A Rich Life

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

“That’s not so. He was referring to a lot of the dogmatic stuff put forward by the Buy-and-Holders.”

Show a link.

You show a link supporting your claim that he was referring to people engaged in market timing.

The easy way to solve this is to open the entire internet to honest posting and ASK HIM. Buffett would be happy to respond to questions, just as Shiller would be, if it is made clear that the discussions were going to be civil and reasoned. That means no death threats, no demands for unjustified board bannings, no acts of defamation, no acts of extortion. Lot of people are willing to help if you show that you genuinely want to know the answers to the questions, not just to bully people into pretending that everything you have ever said on the subject of stock investing is correct.

Greaney hasn’t corrected the error in the retirement study posted at his web site to this day. What does that tell us about Buy-and-Hold? An investment expert who does not correct errors is an investment expert that you do not want to be paying attention to. My sincere take. Making errors is fine. The only people who never make mistakes are people who never do anything. But not correcting errors after they are brought to your attention is not even a tiny bit fine.

Dial the Goon stuff back about 4,000 notches and Buffett (and lots and lots of others) will he happy to answer any questions you have. We should have started engaging in productive discussions re these matters back on the afternoon of May 13, 2002. That is why I proposed it at the time.

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 would say that they do not believe that I will receive a $500 million settlement. We never discussed that particular aspect of things directly. But their skeptical attitudes certainly suggest that they do not believe that there is a $500 million settlement coming. My priest once suggested that, if I thought that this work was going to bring in millions, I should go to a bank and see if the bank would be willing to lend me millions. I think that suggestion reveals where his head is at re this matter.”

I am guessing that your wife and priest have continued to pressure you to get a job, but you really don’t want to do so. Instead, you have told them that you have to finish your book first. Oddly enough, the book has taken way longer than expected, so the job search has had repeated delays. Have I got that right?

You’ve got it essentially right. My oldest boy (Timothy) is probably the person who is most supportive of me. But even Timothy has lost patience with my failing to meet self-imposed deadlines for finishing the book. If this project is so important, then I should buckle down and finish it, you know? I get it. I see the logic. There’s no good reason that I can advance for why the book is not finished after all this time. I kick myself for it.

But….

I also forgive myself. The reason why I have not finished the book is the reason why millions of us have not acknowledged that the Greaney retirement study gets the numbers wildly wrong. On the surface, that doesn’t make any sense either. We all have to invest in stocks. We all should want the retirement studies that we use to get the numbers right. Why is there even one person (including Greaney himself) who is reluctant to acknowledge the error in the study (it lacks a valuation adjustment)?

That’s the problem that we need to solve to advance in our understanding of how stock investing works. The answer is that we all possess a Get Rich Quick impulse and tending to it is very important to us. Permit honest calculation of the numbers and Get Rich Quick strategies are no longer viable and the only money in our retirement accounts will be money that we have actually earned either through our labor or through true economic gains on our invested earnings. Yucko! Who wants that, you know? Can’t we just banish these people who try to report the retirement numbers accurately and honestly?

I told the truth re safe withdrawal rates on the morning of May 13, 2002. It took me three years to work up the courage. But that’s done. So you might think that my fear of doing that is in the past and I am free now to just move on into the future. To some extent, that’s so. I say that the Greaney study is in error all the time. So, yes, that one has gotten pretty easy. But there are lots of other related truths that I tell in the book. The purpose of the book is to explain how it is that as a society we have kept the error in the Greaney study covered up for 19 years now. One of the explanations is that we have as a society ignored the criminal acts that you Goons have engaged in for 10 years now. When I talk about that in the book, I am not just finding fault with Greaney and the members of his Goon Squad, I am finding fault with every member of our society, ever human on the face of Planet Earth really.

That’s hard. I am separating myself from all of my fellow humans when I do that. It needs to be done. It is important that as a society we advance in our understanding of how stock investing works. So this book very much needs to be written. But I am turning myself into a pariah by writing it. And on some layer of consciousness I am aware of that. A good writer works on his sentences until he gets them just right. That way they are more powerful. But the clearer I make my sentences,the more I turn myself into a pariah So there is a little voice in my head that says “don’t go there, don’t make the words more clear, leave it sort of weak, maybe people won’t hate you quite as much that way.” Being a good writer endangers me. So part of me resists doing the things I need to do to make this a good book.

That’s why it has taken so long. The intellectual work involved in writing the book is nothing special. If that’s all there was to writing this book, I would have completed it years ago. The struggle is an emotional one. Emotionally, this is a very, very, very, very difficult book to write. So don’t write it, right? Find another topic that is less emotional that you can get down on paper in a reasonable amount of time, write that book instead. You have a better chance of making money from your efforts if you write that book.

That’s what all others have elected to do. Shiller wrote an amazing book. He makes money. So one can write at least some important truths about stock investing and survive to tell the tale. Good for Shiller. But I think that all the truths that Shiller ducked (Shiller did not write about safe withdrawal rates, for example) need to be told as well. That is the project that I have taken on, to tell the truth that Shiller dared not touch, the IMPLICATIONS of Shiller’s amazing research findings. It is more emotionally difficult to tell the truths that Shiller dared not touch than to just repeat the ones that he advanced in his book.

It is telling the truths that Shiller dared not touch that makes my book valuable. So I absolutely must go there. That’s the entire point of the project. But it is very, very, very hard work to go there. Anyone who hasn’t tried to do it has no idea how hard. But that’s also the value of the project. Pull it off and you have changed the world for the better by climbing that mountain. It is my intent to climb that mountain. If it takes a long time, it takes a long time. It is what it is. But I believe that someone needs to climb that mountain for the good of our entire nation and it appears to me that the universe has elected me to be the person to do it.

A lot of things that Freud said were embarrassing to many people. He talked about family members having sublimated sexual desire for each other and all this sort of thing People don’t like to talk about that stuff. So a lot of people told him to just shut up. But he didn’t. And the reason why we all recognize his name today is because other people found value in what he said and built on his insights. I think it was good that Freud gave voice to truths that some people very much did not want to hear. Martin Luther King was killed because he told truths that some people very much did not want to hear. I admire him for what he did. The fact that what he did made him a social pariah in some circles does not cause me to dismiss him. All I look at is whether the difficult truths he advanced really were true or not.

It’s not wanting to be a social pariah that holds me back.It is my belief that we all need to know the accurate retirement planning numbers that pushes me forward. The conflict between those two goals causes me a lot of anguish. But I don’t stop. I do some work on the book every day. I’ll get there. The catch phrase that I have been using going back to the early days is: “I can do no more and I can do no less.”

I hope that helps a tiny bit.

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:

What do you feel you need to see and accomplish in order to feel as if you have been successful. Is it the $500 million windfall? Is it a nobel prize?

Or putting it another way. If you never get a dime of your windfall payment, you continue to be banned and your retirement fails, causing financial distress, will you consider your efforts to be a failure?

I like this question.

For me, success would be seeing every discussion board and blog on the internet being opened to honest posting re the last 40 years of peer-reviewed research in this field. I believe in the United States. I love my country. So I naturally believe that the same laws that apply in every field of endeavor outside of the investing advice field should apply in the investing advice field as well.

What I like about the idea of having U.S. law apply in the investing advice field is that it provides us all a way of getting our mistakes corrected over time. If I made a mistake and honest posting were permitted, someone would point it out and I would have to correct it. If I violated U.S. law to suppress discussion of the mistake, I would be placed in a prison cell and the rest of the nation would be able to resume its learning experience.

I love it that we have laws in place that provides for correction of mistakes in that way. There is of course a great responsibility involved in making suggestions as to how people might invest their retirement money. It gives me comfort knowing that, so long as the laws of the United States apply in this field, any mistakes that I make will be discovered and corrected. I of course want that comfort to apply for my Buy-and-Hold friends. So I argue in favor of having the laws of the United States apply in this field.

There’s nothing that could happen to me that could cause me to view my efforts as a failure. If honest posting were permitted and the ideas did not catch on, I would view my efforts as a failure. But for so long as the ban on honest posting remains in place, the failure of the ideas to catch on is of no particular significance. The discussions lack integrity for so long as no criminal acts are being employed by Valuation-Informed Indexers but are being employed by Buy-and-Holders.

If anything, the fact that Buy-and-Holders employ criminal acts suggests that Shiller’s Nobel-prize-winning research is legitimate research. Shiller showed that investors are sometimes highly emotional (Buy-and-Hold posits that investors are always 100 percent rational). It is crazy to engage in criminal behavior because there are people who follow a different investment strategy than you do. If the Buy-and-Holders were right, we never would have seen any criminal acts. All of the bad behavior that we have seen over the past 19 years could exist only in a world in which investors were highly emotional, which is the world that Shiller says exists.

I want to restore integrity to discussions of stock investing. For so long as our discussions lack integrity, we are in the soup, in my assessment. Once integrity is restored, I will be highly confident that we will end up in a good place. I love my country and it is hard to think about the horrors that are likely to follow if we don’t as a nation work up the courage to stand up to you Goons and insist that honest posting re the last 40 years of peer-reviewed research be permitted at every discussion board and blog, without a single exception.

That’s where I am coming from, Anonymous.

I naturally wish you all the best that this life has to offer a person regardless of what investment strategy you elect to follow.

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:

When did Bill Gates get banned on websites because of the value of his ideas?

People who bring exciting new ideas to the world have been encountering hate from people who are making a good living on the old ideas ever since the world began, Anonymous. It’s the oldest story in the book. Do a search for graduation speeches by Steve Jobs if you want to figure out what is going on here.

The trouble is not that this is hard to figure out. It is as easy as pie to figure out. The trouble is that you do not want to figure this one out. Figure it out and Greaney has to correct his retirement study and you do not want that. That’s been the entire story from A to Z going back to the morning of May 13, 2002. Some guy got an important number wrong in a retirement study posted at his web site and he really, really, really does not want to acknowledge it. That’s been the 19 years.

I really, really, really want him to acknowledge it. Or at least to have thousands and thousands of people in the field to acknowledge it so that it doesn’t really matter anymore whether he personally acknowledges it or not. In part because I don’t want people to be taken in by the false claims made in the study. But also more importantly because what it tells us about the investment advice field in the year 2021 that there is an error in a retirement study that was brought to public light in May 2002 but that has not been corrected for 19 years now. If Buy-and-Hold causes us to get the numbers wrong in retirement studies, what else did it cause us to get wrong?

All kinds of things. That’s why we are living under the threat of a CAPE value of 38 today. We pull together to bury Buy-and-Hold 30 feet in the ground, where it can do no further harm to humans and other living things, and all that goes away. I believe that Robert Shiller’s Nobel-prize-winning research is legitimate research. Sue me, you know? Either market timing isn’t required or valuations affect long-term returns. It cannot possibly be both. We should all be permitted (and encouraged!) to make use of basic logic and common sense when making decisions about how to invest our retirement money.

I naturally wish you all the best that this life has to offer a person regardless of what investment strategy you elect to pusrue.

Rob