What you are not understanding here is that the concepts hocus espoused were mostly agreed with here.
Exactly! That's what I find the most bizarre. I first "met" hocus over here on NFB (although I was vaguely familiar with some issues at TMF). I am no fan of the 4% SWR religion. 99% of us share the same ideas as hocus, i.e. that the REHP study (or whatever it is called or based on) is not rigid enough to be a "rule" and that there are times, such as now, that indicate the future WILL be worse than the past.
I started a thread down below on the SWR research page attempting to find out where hocus' ideas split from others. It was going rather well, I though, and hocus sounded entirely reasonable and responded to my questions in a very informative way. He didn't say anything that seemed it could be controversial, especially HERE. But after the "banning" I read some of his other posts more closely, and he seemed like he was contradicting himself in several places. One example is that he kept saying that the SWR was some mathematical certainty, ONE number that could somehow be calculated exactly, given the right inputs. Well, sure, but those inputs would be just as uncertain as anything else I guess. But when asked HOW we could figure out if we had all the right inputs, he said that it was not for us to know, or he couldn't reveal it now, or something like that. That kind of think rubbed people the wrong way it seemed. In my skimming of past posts, I got the impression that when hocus was presented with a challenging, legit question, he just assumed the question was an attempt to undermine his research. Even when that question came from someone like raddr, whose research is what helped convince ME that the REHP stuff is likely to get you into trouble. You would think hocus and raddr would be allies. But although hocus seemed to want "healthy debate", I read in several places where every critisism, even friendly devil's advocate type stuff, seemed to cause him to go on for multiple paragraphs about intercst and the "great debate". For someone like me who didn't know who intercst was, it was very strange. I wasn't interested in the "great debate" I was interested in having hocus help me understand his thoughts. But his continued references to TMF and REHP went far beyond what was necessary to explain his ideas, such that his ideas never GOT explained, and questions posed to him never got answers, at least in my opinion.
I have no dog in this fight. I feel like I came across a street scuffle and simply am curious as to what started it. But I've read many of hocus posts now, and some good ones of JWRs, but I STILL don't feel like I understand many many of hocus insistant comments about "calculating a number" for SWR. In fact, I'm not even sure if that's what hocus intends to DO or not.
As far as I know, all hocus wants to say is that excessively high valuations, like we may have now, render the 4% number dangerously high, and that maybe a if we had a model that took valuations into account we would be able to predict a SWR even if we had a time where the present was was worse than the past. This hardly seems controversial to people here, does it? But coming up with such a model, especially one where he claims will give an SWR number with certainty, is certainly not an easy task, and one subject to near infinite variables.
Suppose hocus had said (and I hope I'm not exposing my ignorance about ecomomics!), "I believe we can get a much better estimate of SWR if we use the gordon equation on the retirement start date to predict future returns...I'm currently working this out and backtesting it". Hey, this would be great. We could all pitch in to help (well, those who are good at that kind of thing). But I can't find any real details, provided by hocus, as to any kind of real-world solution to determining SWR, other than saying that "valuations matter". On this board, it seems people agree with that. On TMF, they think it's built into the past data and so all bases are covered.
Anyway, I'm rambling at this point. In summary, I still think it's entirely strange what happened, because it seems hocus and other posters here at NFB are in much more agreement than disagreement. But at risk of sounding biased, I will admit that I had a terribly difficult time in deciphering some of hocus' posts, and in attempting to find an answer within certain posts to questions posed to him. For a long while I assumed I didn't have a firm enough grasp on the issues, but now I'm not so sure. But I got very frustrated after reading through post after post (and many times I felt like I was the only one reading EVERY WORD) and feeling like I hadn't gotten any closer to understanding what hocus was trying to say. It got to the point where I almost wished someone would say "try to answer me WITHOUT using the words INTERCST or GREAT DEBATE".
If anyone has read this far in MY post, I'm impressed.
Good day!
Ahh wait, yea, I still am! 