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 but you Goons posts here. That’s a fact.”

That should tell you something. In the last two decades you have probably posted more than anyone I know. Despite the volume of your messages, there is no signs of support. Instead, you have had your considerable share of critics and skeptics. Rather than try to learn from others, you have chosen just to call them all goons in order to make yourself feel better or justified. Nothing is going to change for you when you stick to living out some kind of fantasy instead of dealing with reality.

The only ones who have ever offered any criticism of me are you Goons. I have had Normals who have said that they do not agree with everything that I have said about stock investing but who have also said that they appreciated my stuff because it helped them to think things through more carefully and generated lots of great discussion. I can live with that.

And there is no one who has ever posted to the internet who has generated even a tiny percentage of the support that I have generated. I am the co-author (with Wade Pfau) of the most important peer-reviewed research in this field in many. many years. Wade devoted 16 months of his life to working with me on that research and told me that our findings so excited him that he couldn’t sleep at night. He concluded that: “Yes, Virginia, Valuation-Informed Indexing works!” That’s support! I think it would be fair to say that none of you Goons have ever enjoyed that level of support on anything that you have said.

Your acts of extortion employed to silence Wade just highlighted the point. If Buy-and-Hold were a real thing, you would never have even considered resorting to criminal acts to “defend” it. I mean, please give me a freakin’ break.

My sincere take.

My best wishes, etc., etc.

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 retirement is not “fully funded” if more than half of the money in your account consists of irrational exuberance, Anonymous,”

That’s what you said 10 years ago and look at how that worked out for you. Meanwhile, you are banking on a windfall with odds that are worse than playing the lottery.

I say the same thing today that I said 10 years ago, Anonymous. I think it has worked out very well. I abandoned Buy-and-Hold and started working on Valuation-Informed Indexing on the evening of August 27, 2002, when Greaney advanced his first death threat and over 200 of my Buy-and-Hold friends at the old Motley Fool board endorsed it. I write a weekly column on Valuation-Informed Indexing at the Value Walk site. In 10 years, that’s over 500 columns. I have learned at lot over the past 10 years. I would be 10 years behind where I am today if I spent those 10 years pretending to believe that there might be some mystical, magical alternate universe where a pure Get Rich Quick/Buy-and-Hold “strategy” might work f0r one or two long-term investors.

Somehow, I think that the odds of me collecting a $500 million settlement payment are a lot better than your odds of avoiding a long-term prison term. I’ll take those odds!

Rob

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

I will mark you down as someone that won’t listen.

Okay.

Please take good care.

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 you are, over the age of 60, living in the land of make believe with the silly stories on death threat, etc. Meanwhile, you are run through savings and have destroyed your social security benefits by avoiding work. You have no relevant work experience as you haven’t had a job in about 2 decades, so any job your could possibly land would pay a very minimum income. To provide for retirement, your plan revolves around some fantasy of a $500 million windfall.

Yet here you are preaching to everyone about investing for retirement. Really????

I believe that we need to open every discussion board and blog on the internet to honest posting re the last 40 years of peer-reviewed research in this field. The fact that I have been denied an income for 19 years because I “crossed” the Buy-and-Holders by posting honestly re the error in the Greaney retirement study shows how important it is that we all insist on our right to post honestly. If Buy-and-Hold were a real thing, the Buy-and-Holders would WELCOME challenges to their ideas.

The fact that someone could be denied an income for 19 years solely for posting honestly re an error in a Buy-and-Hold retirement study is very scary stuff. If Buy-and-Hold were a real thing, there never would have been any “controversy” re any of this. The Greaney study would have been corrected IMMEDIATELY.

That is my sincere take re these terribly important matters, in any event.

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:

So you have posted the same thing 17,877 times.  What makes you think that when you post it 17,878 times, people will suddenly change their mind?

There were scores of people who responded to my very first post asking if we should consider valuations when calculating the safe withdrawal rate by thanking me for starting the most exciting and helpful discussion in the history of the Retire Early board. If Motley Fool had given Greaney the boot when he advanced his first death threat (as I recommended at the time), Valuation-Informed Indexing would today be the dominant model for understanding stock investing today.

Motley Fool went for the quick buck. It’s hard for a research-based strategy to compete with a pure Get Rich Quick approach for popularity points.

I have never had any problem whatsoever convincing lots of people of the merit of following a research-based approach. The problem is that, the more successful I am in persuading people, the more brutally abusive you Goons become. People don’t like to see the lives of their loved ones threatened. Until as a society we agree to enforce the laws of the United States in the investing advice field as we do in all other fields, you Goons are going to have the edge.

I believe that we will see a big change in the days following the next price crash, when millions of people will see half of their stock portfolio disappear into thin air. 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:

<i>What specific information is missing from the internet?

Answer: none</i>

There is lots of information missing from the internet. All of the discussions of why Buy-and-Hold is such a dangerous investing strategy, all of the discussions of why market timing is the key to long-term investing success are mssing.

I put forward my famous post pointing out the error in the retirement study posted at John Greaney’s web site on the morning of May 13, 2002. The Retire Early board exploded when I advanced that post. There were lots of posts thanking me for starting the post exciting discussion in the history of the board. And there were lots of posts saying that I must have forgotten to take my meds. That post put both sides in an uproar.

Why?

I didn’t say anything that a person with an average I.Q. could not have figured out on their own. I pointed out that the Greaney study lacked an adjustment for the valuation level that applied on the day the retirement began. Why would that cause a commotion?

There are two reasons.

One, it is an obviously important point. A seven-year-old understands that you cannot calculate the safe withdrawal rate without taking valuations into account.

And, two. it was a point with far-reaching implications. If the Buy-and-Holders got the safe withdrawal rate wrong, then why else did they get wrong? The answer is — everything. If the safe withdrawal rate was only 1.6 in January 2000, then stocks were not a good buy in January 2000. But everybody on that board had been buying stocks in January 2000. If all of those people were going to accept what I was saying in that post, then they had to accept that they made a mistake to continue buying stocks to the same extent in January 2000. That hurts. Who wants to make a mistake with their retirement money?

So I made a point that was obviously true and that was very hurtful to lots of people.

Which is what Shiller did. For 40 years now, we have as a society been stumbling around with the question of to what extent are we going to let Shiller’s breakthrough findings about how stock investing works penetrate our consciousness. I am saying that we should let them in. Some others are saying, no, that’s too painful, no can do.

That’s the story. Will out decision as a society change when prices fall hard? I believe so. But there is only one way to find out for sure. None of us can see into the future. None of us can say with 100 percent certainty how it will go.

But I believe that there is a lot of information re stock investing lacking from the internet today. I am doing what I can to fill the gap.

When the gap is filled, prices will change. It is what people believe about stocks that determines the price for which stocks sell. I have something different to say about how stock investing works from what my Buy-and-Hold friends have been saying for years now. When my information is available at every site on the internet, the CAPE value will no longer be in the mid-30s. It’s a physical impossibility. In a world in which honest posting re the peer-reviewed research is permitted, there can never be a CAPE value in the mid-30s.

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:

“hundreds of thousands of businesses will go under. Millions of people will lose their jobs. Millions of retiremens will fail. Political frictions will worsen. ”

We have already seen this with Covid. People that lack emergency savings will want to know how the government will bail them out (like they are doing right now) and those with resources will be picking up assets at bargain prices, making them even more rich. You already have 2008 as another example. We have already seen things play out, yet you still have nothing new and don’t see the obvious. Sitting around is not a game plan.

Covid has been rough. But that wasn’t something where we had 40 years of peer-reviewed research to help us avoid it. I see an important distinction there.

The 2008 crash would have been the same thing if it had remained in place longer. It scared people. But it did not scare them enough for us as a people to let go of the attachment to the Buy-and-Hold/Get Rich Quick stuff. For the current bull/bear cycle to come to an end, the CAPE would have to drop to somewhere near 8 and we would have to see that drop remain in place for five years or more. I am not saying that it is for certain that that would do the trick. I am saying that I personally believe that it would do the trick. And that I am not capable of playing it the other way in any event.

I would describe your position as a cynical one. I am not sitting around. I am responding to your comments here at the blog. I am writing a weekly column. I am finishing work on a book that I think it would be fair to describe as the most important book ever written in the history of personal finance. That ain’t nothing.

We all have questions in our mind when we are young as to what area of life endeavor we should direct our life energy. If it turns out that Shiller’s Nobel-prize-winning research is legitimate research (I believe it is), then the need to shift from Buy-and-Hold to Valuation-Informed Indexing is the most important public policy issue before our nation today. If I succeed in opening every discussion board and blog on the internet to honest posting re the last 40 years of peer-reviewed research in this field, I will have accomplished 50 times what I thought as a a young man was the most that I could accomplish in a single lifetime. I an live with that, you know?

It is a gratifying feeling to know that you can help millions of people and revolutionize the field in which you work with the work you do. It’s no fun standing up to you Goons, I will give you that one. But I have always believed that the good that there is to achieve here is 50 times more good than the bad that we have seen generated from the Goon side of the table, So I soldier on.

I hope that that is okay with you, my dear Goon friend.

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:

If Shiller told you that you should not use CAPE to time the market, would you finally admit that you are wrong about Shiller’s work? Do you think you know more about investing than Shiller?

That’s a super question.

If Shiller said that, I would tell everyone that he said it. Shiller played such a key role in the development of the Valuation-Informed Indexing strategy that anyone considering the strategy would need to know that he said that if in fact he did.

I would not necessarily say that I was wrong. If Shiller gave a reason for not using CAPE to time the market that I found persuasive, then I would change my mind and I would tell people that I now thought I was wrong about what I believed in the days before Shiller persuaded me. But I doubt Shiller would say anything that would persuade me. In that case, I would continue saying what I believe. I would let people know that Shiller has a different opinion in in fact he said that he did. But I would not say that I thought I was wrong about my own opinion.

I think it would be fair to say that I am the world’s foremost authority on two subjects: (1) The Valuation-Informed Indexing strategy, which I have been developing full-time for over 18 years now; and (2) The efforts by Buy-and-Holders to block millions of middle-class investors who very much want to and need to hear about these ideas from learning about them. Lots of people know lots more than me about all sorts of investing topics. But no one has put in the time and effort on those two that I have. There’s no one in a close second place.

I put the time in because I think those two issues are of immense important. People invest their retirement money in stocks. So we have to find some means of getting information about accurate and honest research-based strategies out to people no matter how bad it makes the Buy-and-Holders feel for us to do that. The process issue is more important than the substance issues. Because, once we solve the process problem, we will have thousands of people making great contributions on the substance side. I won’t be the foremost authority anymore in those days. And that will be a good thing. I SHOULDN’T be the world’s foremost authority on research-based investment strategies. It’s only because of the insanely abusive posting of you Goons that it became possible for me to attain that status.

I very much look forward to seeing Shiller’s book on the how-to aspects of his model for understanding how stock investing works. My guess is that we will be seeing that someday after we all suffer the horrible effects of the next price crash.

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:

Why don’t you start up your own version of the Bogleheads forum for your own followers instead of expecting other people to change for you?

My aim is to set up a new version of every investing discussion board and blog on the internet, Anonymous. A new, HONEST version, one that permits discussion of the last 39 years of peer-reviewed research in this field. Why should I limit myself to one site when I can have every site? Doing it that way benefits every last one of us. We all need to know how best to invest our retirement money. The more sites we have permitting honest posting, the more we all will be able to learn.

And I have never asked anyone to change for me. If there are people who believe in Buy-and-Hold, I ask them to post in support of Buy-and-Hold, That’s not changing. If they engage in criminal acts, I ask them to knock it off. But they had to agree to follow U.S. law when they first signed up at whatever board they are at — the published rules of all the boards require that. That’s not really changing either, it is doing something that they promised to do at an earlier time.

And all that should have happened on the day in 1981 when Shiller published his Nobel-prize-winning research showing that there is precisely zero chance that a pure Get Rich Quick/Buy-and-Hold strategy could ever work for a single long-term investor. Once honest posting is permitted (and encouraged!) at every site, all of our problems are over. We will all be learning new things every day. Stock investing will be far less risky and far more profitable. Out economic system will operate fare more smoothly. We will all be living better and richer lives from that point forward. I can live with that!

Shiller’s research helps us all. New knowledge is always a plus, It is not even possible for the rational human mind to imagine any exceptions.

That’s my sincere take re these terribly important matters, 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:

Don’t you think it is irresponsible for you to try and trick people into your market timing scheme, when it has never worked for even one single person, including you?

If I had a cure for cancer that had passed peer review, would it be irresponsible for me to tell people about it? I say “no.” If there were some people who elected not to make use of the cure, I would of course be fine with that. It’s their body, it’s their choice. But, no, I do not find it even a tiny bit irresponsible to let people know what the last 39 years of peer-reviewed research teaches us about how the stock market works. I think that it is 100 percent imperative that we get the word out to everyone on the planet.

Say that there is something wrong with Shiller’s research. That could be, right? The fact that he was awarded a Nobel prize does not make him God. It is at least theoretically possible that Shiller made a mistake somewhere down the line. You know what we could do to increase the offs of bringing that mistake to light quickly? We could open ever discussion board and blog on the internet to honest posting, without a single exception. When we do that, we will identify any weaknesses in the Shiller model. We should all want that, just as we should all want to discover any weaknesses in the Buy-and-Hold Model.

My sincere take.

My best and warmest wishes to you and yours.

Rob