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 you call research is your opinion of what one guy said.  You even stated that Shiller doesn’t say what you say.

I am not aware of Shiller ever having put forward the words “The safe withdrawal rate is not the same number at all times.” So he doesn’t say precisely what I say.

That’s true of anyone who has ever said anything. The standard Buy-and-Hold allocation is 60 percent stocks 30 percent bonds, 10 percent Treasuries. I have heard many Buy-and-Holders say that they go with different allocations. Some go with 70 percent stocks. With some it is 80 percent. Greaney said that he considers 89 percent stocks to be “optimal.” I have never heard anyone say that someone who does not use the standard allocation of 60 percent stocks is not a Buy-and-Holder.

There’s room for individual interpretation in all these matters. It’s through people expressing their individual interpretations that as a community of people we learn together over time. I would like to hear whether Shiller believes that the safe withdrawal rate is a number that changes with changes in valuations. I am confident that he would agree with me on that one. But I would like to hear him say that. I think that we should invite him to the Bogleheads Forum and have people from both sides of the table ask him questions and find out precisely what he thinks on all sorts of questions. I think that would benefit every last one of us. It pains me to think that 21 years have passed and we have not done that yet.

I see the publication of Shiller’s Nobel-prize-winning research as the biggest advance in the history of personal finance. But the publication of it by itself does absolutely nothing. We are today at a CAPE value close to the one that caused the Great Depression. So what good has Shiller’s research really done? If the purpose was to reduce irrational exuberance (I believe that was indeed the purpose), Shiller’s research has failed to achieve its purpose. But I believe that, if we discussed Shiller’s research at every site, that would definitely help us to rein in irrational exuberance. People would engage in market timing when prices got too high and the diminished demand for stocks would bring prices down.

There’s not one of us who knows everything there is to know about stock investing works. Not me, not Shiller, not you, not anyone. We all should be sharing our thoughts. There never should be any intimidation tactics employed to suppress people from sharing their sincere thoughts. That sort of thing holds back the learning process and hurts us all. So I oppose that sort of thing.

That’s where I’m coming from re this matter. I want to feel free to state my honest views when I appear at a discussion board and I want everyone else to feel free to do that as well. I believe that any board that permits intimidation tactics to be employed to suppress people from stating their honest views is a fraudulent enterprise. When people do not feel free to say what they believe, you cannot trust discussions that are held to lead to a good place.

Bogle was widely criticized at one time for advocating indexing (there was a full-page ad in the Wall Street Journal saying that indexing is “unAmerican”). I am glad that he stuck to his guns and said what he believed. I learned from that. I believe that lots of others did too. That’s how advances in societies of people are achieved.

I believe that the safe withdrawal rate CHANGES with changes in valuations. I believe that I should be permitted to say that at every site on the internet, without a single exception. And I believe that, if we were all thinking clearly, there would be a universal consensus that it would be a good idea to put that question to Shiller (and lots and lots of others) and see what he thinks about it. There’s a lot of learning to be had by talking about these matters openly and honestly and widely and in detail.

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 wife and kids enjoyed suffering because of you?

My ex certainly did not. That one is easy.

My older boy told me that he never wished that he had a different dad. He was not even a tiny bit happy about the divorce. But he believes that I am right about stock investing and he admires me for having stood up for what is right. He just would like to see his mother and his father back together.

The younger boy isn’t too emotionally invested in it. He loves his mom and his dad and his brother but he lives his own life and he is happy. It’s not a super biggie for him.

No one enjoys suffering. But say that you were a soldier and you were sent on a mission that put your life at risk. Would you say “I won’t go because it will hurt my family if I get killed?” Sometimes there are bigger things at stake than one’s own family. There are millions and millions of people who will get hurt in the next Buy-and-Hold Crisis. I think I have a responsibility to do what I can. I can’t just keep my mouth shut given the amount of human misery that we are talking about. I think we all should be doing what we can.

I love my family. But I also love my country, you know? I don’t like having to choose between the two. But we are all dealt the cards that we are dealt. I am happy to praise the Buy-and-Holders to the sky if that would help. The only thing that I am not willing to do is to say that I believe that the Greaney study contains a valuation adjustment. You Goons are not willing to accept anything less than that. So 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:

The Brad Pitt character had a job.  Even he lost his job, he would then go get another job.  His character was successful, you are not.  You are nothing like his character.  You don’t have one single thing in common with that character.

There were numerous references in the movie to how he was an idiot who was going to lose his job. It was an important theme. The guys who believed in the pre-research stuff hated him as much as you Goons hate me. Research was as much of a threat to them as it is to you.

I think that the research-based strategy will prevail in the end. But we’ll see, you know?

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’ve been in social situations where I meet someone new and I tell them my story, the board bannings and the divorce and my inability to build my internet writing business and so on. I have never seen a negative reaction, People generally don’t know what to make of it. They have never heard of something like this.”

In social situations, they are going to be polite and not say anything to hurt your feelings. When they learn of your divorce as part of your conversation regarding investing/finance, just look at their facial reaction. They now know you are a train wreck.

The feeling that I get is that they would not have done what I have done. So there is some distancing. But often that is combined with a good bit of curiosity about the investing stuff. People are respectful of the investing ideas. I am not saying that they immediately adopt them as part of their strategy. But there is a genuine interest in the investing ideas.

And of course that interest is 100 percent consistent with what I saw on all of the boards. There’s LOTS iof interest in these investing ideas. People will need to hear more about them to feel safe adopting them. But the interest is there and is reasonably strong even at a time when the CAPE number is at very scary levels. When we see a drop in the CAPE, we should expect to see interest in the investing ideas grow.

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:

“ Have you written a book on the transition from Buy-and-Hold to Valuation-Informed Indexing? Has anyone else? ”

There is a reason no one else has written a book on VII. No one wants to be known for writing a book that will lead others to a disaster. What do you think people will say when they found out the author of such a book went broke while trying to push this timing scheme?

I’ve been in social situations where I meet someone new and I tell them my story, the board bannings and the divorce and my inability to build my internet writing business and so on. I have never seen a negative reaction, People generally don’t know what to make of it. They have never heard of something like this.

About 50 percent of the time they will ask me something about investing. Most people do not feel secure in their understanding of stock investing. So they ask me to share my unconcentional take on the subject. I always go to pains to explain that Valuation-Informed Indexing is just common sense. We consider price with every other purchase we make. All that Shiller’s Nobel-prize-winning research tells us is that we should buy stocks in precisely the same way that we buy everything else — with price in mind. That’s the entire deal. There’s nothing more to it than that.

When I was a boy, whenever my family visited someone’s house, there would be ashtrays in the living room. It was considered a basic social nicety to provide ashtrays for the smokers who were visting. Most people do not place ashtrays in their living room today. No one would dare to light up a cigarette in someone else’s house without asking. If you did ask, they would probably suggest that you step outside to have your smoke.

That is a huge change. That change in social practices has caused the percentage of people who smoke to drop. When you put out ashtrays, you are sending a message that smoking is fine. When you ask people who do it to leave the house to have their smoke, you are sennding a message that it is not fine.

That’s what I am trying to achieve in the investment advice field. If people are not going to engage in price discipline when buying stocks (market timing!), I think we all should be sending a message that that’s not fine. A failure to engage in market timing hurts humans and other living things. We should all be doing what we can to see that people make better choices.

The people who hear my story don’t change their stock allocation overnight. They think over what I tell them. They ponder it. Some probably change their allocation down the road a bit after reading up and talking it over with their friends and so on. Others just forget what I told them and get on with their lives. The usual reaction is interest in the story. It’s common for people to offer a few words of sympathy for what happened to me. I have never had anyone say:” I will never consider market timing because of what I just heard.” I cannot recall one time in which someone said something like that.

If you had told people not to smoke in the early 1960s, you would have seen a somewhat bewildered reaction. That wasn’t the social norm at the time. Now it is. We need to make it the social norm for people always, always, always to engage in market timing (price discipline). Once that idea is nornalized, once there is no taboo re discussing the importanve of market timing, we will all be living better and richer and fuller and freer lives and there won’t be anyone suggesting that there might be some alternatve universe in which everything works the opposite of how it has alwsys worked here on good old Planet Earth and market timing is not 100 percent required for every investor.

Ordinary people do not hate me for telling the truth about stock investing. Thats’s a Goon thing. Ordinary people would not have elected to walk the path that I have walked, I am very much an outlier in that regrard. But people don’t hate me for it. In the days following the onset of the next Buy-and-Hold Crisis, peiple will thank me for it, they will say that they wish that they had listened more carefully. All of the bad stuff that has happened to me has happened because I walked straight into the fury behind this giant taboo against telling the truth about stock investing. I of course believe that we all need to start telling the truth about this important subject. So I soldier on.

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:

“ The reaction we have seen from people who have been exposed to my thinking says a lot.”

Yep. It is dead silence. No one is interested. Even your ex-wife didn’t agree with your thinking. That is why she is your ex.

If the reaction had been dead silence, you Goons would never have advanced a single abusive post. It was the strong positive reaction to hearing about the last 42 years of peer-reviewed research that you saw as a threat to the belief that most people have in Buy-and-Hold.

My ex was fine with the investing stuff. I don’t think that she had a strong opinion one way or the other. She did not like it that there was not money coming in for so long a time, that’s all. And it wasn’t that she was money hungry. I think that she viewed it as a moral failing. She has a strong work ethic (as do I). The language that she would use in our arguments was “you don’t work.” I of course have a very different perspective. I believe that the work that I am doing in trying to get every internet site opened to honest posting re the research is the most important work being done in the United States today. But that was her complaint. She thought that I was probably on to something re the investing ideas. But she didn’t care enough about the subject to study it in detail and to find out for sure. It’s not her thing.

It’s not really my thing either. I got pulled into it by circumstances. My attachment to the subject is through my interest in understanding human psychology. It’s an amazing puzzle to me that people have 42 years of research available to them that would permit them to invest with much less risk and to retire many years earlier and they won’t give themselves permission to talk about it because that would require them to acknowledge that there once was a time when they didn’t know everything there is to know about this important subject. That blows my mind. The potential for enhancing millions of human lives just by permitting a discussion is off the charts. So I feel compelled to do what I can to see that that happens as soon as possible. The investing stuff is seconary or even tertiary for me. What mattets to me is the journalism question — permitting people to have the discussions they want to have — and the human psychology question — the incredible ability we humans possess to engage in self deception, even when it does us great financial harm.

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:

“ And where would today’s CAPE value be? Probably precisely where it is.”

Which means you wasted your time.

What was that phrase that President Carter had when the helicopters went down in the desert? It’s been “an incomplete success.”

One person can only do so much, Anonymous. A year from now, I will have a printed book in my hands with my name on it that describes everything going on in great depth and detail. I didn’t know that anything was going on on the morning of May 13, 2002. So everthing written in the book will be things that I LEARNED by having the courage to say what I believe and then watch the reactions.

I think there’s great value in learning. We’ll see, you know? But that’s what I believe. I wouldn’t have made a decision as a young man to devote my life to journalism if I didn’t see value in it.

My best 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:

Does Scott Burns talk to you now? Nope. Does Wade Pfau talk to you now? Nope. Does anyone else from the investment community talk to you now? Nope.

No, we are not in this together. No, there is no one that supports you.

What will happen once we have opened every discussion board and blog on the internet to honest posting re the last 42 years of peer-reviewed research, without a single exception? Will there be even one person in this field NOT talking to me then?

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:

“One, I can finish writing my book.”

Talking about finishing your book, and actually finishing your book are two different things.

The evidence suggests that you are much better at talking about finishing your book than actually finishing your book.

What is your current estimate for finishing your book?
What was your first estimate for finishing your book?

It will be finished when it’s finished, Evidence. Have you written a book on the transition from Buy-and-Hold to Valuation-Informed Indexing? Has anyone else? Shiller comes the closest. His book is top notch. But he failed to address the how-to questions in his book. And the how-to questions are the most important questions. I am addressing those.

I wish that I had finished the book years ago. 100 percent. But I am ahead of everyone else on the planet re this one. I’m pretty darn proud of that one, you know? It’s hard. It’s super hard. The way that people respond on the discussion board tells you how the general population would respond if they heard the same arguments. People really loove, love, love, love the Get Rich Quick/Buy-and-Hold stuff. There’s not a lot of patience out there for discussion of what the last 42 years of peer-reviewed research says. So, every time you put a sentence down, you are wondering how people are going to react to it. It’s a super delicate mission.

Which makes it all the more important. If it were easy, there would be thousands of books doing what mine will do already out on the market. Shiller’s research is not a secret. Shiller’s Nobel prize is not a secret. My book will be the first to explore the far-reaching implications of Shiller’s research in depth (including, incredibly enough, Shiller’s book on his research). So I am proud of myself for sticking at it.

My current estimate (hope?) is that I will be able to begin the copy editing/proofing stage of the process at the turn of the new year.

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:

All the people that are on the sites that you are banned on have all seen your opinions on Greaney.  If you regain access and post the same things they have already seen, they won’t change their mind.  I think you know this as well and that is why you gave up posting anywhere else on the internet, such as Reddit.

That’s not too far off the mark.

I was not banned at just one or two places. I was banned at lots of places. There were a few places where I backed off when it became clear that I was going to be banned if I continued posting about what the last 42 years of peer-reviewed research teaches us all about how stock investint works in the real world. If I continued pushing at those places, I would have been banned at those places as well.

I once was telling my doctor about my sad story and she said “this is not your time.” I half agree and I half do not. I agree with the thought that I cannot achieve success in the current environment. When the CAPE value is 31, the market for research-based investment advive is obviously very, very small. That makes me sad. But I think it would be fair to conclude after 21 years of this, that that is the current-day reality. Like it or not, I need to accept it.

The part that I don’t agree with is the suggestion that it would be okay for me to retreat until conditions for forward progress inprove, There are things that I can do today to sharpen the case that I will be able to proceed successfully with in the days following the onset of the next Buy-and-Hold Crisis, when the CAPE level will be a lot less than 31. One, I can finish writing my book. Two, I can respond to comments from you Goons when there is something in a particular comment that suggests that there is a greater-than-zero chance that someone will someday be able to learn something from the interchange. So I do those two things.

I think it would be fair to say that the most important public policy before the United States today is the question of how much longer it will take us as a nation of people to open every internet site to honest posting re the last 42 years of peer-reviewed research in the investment advice field. If I were king of the world, we would have opened every site to honest posting on the afternoon of May 13, 2002, I proposed that at the time. I am obvuously not the king of the world. I don’t have to like that reality. I need to accept it as a reality whether I like it or not.

And I need to make the best of the situation. So that’s what I am to do. Does that not make perfect sense?

Rob