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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 isolated yourself. You refuse to post at Bogleheads or anywhere else. And now your Value Walk columns no longer accept comments. Was that your doing? How long before you shut off comments here too?

I haven’t done anything to stop comments at the Value Walk site. I had a good back-and-forth discussion with a non-Goon last week. It wasn’t re the most recent column; it was one from a few weeks back. But he put his comments up a few days ago and I responded to them a few days ago. It sounds to me like the site administrator may be taking down Goon comments. But I don’t know that for sure.

My policy with comments here is that I am looking for material that people with an interest in the subject of stock investing can learn from. If one of you Goons puts up a death threat, I would probably leave it up the first time so that people can see what those of us trying to open the internet up to honest posting re the past 36 years of peer-reviewed research in this field are up against. It is possible that I would let a second death threat remain up just to show that the first one wasn’t a quirk. But I wouldn’t permit 10 deaths in a row appear at the site. That stuff takes us down. It is a negative. It has no place at a site about financial freedom.

There is stuff that you Goons have posted that have helped us. While you are Goons, you really are human investors too. So you have questions about the last 36 years of peer-reviewed research that Normals have as well. I think it is helpful for me to respond to those questions to the best of my ability. And sometimes you offer links to articles making the case for Buy-and-Hold that are helpful. I am always grateful when you bring those sorts of things to our attention. So I obviously leave that stuff up. There have been numerous occasions where something that one of you Goons said in a post or something I saw at a link that one of you Goons posted led to a column. So there is value there.

The judgment call is of course what to do when you mix in some words of value with a heavy dose of Goon garbage, which is most of the time. My rule is that, if a post is 90 percent Goon garbage and only 10 percent material of value, I will delete it; the stench of the garbage is so overpowering as to render the good stuff not useful — people cannot learn from the good stuff if they cannot breathe because the smell is so bad. If there is more than 20 percent stuff of value and only 80 percent Goon garbage, I vote for letting the post appear and focusing on the good stuff in response while pointing out that the heavy dose of garbage shows how emotional a strategy Buy-and-Hold is. In cases where the Goon garbage is more than 80 percent of a post but less than 90 percent of it, I look to whether the useful points being made are something fresh or points that have been many times before. If it is old, tired stuff, I delete the post. If fresh Buy-and-Hold material, I would vote for swallowing a lot of Goon garbage to be able to get that fresh material out to people.

Over time, you have less fresh material. So the percentage of comments being deleted should increase. I think that is generally the case. The curve ball is that, as you see more posts getting deleted, you might make more of an effort to get the percentage of useful material up a bit, so the deletion percentage might drop rather than rise. That happens from time to time. Overall, though, I would say that it is harder for you Goons to get a post to appear here today than it was a few years ago. And over time I expect that it will get harder still. But I will of course always be open to material that adds to the discussion rather than subtracts from it. And, if I am going to make mistakes, I would prefer by a factor of ten to let too much Goon stuff in to taking too much pro-Buy-and-Hold stuff out.

As for Bogleheads and other places that have permitted the use of criminally abusive posting tactics as a means of keeping the 15-year cover-up of the errors in the Buy-and-Hold retirement studies from becoming known to millions of middle-class investors, it is the entire United States that has adopted laws against financial fraud. I am a citizen of this country and I love this country. When I see acts of financial fraud take place before my eyes, I am required to point them out and to ask that they be brought to a full and complete stop. If I fail to point them out, I become part of the cover-up and I take the risk of being sent to prison myself in the days following the next price crash. No thanks, you know? I am 100 percent happy to help out at Bogleheads in any way that I can so long as it does not require me participating in any criminal acts. I am not going to say that I believe that John Greaney included a valuations adjustment in the retirement “study” he posted at his web site. I am not going to deny that there is 36 years of peer-reviewed research showing that valuations affect long-term returns.

Does that help?

Rob the Balanced Site Administrator

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

“my job is one of the most important jobs in the United States, perhaps the biggest of all.”

Does anyone else, including your wife, agree with that statement?

I am going to add a little bit to that response.

The click experiences come at different times for different people. I have had more click experiences because I have been working it so hard and for so long. It’s not reasonable to expect everyone who was exposed to the discussion to have had the same number of click experiences. If the discussions continued, more and more would have those click experiences over time. But it takes a good bit of time for some insights to hit and different sorts of insights hit at different times for different people.

This is why it is so critical that fully honest posting be permitted at every site. I didn’t know Wade Pfau when this started. So, if I had not soldiered on through a good number of years of abuse before meeting him, I would have missed out on all of his insights. And so would the rest of the world because Wade never would have looked into these questions if he hadn’t learned about my work at the Bogleheads Forum.

Learning new things is a process of discovery. And you just never know what sort of person is going to say things in just the right way to cause a click experience for you. Say that Wade had been awarded a Nobel prize for the research that he co-authored with me a number of years back. Other academic researchers would have noticed that and that would have caused them to develop an interest in exploring new angles of the Valuation-Informed Indexing concept. So today we would all be benefiting not only from Shiller’s insights and from my insights and from Wade’s insights but also from the insights of these other academic researchers who we cannot even name today because we elected to shut down honest posting all across the internet.

There is HUGE leverage in opening every site to honest posting. The thing grows and grows and grows as more people get involved trying to further develop the concept. That’s a big part of what makes my work so important. It is not just that I will be able to spread the word re the hundreds of powerful insights that I have developed over the past 15 years. It is that we will be getting hundreds and hundreds of other smart people involved and those people too will be generating hundreds of powerful insights and thereby helping us all out.

Your abusive posting is like a dam that has been holding up the flood of knowledge of how stock investing works for 15 years now. I am trying to knock a hole in that damn. Once we knock a hole in the dam, we are going to see all kinds of wonderful stuff that we cannot even imagine today. Life is just going to keep getting better and better and better for all of us for many years into the future.

This is our system. This is how freedom works for all of us. This is what the United States is all about — progress for all through the exercise of freedom. This is why I love my country.

Deep in your hearts, I feel confident that you Goons have some affinity for the freedom concept and the progress concept and the research concept although you of course will vehemently deny that this is the case in the safe-withdrawal-rate realm. I believe that you will change your tune following the crash, when the appeal of the pure Get Rich Quick approach will quickly evaporate into thin air.

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:

“Honest posting is code for people listening if they care to listen and electing not to listen if they do not care to listen while permitting all other community members to do the same.”

Everyone already believes that’s the current situation. That is, everyone except the tiny handful of people whose behavior is so atrocious that they need to be removed from the conversation. Nothing will change for those people until they realize that THEY are the problem.

And since you’ve said you will NEVER admit that you are the problem, nothing will ever change for you. So we’ve circled back to futility. You think my situation is futile? I can post wherever I want. I can go to the Bogleheads conference if I want. Not you. So you lash out in frustration, day after day, year after year, demanding that the world change to suit you. It ain’t gonna happen, son.

Now here’s where you say it will be interesting to see how it plays out.

You’re right, Anonymous. That’s exactly what I say here. No, I don’t think that I have presented any problem whatsoever. My contribution has been 100 percent positive. And it is has been a very, very, very BIG positive. I am humbled and honored to have been able to make that kind of contribution and it is certainly my intent to continue making it.

An easy way to see it is to look at the Ask Me Anything session that Wade Pfau did with the Financial Independence sub-reddit community recently. Wade said that the safe withdrawal rate is not always 4 percent. There is no way in God’s green earth that he would have gotten away with saying something like that before I came on the scene. I said something a lot more mild than that on the morning of May 13, 2002. All that I did then was to ask a question — I asked whether we should be taking valuations into consideration when calculating safe withdrawal rates. That was enough to cause Greaney and his Goons to threaten to come to my house with a baseball bat and to kill my wife and children as my punishment for my “crime.”

No one threatened Wade when he told the truth about safe withdrawal rates. That’s because things are changing for the better. Things are changing SLOWLY. But they are changing. And they are changing because people like me are becoming less and less willing all the time to tolerate the insane abusiveness of you Goons. Good for me! Good for all of us who stand up to you!

When I was at the Bogleheads Forum, they occasionally took polls of the community to see who the most popular posters were. John D. Craig and Microlepsis always scored near the top of those polls. Those guys made huge positive contributions. But they were attacked mercilessly by the sorts of “individuals” who have posted in “defense” of Mel Linduaer. And of course once Lindauer and his Goon pals got control of the community, those two great posters were banned for life. Surprise! Surprise!

I am going to bring them back. I am 100 percent sure that, when they are brought back, they will offer us all even more good stuff than they offered us in earlier days because they will feel free to say what they believe to an extent that they never felt to do so before. And I will encourage other top-notch posters who today are afraid to say what they believe to do so. That’s how you grow a board. Word will spread all over the internet and things will just get better and better and better and better for all of us. Even for you Goons, believe it or not!

Yes, we will see how it all plays out. I love my country and I have full confidence that my country will do the right thing for all of us in the end. I wish that it all happened like magic. I wish that it hadn’t taken 15 years already to get there. But the important thing is that we get there in the end. And I remain 100 percent confident that we will get there in the end. And that, when we look back, each and every one of us will say that it was worth the fight it took to get us there 500 times over.

Could I be wrong?

I could be wrong. It’s been known to happen.

That’s why I say that we will just have to wait and see.

You can indeed post wherever you want. But there’s a problem that you overlook when you say that. Because of your behavior, you cannot be challenged in your beliefs in the way that you need to be challenged in your beliefs to learn what you need to learn to become the most effective investor you can become. So you have hurt yourself as much as you have hurt millions of other middle-class investors.

I don’t play it that way. I want to be challenged and I want to challenge others. I want us all to learn all that we can possibly learn about this important subject matter at this exciting time to be learning about it. I will always wish you all good things because I think of you as a friend despite your goonishness. But one of the good things that I will always wish you is that you be surrounded by fellow community members who care enough about you to challenge you when they think that you have gotten onto a track that may hurt you in the end. That’s one of the things that I mean when I say that I wish you all good things.

I cannot play it any other way, Anonymous. I worked it hard when I was putting together my plan not to get any of the numbers wrong. If I knew that a friend of mine saw that I had gotten a number wrong and that he lacked the courage to tell me, I would have been pretty darn pissed about it. So I am not going to do that to any of my friends. When I saw that Greaney got an important number wrong, I told him. It took me three years to work up the courage, but I did eventually do it. That’s a true friend. No, I am not the problem. And it’s not a close call.

I wish you the best of luck in all your future life endeavors, okay? That much I can do. I have a funny feeling that you may be waiting a long time for this other thing you seem to be set on. But I do indeed wish you the best in all your future life endeavors. I do that with a full and an open heart, my long-time Goon friend. That far I can go and that far I am happy to go.

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 are thousands of people on the various financial boards that are not buy and holders, yet they aren’t banned like you are. Why is that?

They self-censor themselves, Anonymous. They put forward posts indicating that they hold some doubts re Buy-and-Hold. Yes, I acknowledge that that is tolerated by the Buy-and-Holders. But they pull their punches. They don’t share with their fellow community members the full extent of their concerns re Buy-and-Hold. They walk on their tip-toes. They let things slide that they shouldn’t let slide. They keep it zipped re the most sensitive issues. They don’t argue their points as forcefully as they are capable of arguing them.

I don’t play that game. I post with FULL honesty. I believe that this stuff is too important for me to do otherwise. I play to win. I love my Buy-and-Hold friends. I show them respect and affection and gratitude for the many things I have learned from them. But I do not hesitate to go into intellectual battle with them when they say something that I think could be dangerous to my fellow community members in the event that the point were to remain unchallenged.

It is my job to argue my points as forcefully as I possibly can argue them. I certainly do not want my Buy-and-Hold friends to do anything less. They believe in Buy-and-Hold and so they have a responsibility to argue forcefully for it, just as I have a responsibility to argue for Valuation-Informed Indexing. There is not one case that I can recall where a Buy-and-Holder pulled his or her punches. The Buy-and-Holders fight (intellectually) all out all the time. They are right to do so. They need to do that for the boards to work.

But it is a very, very, very small number of the Valuation-Informed Indexers who do the same. I try hard to argue my points as forcefully as I see the Buy-and-Holders arguing theirs because I don’t think that the boards can achieve their purpose unless we ALL feel free to say exactly what we believe. I want to set an example for other Valuation-Informed Indexers. I want them to look at me and say “that fellow is saying what he truly believes, maybe I can get away with doing the same” and then follow suit. I want to make all the posters who believe that Buy-and-Hold is dangerous to feel as welcome in our board and blog communities as do the Buy-and-Holders.

The root problem is that 90 percent of the population believes in some form of Buy-and-Hold today while only 10 percent believes in some form of Valuation-Informed Indexing. Believing in Valuation-Informed Indexing at our boards and blogs is like being the first black or the first woman ever hired at a big corporation. You have this feeling that, if you make one mistake, you will be crushed for it. So you become highly reluctant to say anything even the tiniest bit controversial. You avoid not only actual mistakes but even statements that are 100 percent accurate but that will be perceived as mistakes by the 90 percent on the other side of the table.

Anyone who compares what I said on the morning of May 13, 2002, with what Wade Pfau said in his Ask Me Anything session on Reddit this week will gain a good sense of the nature and extent of the problem. I didn’t say that the Buy-and-Hold retirement studies were in error in my famous post. All that I did was ask a question. I asked “Should we be giving consideration to valuations when calculating the safe withdrawal rate?” That post was like a nuclear bomb. We are still feeling the reverberations from that one today. But Wade’s life was not threatened when he made a much stronger statement in his Reddit session. He said flatly that he does not believe that the safe withdrawal rate is always 4 percent. I implied that, Wade said it plainly. But my post generated 50 times more flak.

Why? Because no one had ever said such a thing before when I said it. It came as a shock when I said it 15 years ago. Enough people have said it by now that there were no expressions of shock when Wade said it. I am highly confident that there were lots of people listening in when Wade spoke who did not agree with what he said. But things have reached a point where saying something that was a complete and total heresy in 2002 has become sort of ho-hum today. So Wade “got away” with it.

I am happy that Wade got away with saying that the Buy-and-Hold studies are in error (that’s my word, not his, but that is what he is saying, he is saying that 4 percent is not always safe). But I want Wade and lots and lots of other people to feel free to give expression to lots and lots of other implications of the last 36 years of peer-reviewed research in this field. I want to see people saying things that have never been said before at every investing discussion board and blog on the internet on a daily basis. I want to see more and more and more and more of it.

If we all feel free to post honestly, there will be some things said that will ultimately be revealed to be wrong. You know what? That’s a good thing. We should all want false claims to be revealed to be false. By permitting honest posting, we will encourage the posting of both more true statements and more false statements. Both types help us all. The true statements teach us things we would never have learned had we not permitted the posting of those statements. And the false statements confirm our confidence in our current beliefs when they are exposed as false. It’s all good so long as posters from both “sides” follow the published rules of the various boards and blogs.

My post of May 13, 2002, asking whether we should be giving consideration to valuations when calculating the safe withdrawal rate should not have come as a shock to anyone. It came as a shock to lots of smart people because as a community we had fallen into the bad practice of thinking that we knew it all and had nothing new to learn about the subject of stock investing. My question was a good one and I did a good thing by posting it. Wade Pfau ,might well not be questioning the accuracy of the Buy-and-Hold retirement studies today had I not worked up the courage to advance that post. Wade learned much of what he knows about safe withdrawal rates from me and from the hundreds of other brave posters who informed me by posting honestly themselves in the years from May 2002 until the time when Wade saw the first post of mine that he saw at the Bogleheads Forum.

Those who believe that the last 36 years of peer-reviewed research in this field is legitimate research should not have to risk being made to run a gauntlet as punishment for the “crime” of posting their sincere views on stock investing. We should ENCOURAGE all posters to post honestly, both the Buy-and-Holders and the Valuation-Informed Indexers. I was banned because I was not willing to accept the second-class status to which you Goons (not all Buy-and-Holders, but a significant percentage of them, perhaps 10 percent and a highly influential 10 percent) would like to assign any community members who holds views not in accord with your own.

I offer no apologies for posting honestly, I am proud that I do so. I do not respond to acts of intimidation aimed at shutting me up. If anything, acts of intimidation make me more convinced that Buy-and-Hold needs to be effectively challenged at every board and blog on the internet. When we see death threats being posted by a small percentage of the Buy-and-Hold community and the much larger percentage of the Buy-and-Hold community keeping their mouths shut re the violation of U.S. law, we have a serious, serious, serious problem on our hands.

I call that sort of thing out every time I see it. So you Goons see me as a greater threat than any of the other community members who do not share your views on investing. I wear your hatred of me as a badge of honor. I am banned at every board and blog on the internet where a large number of Buy-and-Holders congregate because I won’t tolerate the b.s. of the lowest of the low among us. Good for me, you know?

I am your best friend. Anonymous. I hold you to minimal standards of human decency. Had all the others who disagree with you on investing held you to those same standards all along, you wouldn’t be today on a path that will land you in a prison cell in the days following the next crash. Those people let you down with their cowardice. I tried to lift you up. Your hate has been stronger than my love for 15 years running now. But I believe with my entire heart, mind and soul that my love (and the love of all the community members who adopted the rules that govern posting at all of our boards and blogs — and that’s all of us!) will triumph in the end. We will of course have to wait to see how things play out following the next crash to know for sure.

I wish you all the best that this life has to offer a person in any event, my long-time abusive, Buy-and-Hold-believing friend.

Rob