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

You are broke and divorced, but somehow have convinced yourself that you think you have things figured out.

I do not believe that the retirement study posted at John Greaney’s web site contains a valuation adjustment. I am not the only person who has come to that conclusion. Many people have looked at it. Not one has been able to identify a valuation adjustment in the study. That includes a guy who posts under the screen-name “Evidence-Based Investing.” Evidence is one of the generals in Graney’s army of Goons. Evidence advanced a post in late 2021 saying that “nobody” truly believes that the Greaney study contains a valuation adjustment, including Greaney himself. I think that Evidence nailed in with that one.

The thing that has to be figured out is, why is there even one person who has not insisted that the Greaney study be corrected immediately? That’s the Get Rich Quick/Buy-and-Hold urge that resides within all of us at work. We all like the idea of getting something for nothing and the stock market offers us an amazing opportunity to obtain it. Just push prices up beyond their fair-value level (a CAPE value of 17) and you can pretend that you are closer to having enough for retirement than is really the case. There’s a rub. however. If the irrational exuberance is exposed, people lose confidence in it and sell stocks and prices go down and the irrational exuberance disappears. So those who have an inclination to post honestly about what the peer-reviewed research tells us all about how stock investing works in the real world need to be supressed to keep the scam going. That’s me. I’m a threat to today’s CAPE value of 29. Every investor who longs to believe that Buy-and-Hold/Get Rich Quick is a real thing has a motive to want to see me banned from every investing site on the internet.

The Bennett/Pfau research shows that reining in irrational exuberance is 70 percent of what it takes to achieve long-term success as a stock investor. So 70 percent of an investment expert’s job is to encourage market timing, which is the only tool we have available to us to rein in irrational exubernce before it gets out of control. LOTS of people want to tell the truth about this stuff. If they didn’t, Shiller’s book would not have become a bestseller and he wouldn’t have been awarded a Nobel prize for his work. But most people are frightened by death threats and by threats to destroy their careers if they do honest work. If we all want to invest more effectively than was ever possible in the days before Shiller published his Nobel-prize-winning research, the first step is opening every site on the internet to honest posting re the past 41 years of peer-reviewed research.

I would not be either broke or divorced if you Goons had not directed abusive and criminal behavior at me and at others who worked with me to get the word out about what the last 41 years of peer-reviewed research teaches us all about how stock investing works in the real world. We need to apply the same laws in the investment advice field as apply in every other field of human endeavor. It’s important to get the numbers right in retirement studies. People use retirement studies to plan retirements. A failed retirement is a serious life setback.

My sincere take.

And 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:

Who is wishing the best for the other?  You want to see your critics go to prison.  You critics want to see you stop wasting time and to get a job so that you can actually have money for retirement instead of tensing broke.

I don’t want my critics to go to prison. I first called on Greaney to correct the error in his retirement study on the afternoon of May 13, 2002. He obviously wouldn’t be worried about going to prison today had he followed my advice. I don’t remember you joining me on that call, Anonymous.

I have said that I intend to do everything to make the prison sentences assigned to you Goons as short as possible. I’m not Superman. There are limits to my powers. Help me out, you know? Every day that the Ban on Honest Posting continues, more lives are destroyed. The members of your jury are obviously going to be looking at how many lives you have destroyed when determining the length of your prison sentence. Forget about the millions of middle-class investors who desperately need access to honest posting re the last 41 years of peer-revivewed research in this field. Just leave that to one side. How about helping me to open every site to honest posting for the 100 percent selfish motive of reducing your prison sentence a bit?

Make perfect sense?

It sure seems so to me.

My best wishes.

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:

People are not able to hear both sides on this website.  Also, you didn’t answer as to who decides what is honest and you also didn’t answer as to who decides what the research really says.  You make all the decisions Here, so shouldn’t others decide so for their own boards?

People should make the decisions that they need to make to run their own boards. I certainly agree with that. But, if a board owner publishes rules for participation in which he declares “I will have zero tolerance for death threats,” then he should evidnece zero tolerance for death threats in his site administration decisions. If he doesn’t, he creates an unjustified confidence in the minds of the people who visit his site re the things said by the people advancing the death threats. One of the people making use of death threats states that “the data shows that a 4 percent withdrawal rate is always 100 percent safe” and people think that the claim is a valid one because they do not see other community members challenging it. But of course there would be LOTS of people challenging it if not for the death threats.

Abusive behavior affects what is said. It is only Buy-and-Holders who we have seen engage in abusive behavior. Why is that? It’s because they are desperate. They got there first. They put forward this crazy idea that market timing is not always required and built an entire industry around it. Then this Shiller fellow published Nobel-prize-winning research showing that valuations affect long-term returns. What to do? The sensible thing to do is to rewrite all the books that were written in the Buy-and-Hold Era to reflect the findings of the new research. That’s not what happended. We still have people today saying that the safe withdrawal rate is the same number at all valuation levels In their desperation, the Buy-and-Holders want to suppress discussion of the how-to implications of the last 41 years of peer-reviewed research. I think that is a very, very, very bad idea, I think we all need to know what the research says. So I “cross” the Buy-and-Holders by pointing out to people that the Buy-and-Hold retirement studies lack a valuation adjustment.

As a society, we are of two minds re these questions. We very strongly believe that people should be permitted to post honestly. That’s why every site has rules prohibiting the tactics that the Buy-and-Holders have employed to suppress discussion of the research. But we also love love, love us some Get Rich Quick investing advice, We want to believe that those numbers on our portflio statements are real. We want something for nothing and, if it means causing an economic crisis to pretend for a time that the irrational exuberance gains that we created have some lasting economic significance, then we can live with that.

But we haven’t ecperienced the inevitable economic crisis yet, you know? We are like the guy who has been eating sugars and carbs for decades but hasnm’t yet had a heart attack. That guy often tries to change his earing habits after he has his heart attack. I believe that the next economic crisis will help us to see the merit of permitting honest posting re the peer-reviewed research in the stock investing realm. These economic crises that always follow times in which Buy-and-Hold “strategies” are heavily promoted are now optional. We now have the peer-reviewed research needed to help people think more clearly about these matters and enjoy far higher returns earned by taking on dramatically redused risk. I think we are on the verge of making a decision as a society to start eating better.

We’ll see. It’s sure not going to happen if the 10 percent of us who believe that Shiller’s Nobel-prize0-winning research is legitimate research fail to point out the dangers of the Buy-and-Hold “strategy. I sincerely believe that the Greaney retirement study lacks an adjustment for the valuation level that applies on the day the retirement begins. So that’s what I say when the subject of safe withdrawal rates turnd up on discussion boards and blogs at which I participate.

My best and warmest 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:

Need more examples? How about Wade Pfau. We all remember this little beauty:

“Hi Rob,
I forgot that I was still saying things like this even 2 weeks after the initial incident.
This was more than a year ago now, but I am thinking that I was just trying to explain politely to you that I’d rather have you quit writing about me, or at least stop using my name. I suppose that I figured the only way you might understand why is if I explained it in terms of your favorite conspiracy theories.
I will make one more attempt at a reality check for you. You go on and on about how I allegedly lack personal integrity because I allowed the Goons to threaten me into silence.
The reality is that though I may have for a brief moment got a bit too caught up in YOUR drama, I do not have any fears about the Goons.
The reality is that you are causing me 1000x more career damage than the Goons ever could have by filling Google with so much nonsense about me, and sharing embarrassing private details such as my overly ambitious journal submission strategies, etc. Those in particular are highly private. People don’t publicly share where they submit articles to unless those articles are accepted. You’ve violated my trust in so many countless ways and yet you still proclaim to be my friend.
And the further reality is that if I *did* lack personal integrity, I could have made this all stop just by saying the meaningless sentence you want so desperately to hear: “I think the errors in the traditional safe withdrawal rate studies must be corrected by using Rob’s analytically valid method.”
But I don’t believe that. I do not believe you have offered a valid correction to the safe withdrawal rate question. And I believe that retirement income strategies go much further than the question of a safe withdrawal rate. And so that is why I’ve had to endure your ongoing harassment for months on end now.
Usually I can figure out the Rob-logic behind what you are thinking, but I really don’t know how you think you come out of this whole episode looking like the good guy. I guess it is because you think you are saving my soul and putting me back on the path of righteousness, or something, huh? If only you had the power to do a little bit of self reflection…
Now that the whole email history is on display, we have the reminder of how angry you got at the very beginning when I referred to you as dogmatic. Yet, look at the way you’ve treated me for disagreeing with you on something which you don’t even understand. You quote numbers from JWR’s statistical work, but I’m not sure if you can even distinguish a mean from a median. So how can you be sure his work is right? I don’t know either, as I never did get around to digging into it, and I doubt I ever will now. But I’m not sure how a properly calculated lower confidence bound for a 2000 retiree could have been higher than zero.
Rob, suppose the stock market does drop 65% as you are expecting. It might happen, who knows.
Step 1: Stock Market Drops 65%
Step 2: ??
Step 3: Rob wins $500 million settlement from the Goons, the Goons are sent to prison, the investing public learns about and adopts VII.
What is Step 2? There isn’t one. You will still be in the same position as you’ve been in for the last 10 years. Why didn’t something happen for you after the 2008 financial crisis? You are like the guy who keeps predicting new ends for the world as each previous prediction date passes by.
That is why I’m telling you, from one human being to another, that it is time to move on. You are a smart guy, and you could use your talents for something productive. While warning people about the 4% rule is helpful, the way that you go about doing it is rather “catastrophically unproductive” as one wise fellow said to you years ago. I provide a loud voice that is critical of the 4% rule, and so spending your days assassinating my character is counterproductive to your underlying cause. So perhaps you can start fresh with a new issue of social import that carries less baggage for you. What happened in the past is a sunk cost, but you still have a chance to turn things around and start afresh today. And you can do all of this while still being honest and true to yourself.”

There are lots or stories of people not wanting to see their careers destroyed and jumping through lots of crazy mental hoops to stop that from happening. There are just as many stories of people betraying an interest in letting rationality play a role in the stock investing project. If we were a completely corrupt people. Shiller would never have found a journal to publsh his research. He never would have found a publisher for his book. He never would have been awarded a Nobel prize.

We are not a completely corrupt people. I continue to believe that we are going to find a way to get accurate, honest, research-based investment advice out to the millions of middle-class investors who need exposure to it. 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:

Every website should be open to discussions on dancing bears. Every website should be open to discussions on alien robots.

Gimmie my $500 million dollars. I earned it with my valuable work. You should be going to prison. My 41 years of Nobel Prize winning research is to rule everything and everyone. We need to get past the big black mountain of VII.
………………….sorry……….suffering from a breakout of hocomania………

There is indeed a sense in which I believe that Shiller’s Nobel-prize-winning research should “rule everything and everyone.: I certainly don’t think that everyone should be required to follow a Valuaton-Informed Indexing strategy. That’s a personal choice, But I think that everyone should be required to hear about what the last 41 years of peer-reviewed research says. If you elect to tune it out, that’s fine. But you can’t elect to tune it out for others. Once the research is published, it becomes part of the world that we all live in and anyone who cares to discuss it may do so. Each investor gets to make his own decision as to what strategy he will follow. But no one gets to decide for all others what research can be discussed. Not under U.S. law.

There was a time when women couldn’t be doctors. Thje field was closed to them. I see it as a big advance that that is no longer the case. People can still decide for themselves whether they will hire a male doctor or a female doctor. That’s a personal choice. But women are now able to enter the field and to demonstrate their abilities. So it is now more of a fair game. It was not appropriate for males to say “this is a high-paying field and we don’t want any cimpetition so we are going to keep the field closed to women.” That’s garbage, in my assessment. That’s what the Buy-and-Holders do when they say “the benefits of market timing cannot be discussed, we make money touting Buy-and-Hold strategies and we do not think we will be able to maintain our dominance in the field if discussion of the last 41 years of peer-reviewed research is permitted.” That’s garbage. If you cannot effectively defend your strategy within the limits of U.S. law, your strategy is not worth defending. It is discredited and out of date. Investors need to know that.

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:

Hi Rob,
I forgot that I was still saying things like this even 2 weeks after the initial incident.
This was more than a year ago now, but I am thinking that I was just trying to explain politely to you that I’d rather have you quit writing about me, or at least stop using my name. I suppose that I figured the only way you might understand why is if I explained it in terms of your favorite conspiracy theories.
I will make one more attempt at a reality check for you. You go on and on about how I allegedly lack personal integrity because I allowed the Goons to threaten me into silence.
The reality is that though I may have for a brief moment got a bit too caught up in YOUR drama, I do not have any fears about the Goons.
The reality is that you are causing me 1000x more career damage than the Goons ever could have by filling Google with so much nonsense about me, and sharing embarrassing private details such as my overly ambitious journal submission strategies, etc. Those in particular are highly private. People don’t publicly share where they submit articles to unless those articles are accepted. You’ve violated my trust in so many countless ways and yet you still proclaim to be my friend.
And the further reality is that if I *did* lack personal integrity, I could have made this all stop just by saying the meaningless sentence you want so desperately to hear: “I think the errors in the traditional safe withdrawal rate studies must be corrected by using Rob’s analytically valid method.”
But I don’t believe that. I do not believe you have offered a valid correction to the safe withdrawal rate question. And I believe that retirement income strategies go much further than the question of a safe withdrawal rate. And so that is why I’ve had to endure your ongoing harassment for months on end now.
Usually I can figure out the Rob-logic behind what you are thinking, but I really don’t know how you think you come out of this whole episode looking like the good guy. I guess it is because you think you are saving my soul and putting me back on the path of righteousness, or something, huh? If only you had the power to do a little bit of self reflection…
Now that the whole email history is on display, we have the reminder of how angry you got at the very beginning when I referred to you as dogmatic. Yet, look at the way you’ve treated me for disagreeing with you on something which you don’t even understand. You quote numbers from JWR’s statistical work, but I’m not sure if you can even distinguish a mean from a median. So how can you be sure his work is right? I don’t know either, as I never did get around to digging into it, and I doubt I ever will now. But I’m not sure how a properly calculated lower confidence bound for a 2000 retiree could have been higher than zero.
Rob, suppose the stock market does drop 65% as you are expecting. It might happen, who knows.
Step 1: Stock Market Drops 65%
Step 2: ??
Step 3: Rob wins $500 million settlement from the Goons, the Goons are sent to prison, the investing public learns about and adopts VII.
What is Step 2? There isn’t one. You will still be in the same position as you’ve been in for the last 10 years. Why didn’t something happen for you after the 2008 financial crisis? You are like the guy who keeps predicting new ends for the world as each previous prediction date passes by.
That is why I’m telling you, from one human being to another, that it is time to move on. You are a smart guy, and you could use your talents for something productive. While warning people about the 4% rule is helpful, the way that you go about doing it is rather “catastrophically unproductive” as one wise fellow said to you years ago. I provide a loud voice that is critical of the 4% rule, and so spending your days assassinating my character is counterproductive to your underlying cause. So perhaps you can start fresh with a new issue of social import that carries less baggage for you. What happened in the past is a sunk cost, but you still have a chance to turn things around and start afresh today. And you can do all of this while still being honest and true to yourself.

These words were not written by Wade Pfau today. One of the Goons just posted them today. But they were written by Wade a good number of years back, when he was threatened by the Goons after working with me for 16 months on the research that we had published in a peer-reviewed journal which caused Wade to exclaim: “Yes, Virginia, Valuation-Informed Indexing works!”

It was one of the Goons who posted this comment today. But look at what it says! Even in these Goon-approved words, Wade says that: “warning people about the 4% rule is helpful.” If there is something to warn people about, that’s huge. Before I put up my famous post from the morning of May 13, 2002, no one at the Motley Fool board was warning people about Greaney’s study. They were using it to plan retirements! That happened almost every day at that board! So getting that out there was huge. And of course what Wade really believes is that the Greany study is “dangerous,” which is what he said before he was threatened. And he believed all of the things that he said in the days before he was threatened on scores of other subjects as well.

Why is it that only the members of the Buy-and-Hold Goon Squads who feel a need to threaten people? We never see Valuation-Informed Indexers do that. The difference is that the Valuation-Informed Indexers have Nobel-prize-winning research supporting what they say while all the Buy-and-Hold Goons have is a mistake (the Efficient Market Theory) that was DISCREDITED by that Nobel-prize-winning research 41 years ago. We all need to move on from the mistake at the heart of the Buy-and-Hold strategy (the idea that market timing [price discipline!] is not required for all investors at all times).

That’s my sincere take re these terribly important matters, in any event. I believe that we will as a nation of people move on in the days following the next Buy-and-Hold Crisis. And, when we do, Wade Pfau will return to saying all the things that he said in the days before the Buy-and-Hold Goon Squads threatened to destroy his career if he continued doing honest work in this field. We all benefit from having Wade Pfau believe that it is safe to do honest work in this field. We all benefit from having EVERY academic researcher feel that it is safe to do honest work in this field.

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 forecast has been way off.just admit you were wrong.

The forecast has been off. In recent years, stocks have performed in ways that they have never performed before.

But those who follow the research include a caveat in every forecast noting that “we do not know enough to get things precisely right.” So to miss a forecast is not to wrong, it is just to be early. The Buy-and-Holders don’t make forecasts. That’s the most serious way in which an investment adviser can get it wrong. To fail to make forecasts is to be indifferent to price changes. And to be indifferent to price changes is to encourage irrational exuberance, the cancer of the personal finance realm.

I would rather be mostly but not entirely right than to be completely and dangerously wrong.

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 not one word in your definition in which you say you will listen and consider what someone else says.

I can promise that I will listen and that I will consider. I cannot promise that I will agree.

I have pondered these issues every day of my life for the past 20 years. I respect the Buy-and-Holders. I think they are intelligent and hard-working and seeking to do good. But I sincerely believe that they messed up re the market timing question. I believe that as a friend I owe it to them to point out where I think they messed up.

All of us humans have the capacity to make a mistake. It’s a horrible reality of life on Planet Earth. I tbink it’s great that in most circumstances we can count on our friends to sooner or later discover our mistake and to help us learn what we need to learn to fix it. In this particular case, the usual rules have not applied. I think that that’s because the issue (the safety of people’s retirements) is so important that the Buy-and-Holders just cannot bear to acknowledge the mistake and the rest of us feel funny pointing it out.

My take is that those of us who believe that Shiller’s Nobel-prize-winning research is legitimate researh are betraying our Buy-and-Hold friends by failing to point out the error. We are making things worse for them. We are causing them even more pain. Our Buy-and-Hold friends are hurting today. If they were thinking clearly, they would be at the head of the line of those saying that we need to open every discussion board and blog to honest posting re the last 41 years of peer-reviewed research.

That’s where I am coming from re this terribly important matter in any event, Anonymous. I naturally wish you all the best that this life has to offer a person, my old 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:

“ I was elected.”

Who elected you?

The Universe. Fate. Evolution. God. Whatever you care to call it.

I was placed in circumstances in which I either had to sell out my friends at the Retire Early board by pretending that I believed that that the Greaney retirement study contains a valuation adjustment or post honestly and thereby bring down the wrath of you Goons. I didn’t ask to be placed in that situation. If there hadn’t already been a 21-year cover-up of Shiller’s Nobel-prize-winning research on the morning of May 13, 2002, there wouldn’t have been a peep of objection when I suggested that the board community explore what the safe withdrawal rate was when valuations were taken into consideration.

Faced with those circunstances, I chose to post honestly. No regrets. I don;t take it back. We’ll see where it takes us in the days following the next Buy-and-Hold Crisis. My personal belief is that it is going to take us to some absolutely amazing places. 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:

Your wife doesn’t believe one bit of it and that is why she pleads with you to get a job.

She accepts that I have tapped into something important. She has told me that. But her focus is on the practical side. She feels that there needs to be money coming in. I am sympathetic to that position. But my focus is on the public policy side of the story.

In the normal state of affairs, people would have openly debated the merits of Buy-and-Hold versus the merits of Valuation-Informed Indexing going back to 1981. There never would have been any “controversy” over the need for the debate. In this particular case, things got off track early on. People who give investment advice need to be recognized as experts and it is a bit problemmatic to tell people that you are an expert while also telling them that there is another point of view on all the important qiuestions that would generate very different advice. So discussion of the minority point of view was suppressed. Then people came to feel that that suppression would come to be seen as a cover-up and the perceived need for further suppression grew stronger and stronger.

I didn’t ask to be the leader of the effort to open every site on the internet to honest posting re the peer-reviewed research. I am just a journalist who discovered that there was some funny business going on when I told people about the error in the Greaney study and then witnessed this mass freak-out aimed at keeping the cover-up going. I was dragged into this. But, knowing that is affects millions of people in very serious ways, I don’t feel that I can just walk away. I need to give the effort of setting things straight my best shot. I couldn’t live with myself if I didn’t do that much. I believe that I will make plenty of money from this. But money is not my primary driver.

Rob