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:

You are not banned from honest posting. We do have to clarify as to what honest posting REALLY is because I would never let you post made up stuff like pretend death threats or pretend job threats if you were on my website. But setting that aside, you have the largest venues available to you, such as Twitter, YouTube and Facebook. That gives you access to everyone.if you can’t make it on any of those platforms, then no one sees value in your message.

Thousands have found value and thousands have said so. Not at one time. There was no single day on which thousands said they saw value. But over the course of the 18 years it has been thousands. There have been scores who have indicated that they have found value in a single day On the sixth day of the discussions, John Walter Russell put up a post saying that he had investigated my safe withdrawal rate claims and that he saw great value in them and that post obtained more than 50 recommendations.

So I have never had any problem whatsoever generating support for my work, But most of those people left the Motley Fool board after Greaney threatened to have his Goon Squad murder the loved ones of any poster who posted honestly re those matters. Once the people interested in the topic of early retirement left the Retire Early board, the board was no longer able to fulfill the purpose for which I had built it up in the first place.

Motley Fool of course had published rules prohibiting death threats. Had those rules been enforced in a reasonable manner, there never would have been a problem. But of course there is a lot of money to be made promoting a pure Get Rich Quick/Buy-and-Hold strategy. Greaney was telling people that they could retire many years earlier than what the peer-reviewed research showed was prudent. So he was popular. And his popularity brought in money for the Motley Fool site.

All Get Rich Quick approaches are going to be popular. For obvious reasons. The beauty of the peer-reviewed research is that it shows the dangers of going with a pure Get Rich Quick approach. This is why the Buy-and-Holders are so hostile to the idea of permitting honest discussion of the last 39 years of peer-reviewed research in this field. There is no research supporting the idea that market timing (price discipline) is not required. There never has been and there never will be. Buy-and-Hold cannot survive in a world in which discussion of the peer-reviewed research is permitted. For so long as discussion of the research is prohibited, emotion can rule the day and it is emotion (the Get Rich Quick emotion that all humans possess) that makes Buy-and-Hold look promising.

I believe that Buy-and-Hold will fall following the next price crash. At that time millions of people will be able to see in a concrete way what a terrible mistake it was to fall for a pure Get Rich Quick approach and to tolerate a general ban on discussion of the last 39 years of peer-reviewed research in the field. We’ll see.

Shiller has “made it” on every platform possible. His book was a best-seller. He was awarded a Nobel prize. What good has it done us? We all still have that Get Rich Quick/Buy-and-Hold urge residing within us. If we are to overcome that emotional urge, we need to be able to DISCUSS the practical how-to implications of Shiller’s findings. That’s what the Buy-and-Holders do not want to see happen. As people learn about the research, the entire Buy-and-Hold house of cards tumbles to the ground. Market timing is price discipline. No market can survive without price discipline. Persuade millions of stock investors not to practice market timing and the stock market is sooner or later going to collapse. There is no getting around it.

I tried for many years to prevent that collapse. I did everything that a person can do. If the collapse cannot be prevented, then the next best thing is to supply people the information after the crash that they need to understand it and to avoid future crashes. We may see a Second Great Depression with the next price crash. It horrifies me that I have not been able to stop it. But at least I can do what is possible to see that we never see a Third Great Depression. That ain’t nothing.

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:

Will you have any emotions crash when you realize that you won’t get your fantasy of a $500 million windfall and that there won’t be any jury trials or goons going to your make believe prisons?

No.

I don’t need $500 million and I don’t need anyone to be in prison. So, if those things did not happen, that reality would not cause an emotional crash for me.

What I need is to post honestly. I didn’t feel totally good about myself in the days before I worked up the courage to post honestly re these matters. Now that I have done so, it would feel even worse to go back to not doing so. So, if I were ever to agree to hold back from posting honestly again, that would cause an emotional crash for me. That’s the one that I fear enough that I would never give even two seconds of consideration to going there.

The $500 million and the prison sentences are not in a direct sense a biggie for me. But they follow from the thing that is a biggie — me posting honestly re safe withdrawal rates and re scores of other critically important investment-related topics. For me to post honestly re these mattes, the internet needs to be opened to honest posting. If the internet is opened to honest posting, it follows logically that we are going to see prison sentences and $500 million payments. So I expect to see those things happen. But that’s different. That’s not the same thing as saying that I need to see those things happen or even that I want to see those things happen. I don’t like thinking about the prison sentences. If it takes prison sentences to get the internet opened to honest posting, I am certainly okay with prison sentences. But in other circumstances thinking of my old friends going to prison would make me very sad.

The way that this should have worked is that there should have been a national debate launched on the implications of Shiller’s research immediately after he published it in 1981. I of course wish that it had happened that way. But of course that has not been the reality. Now that there has been a 39-year cover-up, there are a lot of obstacles to getting things to a good place. It’s not just you Goons. There are thousands of smart and good people who are going to feel embarrassed to have millions of investors learn about the 39-year cover-up. If there were a way to teach millions of people what they need to know about stock investing without embarrassing those thousands of good and smart people, I would of course pursue that way. But it is just not possible. We need to go through the rough stuff to get to the good, life-affirming stuff.

And the rough stuff gets rougher the longer we avoid going through it. So I have always been in favor of making the transition as soon as possible. There is not one academic model for understanding how stock investing works. There are two. That has been true for 39 years now. Everyone needs to know that. We need to get past this thing where people act all surprised that market timing might be required. People can of course think what they like. But there shouldn’t be one person today saying that it is a sure thing that market timing doesn’t work. That claim has at least been under question for those who are familiar with the peer-reviewed research for 39 years now.

So — no emotions crash re the money or the prison sentences. But posting dishonestly (pretending that the safe withdrawal rate might always be the same number) is out of the question. I will never go back to that way of handling things. I cannot control what the rest of the world does. But I control what I do, And I can never go back to that cowardly and lazy and selfish way of handling things. I do not believe that the Greaney retirement study contains a valuation adjustment and I am going to continue to point that out to people at any site at which the study is promoted as a tool for planning retirements and at which I am permitted to post.

My best wishes.

Rob