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

Is there anyone but you, Rob, that has said that they have seen any criminal activity?  If so, who would that be?

What matters is what a jury says.

As a nation of people we need to work our way from a place where honest posting re the last 41 years of peer-reviewed research is banned at every site to a place where we are all living the better lives that that resesarch promises. We all want the same thing. There’s not one person alive who doesn’t want to know how to invest effectively. So what is holding us back? It’s the 41-year cover-up. It’s so horrible a reality that the Buy-and-Holders cannot bear to acknowledge it. If Shiller’s Nobel-prize-winning research were published today, we would be celebrating our good fortune at every site on the internet. But it wasn’t published today, it was published 41 years ago. How do we tell the story of what works in stock investing without telling the story of the 41-year cover-up? We cannot bear to tell that story. And we also cannot bear the thought of enduring another Buy-and-Hold Crisis. What a prediclement!

I’m keeping my eyes on the prize, Anonymous. The prize is opening every site on the internet to honest posting re the last 41 years of peer-reviewed research. How we get there is not my primary concern. I don’t intend to seek prison sentences. But, if getting every site opened to honest posting requires telling the story, then I am going to tell the story. I am indifferent to whether there are prison sentences. But I am not indifferent to getting every site opened to honest posting.

If I tell the story in the days following the next Buy-and-Hold Crisis and there are people who are pissed off about the money they lost and they demand prison sentences, I am not going to play dumb and say “oh, no, no cause for prison sentences here.” Madoff went to prison. This is 500 times bigger than Madoff. If I say “no cause for prison sentences here,” I lose all credibility. There are things that I can say that I believe will reduce those prison sentences a bit and it is my intent to say those things. I cannot promise to you that my efforts in that direction are going to prevail. People are obviously going to be very pissed off. I can’t say that I wouldn’t be demanding prison sentences if I were in their shoes. So I am not going to insult them by playing dumb.

I will do what I can to help you out. That’s all that I can promise. I think that there are some things that I can say that may help a bit. But I cannot say that I have great confidence that the things that I can say will turn the tide. It’s going to come down to how angry people are. I am thinking that they will be pretty darn angry. But there has never been a situation like this before. So no one can know in advance precisely how things will play out. We will just have to wait and see. I wish you the best of luck with it. I’m sorry if that doesn’t sound like much. But I am not in circumstances that make it possible for me to offer much more.

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:

Okay.  Then stop asking people to do things.

I believe that John Greaney should have corrected the error in the retirement study posted at his web site within 24 hours of the moment at which he became aware of it. That was on the morning of May 13, 2002, when I pointed it out in my famous post to the Motley Fool’s Retire Early board.

Is that asking people to do things?

It certainly was SUGGESTING that action be taken. I strongly believe that action should be taken.

But I knew from the moment that I put up that post that Greaney was going to respond abusvely rather than immediately correct the study. He had a long history of abusive posting,. I presumed that the community as a whole would demand action within two or three days and that, if Greaney refused to correct the study, he would be removed from the site.

Or another way of handling it would have been for Greaney to add langauge to the study noting that there are lots of people who believe that it is not possible to calculate the safe withdrawal rate accurately without taking valuations into consideration (we have seen thousands of our fellow community members express a desire that honest posting re the last 41 years of peer-reviewed research be permitted). That would be fine too, from my perspective. That way, people could hear both sides and decide for themselves what withdrawal rate to use in their retirement plan. Adding language to the study making people aware of what Shiller’s Nobel-prize-winning research shows us would at least remove the element of fraud from the thing.

I was aware of the error in the Greaney study when I put my first post to the Motley Fool board, in May 1999. I didn’t say anything for three years because I was afraid of what Greaney and his Goon Squad would do to me and the rest of the board community if I spoke up. I think I was being a bit of a creep for those three years. I owed my fellow community members better than that.

On the morning of May 13, 2002, I came clean. I expressed my sincere view that I believe that the Greaney study lacks a valuation adjustment. I EXPECTED some sort of action to follow from that. Lots of my fellow community members thanked me for starting the most helpful and exciting discussion in the board’s history. I suppose that you could say that they expected to see some sort of action too. But Greaney drove off all the people interested in the subject of early retirement with his abusive posting. So no action was ever taken.

I still believe that action should be taken. I believe that every mention of the 4 percent rule should come with a cautionary note about what Shiller’s Nobel-prize-winning research shows. And of course the bigger issue is the “idea” that the Buy-and-Holders have mistakenly put forward that there might be some alterntive universe in which market timing/price discipline is not 100 percent required at all times for all investors (there is research showing that short-term timing does not work and in the days before Shiller published his Nobel-prize-winning research showing that valuations affect long-term returns, the people wh developed the Buy-and-Hold concept jumpted to the hasty and unfortunate conclusion that, if short-term timing doesn’t work, perhaps long-term timing is not always 100 percent required either — that’s the source of all the difficulties that we have experienced over the past 20 years).

I’d like to see all of the textbooks rewritten and all of the research that has been supressed (Rob Arnott told me that researchers working in this field view it as a career-limiting move to publish research building on Shiller’s Nobel-prize-winning work) discussed freely at every site. And all the other wonderful stuff that we would be seeing if the same laws that apply in every field of human endeavor other than the investment advice field were applied in the investment advice field as well.

So there are a lot of things that I would like to see done. But I don’t for two seconds believe that it is at all likely that you Goons are all going to go to Greaney and insist that he correct the study immediately. I suppose that it could happen. That would of course be super. But after 20 years of this stuff, I think it would be fair to refer to that possibilkity as an extreme long-shot. So I am not asking you Goons to do anything or expecting you to do anything. Does that help?

I am posting my sincere thoughts re these matters. I believe that I should have been doing that all along. I think that I was a creep to permit myself to be intimidated into not doing it for three years. I believe that everyone in this field would feel better anout himself or herself if he or she began posting his or her sincere thoughts about the subjects being discussed. I am not able to imagine any downside to permitting honest posting at every site.

I believe that we will see the greatest surge of economic growth in our nation’s history in the days after we open every site to honest positng re the peer-reviewed research. I believe that, in the days following the next Buy-and-Hold Crisis, we will find a way as a nation of people to provide access to discussions of the last 41 years of peer-reviewed research to every investor in the nation (and on the planet). I forsee all of our lives getting better and better and better and better in the days following the next Buy-and-Hold Crisis (which I anticipate being a horrible and scary event, one that could end up shaking not only our economic system but our political system as well).

That’s it.

I am not asking you to do anything, Anonymous. I think it would be wonderful if you took some steps, But I am not expecting you to do so or asking you to do so. I am posting about my sincere belief that the Greaney retirement study lacks a valuation adjustment and that every citizen of the United States should feel free to post about that error and every other error that followed from the core Buy-and-Hold error that market timing/price discipline is not always 100 percent required at every site on the internet every day. No more, no less.

My best wishes.

Rob

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

So you have no examples. Got it.

The entire 20 years is an example, Anonymous. If Buy-and-Hold were a real thing, there would have been a rush to get the study corrected as soon as possible. No controversy whatsoever.

The goal of investment analysis is not to avoid ever having to acknowledge having made a mistake. The goal is to help people invest more effectively. New research is a plus, not a minus.

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 your wife really believed your story, she would no have divorced you as she would have been convinced you had a big windfall coming.

I don’t think that she believes that I am going to receive a huge settlement payment.

That general way of thinking about things is widespread. I say that I am going to receive a settlement payment in the hundreds of millions. Wade Pfau believed in Valuation-Informed Indexing. He devoted 16 months of his life to researching my ideas in great depth and concluded that: “Yes, Virginia, Valuation-Informed Indexing works!” But, when you Goons threatened to destroy his career, he flipped. Why not just hang in there and obtain a huge settlement in the days following the next Buy-and-Hold Crisis?

It’s because our brains perceive what we can see as being what is real. Wade feels more comfortable receiving whatever salary he is being paid in the present to obtaining a $500 million settlement payment at some unknown time in the future. That’s how my ex felt about it. Full truth be told, that’s how pretty much everyone feels about it.

Buy-and-Hold says that the dollar amount of your portfolio value reported on your statement is your real portfolio value. That makes sense, doesn’t it? One of my favorite comments that you Goons ever advanced was when one of you asked “if you cash in your holdings, how much will they pay you?” The answer is they will pay you the full amount reported on your statement. You would think that the people at the mutual fund companies wouldn’t want to pay you more than your portfolio is really worth. But they do. They do it every day. Haven’t they read Shiller? If they have, it appears that they did not pay very close attention to what they were reading.

Shiller revolutionized the field. His findings change our understanding of how stock investing works in a fundamental way. It’s hard for most people to get their heads around how big an advance in our understanding we have achieved. The number on the portfolio statement is not accurate. That’s what this comes to. That number is not accurate and you cannot use that amount in your retirement planning. You have to adjust that amount for the effect of irrational exuberance.

Irrational exuberance gains are pretend gains. They are not real. They are not lasting, So you should not count them for retirement planning purposes. But they SEEM real. I’m not calling people dumb for falling for the irrational exuberance con. I fell for it. When I put forward my famous post of May 13, 2002, I was still a Buy-and-Holder. I didn’t believe in the 4 percent rule. But I still believed in Buy-and-Hold. It wasn’t until I saw 200 Buy-and-Holders endorse Greaney’s death threat that I saw that the whole thing is a crock. I didn’t fail to see it because I was dumb. I failed to see it because it is somewhat counter-intuitive to not count the number on the portfolio statement as real. You have to think about this stuff a bit before it all clicks.

This is why I say that we need to permit discussions of the last 41 years of research at every site. The more we talk about this stuff, the better we will come to understand it.

My ex believes that I am on to something important. She told me that. But she has experienced the same difficulties coming to a full understanding of all this as have lots of others. It’s a fact that lots of good and smart people do not fully understand it today. Today’s CAPE value tells us that. But they COULD understand it. They need to be able to enter discussions and ask questions and all that sort of thing. In time, it will all click. The advance from Buy-and-Holfd to Valuation-Informed Indexing is a huge advance, That’s why Shiller was awarded a Nobel prize for his amazing research.

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 think that the work that I am doing is the most important work being done today in the United States and I believe that I will be compensated accordingly in the days following the next Buy-and-Hold Crisis.”

There are millions of people that think they will win the lottery this weekend and that they will never have to worry about money ever again. Their odds of winning are less than getting struck by lightning. Your odds of getting a windfall are even less than the lottery players. You can continue to live out your fantasy, but don’t expect everyone else to play along. You ex-wife sure didn’t buy it. You have spent the last 2 decades telling everyone to “see how it all plays out”. Well, we waited and it turned out to be a disaster for you, just like we all predicted.

It’s not a windfall if it turns out that I was right in what I said in my famous post from the morning of May 13, 2002, that the retirement study posted at John Greaney’s web site lacks an adjustment for the valuation level that applies on the day the retirement begins. People use retirement studies to plan retirements. When a retirement study gets the numbers wildly wrong, it needs to be promptly corrected or else lots of people will be hurt in very serious ways.

What does it say about this field of human endeavor that the error in the Greaney retirement study has not been corrected in 20 years? It says that the investment advice field is today corrupt in a fundamental and pervasive way. If you can’t get the numbers in studies that people use to plan their retirements right, what the heck can you do? That’s basic. The people who work in the field are not generally corrupt. We have seen over and over again that most of the people who work in this field want to do honest work, they want to help people just as do most people who work in all other fields of human endeavor. But it is not reasonable to expect people to be willing to experience death threats aimed at their loved ones as the price to be paid for citing what the last 41 years of peer-reviewed research teaches us all about how stock investing works in the real world. So it is an important piece of business to get every site opened to honest posting re the last 41 years of peer-reviewed research.

I think the American people are going to pull it off. I think you Goons are going down. But we’ll see, you know. I am not God. I could be wrong. It has been known to happen.

In naturally wish you all the best that this life has to offer a person regardless of what investment atrategy you elect to follow, 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:

Your posting is not honest.  But let’s say everyone decides that you can post whatever you want to their website.  It doesn’t change a thing. You are broke and it won’t give you an income.  Everyone else will keep doing their thing, just like they have after reading your repetitive nonsense.  Don’t believe it?  Just go to any currently open board, like Reddit or City data.  Post all you want and see what happens.  It will just be more of the same and you will not earn a dime.

We need to have national recognition of the 20-year (or 41-year if you go back to when Shiller published his Nobel-prize-winning research) cover-up. There needs to be a series of articles on the front page of the New York Times that tell the entire story from beginning to end.

We should have launched a national debate on the how-to implications of Shiller’s amazing research on the day it was published. Had that happened, we would today be 41 years ahead of where we are today in our understanding of how stock investing works. We can’t get the 41 years back. Sadly, that’s gone. But we need to recreate the spirit of excitment about the discovery that Shiller made, that valuations affect long-term returns, that stock investing risk is not stable but varible, that market timing is always 100 percent required for every investor, that the safe withdrawal rate is a number that changes with changes in valuations.

The problem that we are facing is that, the longer the cover-up continues, the harder it becomes to pull that off. In the early days, the Buy-and-Holders were just embarrased for people to learn about the mistake they made., Now, it is 50 times worse. They are looking at civil and criminal penalties for participating in a 41-year cover-up. It’s not a good situation.

But it obviously does not get any better as the length of the cover-up is extended. The best that we can do today is to bring it to an end after 41 years. To let it continue into a 42nd year would be a catastrophe. So we all need to pull together and do what needs to be done. I did my part on the morning of May 13, 2002, you know? What have you done to help out, Anonymous?

My best wishes. But, 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:

Like I said, you don’t have any proof.  You made it up.  On the other hand, we have proof of the harm you caused Wade.  Look at how people run away from YOU.  No you are all alone.

I won’t be alone or anything close to it on the day following the day on which we elect as a society to open every discussion board and blog to honest posting re the last 41 years of peer-reviewed research in this field.

We cannot have one set of laws for every field of human endeavor except the investment advice field and another set for the investing advice field. That is just not a viable long-term proposition. I believe that the ocean of human misery that people are going to witness as part of the next Buy-and-Hold Crisis is going to give more of us the courage to stand up to you Goons.

But we’ll see, you know? I’m not God. I don’t know everything. But I know for certain that I don’t feel one tiny bit comfortable saying that I believe that the Greaney retirement study contains an adjustment for the valuation level that applies on the day the retirement begins.

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:

Would you tell your friends to quit their jobs and ignore their wives?  Would you tell your friends that it is okay to deplete your savings?

Only in the most extreme circumstances imaginable.

The situation in InvestoWorld today are the most extreme circumstances imaginable.

Say that there is a 1 in 100 chance that I was right in what I said in my famous post from the morning of May 13, 2002 — that the retirement study posted at John Greaney’s web site lacks an adjustment for the valuation level that applies on the day the retirement begins. Personally, I believe that the odds are more like 99.9999 percent. But let’s say for purposes of discussion that the odds are only 1 in 100.

If that’s the case, then we should be discussing that possibility at every investing discussion board and blog on the internet. Greaney isn’t the only one in this field who made the mistake of thinking that the safe withdrawal rate is always 4 percent. That mistake was repeated by thousands and thousands and thousands of investment advisors. There were newpaper articles on retirement planning that cited the infamous “4 percent rule.” The single most important purpose of investment advice is to help people put together their retirement plans. If the people in this field cannot get an error in a retirement study THAT INVOLVES THE SIMPLE CALCULATION OF NUMBERS corrected in 20 years, then I think it would be fair to say that the entire field has been corrupted in a very, very serious way.

That’s the state iof play today. We are facing not just an economic crisis. We are facing a political crisis. Look at what happened in the wake of the Buy-and-Hold Crisis of 1929. A significant percentage of the population was beginning to lose confidence in our system of government in the wake of the 1929 crisis. It’s worse today. In 1929, we wandered into a crisis because we didn’t know how the stock market worked. Today, we don’t have that excuse. Today we have 41 years of peer-reviewed research showing us how it works, research of such quality that its author was awarded a Nobel prize. Yet we are permitting the next Buy-and-Hold Crisis to take place because our Wall Street Con Men friends very, very, very much do not want to acknowledge that they made a mistake back in the 1960s when they came up with their “idea” that there mught be some alternate universe 20 billion light years away in which market timing/price discipline is not required at all times for every investor. Huh? How do you think the cover-up is going to fly when millions of middle-class people learn why they have lost much of thier life savings in the next Buy-and-Hold Crisis?

Would I tell me friends to risk getting killed by terrorists if they learned about the plans to attack the trade center buildings on 9/11 and informed tbe authorites? I would tell them to do anything they could come up with to protect themselves and their families. But, yes, ultimately, I would tell them that they had to inform the authorities of what they had come to learn. The alternative would be that they would not be able to sleep at night, that they would not be able to live with themselves from that point forward because of what their cowardice had done to thousands of human lives. In those extreme circumstances, I would say, yes, you somehow have to work up the nerve to do what simple must be done.

We cannot go forward as a nation unless we find some means of getting accurate, honest, research-based investment advice out to the millions of people who need access to it, Anonymous. That’s the bottom-line here. This is not an optional matter of national business. It is a 100 percent imperative matter. That is my sincere take re the matter, in any event.

My best and warmest wishes to you and yours regardless of what investment strategy you elect to pursue.

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 Motley Fool board is not your property, nor did anyone “burn it down”. You also don’t own all the other boards that decided to ban you for your poor behavior. You have had 20 years to build your own board community. You have had 20 years to make and sell a book and/or any other materials. You have had 20 years to get another job.

You keep pointing out how your think other people are responsible for your retirement failures, but you don’t take any personal responsibility.

I think I did a very good thing in pointing out the error in the Greaney retirement study, Anonymous. There were people at the Motley Fool board who were using that study as guidance in the construction of their retirement plans. I know. I was there. Some of those people had become friends of mine over the years.

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:

It was one guy, saying something on one amateur blog, decades ago. No one but you even remembers. No one but you has decided to make it a life’s quest to somehow un-ring another person’s bell. You’ve literally squandered your life, you treasure, your wife, and all opportunities you could have taken from the day you decided to go loco over that one omission (in YOUR eyes) on someone else’s speculative work. One blog among thousands. What is the best case scenario for you going forward, in your own estimation? How will you get there? (And, is your plan practicable, or just a personal internal, flight of fancy?) “God, give me the grace to change the things that are within my control, the courage to accept those that are not, and the wisdom to know the difference.” Get well soon, Rob. Greaney wasn’t the only person who advanced the 4 percent rule, Hopeful. There were thousands of newspaper articles on retirement planning that cited that rule. There were millions of retirements constructed with that rule in mind. It’s been 20 years since I pointed out the error and it hasn’t been corrected to this day. How could something like that happen? It happened because there are millions of people who are counting on the full amount in their stock portfolio to finance their retirement. They should be adjusting the amount listed on their portfolio statement for the amount of irrational exuberance present in the stock market at the moment they are checking. People aren’t going to do that unless they are told why it is so important that it be done. Lots of people are willing to warn them. But they are not going to do it until they feel safe to do so. We need to open every discussion board and blog to honest posting re the last 41 years of peer-reviewed research. That’s my sincere take, in any event. My best wishes to you and yours. Rob