s the driver of the high CAPE value.

That part is hard to write. It involves being somewhat critical of my readers. Generally not a great promotional strategy. And, for the stock buying process to become more rational over time (the core goal of the entire project), things need to be said in such a way that they avoid the protective radar of the Normals. That’s a very difficult business. Sometimes I get it just right. Sometimes I see that it is going to take more work to get it just right. My job is to take as much time as it takes to get the entire thing just right. no more and no less.

Rob