Normalization of SWR Discussions
Posted: Thu Jun 10, 2004 3:36 am
I have been hinting in various ways for a long time that I believed that where the various FIRE/Passion Saving/Retire Early communities were eventually headed was to normalization of SWR discussions. I have a tendency to allow my enthusiasm for learning about the subject matter of these boards to spill over the top from time to time, and I think that I have been guilty on occasion of thinking that we all could work through the change that we need to work through a good bit sooner than it is generally possible for human beings to work through changes of the magnitude that we are struggling with here.
The Great SWR Debate is a wonderful debate. It always has been and it always will be. We have learned a lot. People who read the material on these boards (this one in particular) know more about how to invest effectively for the long term than 90 percent of the people who get paid big bucks to expound on their "expertise" in this field. We don't just look to magazine articles or even serious research papers to determine how to invest our money in accord with our hopes of achieving financial independence early in life. We look at all that stuff, and then we go about the business of checking it out to see whether it really makes sense, and, if it does, whether the insights offered can be extended, enhanced, improved.
What we have done during the first 25 months of the Great SWR Debate is to extend the insights that were offered in the conventional methodology SWR studies. William Bernstein described the Trinity study (the most famous of the conventional methodology studies) as a "breakthrough" piece of research. He was right to say that. The insights provided by the conventional studies really were breakthrough insights. They put all of us on a path to realizing our FIRE/Passion Saving/Retire Early dreams years sooner than would otherwise have been possible.
But the fun didn't stop there. What we have done through a process of learning together over the course of the past 25 months is to take those wonderful conventional methodology insights and extend them, sharpen them, enhance them. We will always be making use of the conventional studies--they serve an important purpose in our investment assessment efforts and always will. But we are not satisifed with the insights those studies offer. We are positively greedy for ever more knowledge of how to achieve financial independence as early in life as possible. We want to achieve our goals years sooner than the time in which it would be possible to achieve them if we fell into the trap of thinking that the conventional methodology studies offered the last word in SWR analysis.
We have a built a better tool, the SWR tool of the future. Will this tool be written up in books and peer-reviewed articles and general-interest magazine articles and all the rest, like the earlier one has been? It will be. Not just yet. We have made a few tentative moves in that direction, but the time is not quite ripe for a full-fledged publicity campaign. We want to get all of our own ducks in a row before we take this breakthrough tool public. With some recent developments we are getting close to the time when it will be right to take it public in a big way, but we remain a step or two short of that point at this moment in time.
But the tool will be taken public and it will stand the "Stocks for the Long Run" paradigm that has dominated investment analysis for two decades now on its head. Is that statement another case of "hocus being hocus'? It is. I'm proud of it too. hocus loves the idea of middle-class workers being able to achieve financial independence early in life and becoming free to do all sorts of things with their lives more exciting than doing the work needed to put food on the table. I positively gush about the potential of this wonderful investing tool because I have worked with the tool for eight years now and I know it to be the most powerful investing tool that I have ever seen in my life. It's a wonderful tool, and as more people begin making use of it, we are all going to come to realize that. That will be a sweet day for the entire FIRE/Passion Saving/Retire Early community.
Is it egotistical for me to say that a tool that I developed is so wonderful? If you are bound and determined to look at things from the most negative perspective possible, you might say that. The tool is wonderful and I want every single community member from every single board community to know about it and to make use of it. How would you expect me to make that happen, by pretending that my post of May 13, 2002, was a "mistake," as it has been referred to on one or two occasions?
No. That post was the most important post ever put to a FIRE board. It was not important because it had my name on it. It was important because of the insights it sent forth into the various communities. The communities grabbed hold of the insight and made it shine. One poster added this, another added the other thing, a third added yet a third enhancement, and look at what we ended up with--the mind-blowing SWR tool you see described in the posts added to this particular discussion board on an almost daily basis.
We changed the world with our creatiion of this tool. I did that. You did it too. We did it together. That's the idea, of course. That's why this new discussion board communications medium is such an exciting communications medium of the future. It allows people like us to pool our talents and thereby do together things that we could never dream of doing with each of us trying to move forward only on the small power of our personal self-generated intellectual steam.
We changed the world. Can we let that in? Can we begin to feel as good about what we have done here as it is proper for us to feel? Can we start giving ourselves some credit for what we have accomplished?
The signs that I read when visiting the various boards tells me that we can. I see a change in the tone of the SWR discussions at every single board. Some are moving faster than others. All are taking at least small steps in the direction of the place where we all want to end up, the place where all community members know that these boards were created for the purpose of allowing people to offer honest and informed insights on how to achieve financial independence early in life, and that that is the purpose that they all once again really do serve.
This place is never going to be the same again. Not after the announcement that ES made last night. We all get a fresh start. That is what ES is saying, if you read between the lines of the post. Starting today, it's as if the Post Archives didn't exist. Any poster can come to this board, put forward any reasonable comment re SWRS that he or she likes, and he or she will be given a warm welcome and a reasonsed response in return. There aren't many places in the world today where you can get that sort of deal without having to pay as much as a dime, are there? That's the deal you get here. Treasure it. Send ES an e-mail thanking him for what he has done. He deserves it.
How about the other boards? You see change coming about at those places too. I have been spending much of my posting time at the Early Retirement Forum of late, so I would like to bring to your attention two absolutely mind-blowing threads that have been developed in recent days over there.
This one is called "SWR of 6.21 Percent for 26 Years." It's the second most read thread in the history of the forum, with 234 posts and close to 6,000 reads. Insights by the bucketful put forward by scores of people with a thirst for learning all that it is possible to learn about how to achieve financial independence early in life.
The charge for gaining access to these mind-blowing insights? Zero. If you count the time it takes you to move your cursor over to the link and give it a little push, darn close to zero. That's what I call a Value Proposition Supreme. It's just words. But what thrilling and life-enhancing words!
Check it out.
http://early-retirement.org/cgi-bin/yab ... 1080235218
It's Dory36 you should thank for that one. And for the next one too.
The more recent Early Retirement Forum mind-blower is a little thing called "True Love." No, it's really a little thing called "Yahoo Finance Quiz," but my pretend title offers you a better idea of the value of what you are going to find on the other side of the link you see below.
Do you want to miss out on something as good as True Love? I didn't think so. Give the baby a little click, my good friend. It's 243 posts and close to 6,300 reads of "sometimes you feel like a data-based SWR and sometimes you don't" indescribable deliciousness.
Are you a Cat in the Hat sort of fellow? The Cat says this thread is "positivelootingly wackicanacious." I think the Cat is on to something. It's worth a ride in the way that going 60 in a red convertible with the top down on the first day of real Spring weather is worth a ride. Listen to what the people are saying about the realities of SWRs. Now! Do it! God gave you a clicker so that you could click on things like this. Click into the ever fresh wonders of the community's rapidly expanding SWR conciousness.
http://early-retirement.org/cgi-bin/yab ... 1085366592
The Debate About Having a Debate is over. That's not precisely so. There are a few holdouts who just can't get enough of the word game posts and the intimidation posts and the blah blah nonsense gibberish threads. There are still remnants of the old days here and there. Just ignore that stuff, OK? Don't even bother to refute it. It's too stupid to refute. Like Scuffy the Tugboat, we were made for better things. Let's all sail down unexplored rivers of adventure. Leave the word games for the political threads. They don't do much real harm there. The stuff we want to talk about matters too much not to want to get it right.
There are lots of little reasons why I say that the Debate About Having a Debate has for practical purposes come to an end. Visit the boards, enjoy the thrill of discovering them for yourself. There are two big reasons that I think I had better make note of just to make sure that no one misses out on the good news.
First, there's the ES post from last night. You know about that. I doubt that there is anyone who doesn't know in his or her heart of hearts that that is a sign of better days to come for this site.
The other big positive sign is the Dory36 post that comes at the end (for the time being) of the "Yahoo Finance Quiz" thread linked above. Here are some healing words from Dory36.
Dory36: "Jeez Louise, folks! I go away for just a short while and you all get crazy on me!
Personally, I think that when a thread becomes a meta discussion, discussing more about the participants and discussion itself than the topic of the thread, it's time to just drop the subject.
It is also pretty unfair to those NOT in the discussion to make them wade through many pages of stuff to find material related to the topic title. "
You get the idea. Debating about Debating is out, Learning Together is in. Don't be retro! Get with the fashions of the day or someone is for sure going to say that you look like your mommy dressed you this morning. None of us want that.
It really have been a great debate for a little more than two years now. You and me are going to make it an even greater one in the next two years to come.
What is it the Numbers Guy is always advising us--Have fun? Imagine being a Numbers Guy and still knowing enough about what matters in Real Life to have come up with that one.
Quotations from Beatles songs have been a sub-theme that has appeared regularly throughout the pages of The Great SWR Debate. I'll take my sign-off from the words of a darn good song from my favorite mop-top, the cute one, the good-natured melodic one. I don't know how he did it but somehow or other he knew in advance what was going to go down in the SWR discussions and what JWR1945 was going to suggest as the best medicine, and what to say to tell people that JWR1945 was the one who has his head on straight re this thing, and so on.
Here's McCartney:
"Oh, won't you listen to what the man said?"
Here's the JWR1945 sign off that McCartney was wise enough to make reference to before it even existed:
"Have Fun!"
Here's a one-word commentary by hocus (my first one-word post ever, it might be argued):
"Normalize!"
The Great SWR Debate is a wonderful debate. It always has been and it always will be. We have learned a lot. People who read the material on these boards (this one in particular) know more about how to invest effectively for the long term than 90 percent of the people who get paid big bucks to expound on their "expertise" in this field. We don't just look to magazine articles or even serious research papers to determine how to invest our money in accord with our hopes of achieving financial independence early in life. We look at all that stuff, and then we go about the business of checking it out to see whether it really makes sense, and, if it does, whether the insights offered can be extended, enhanced, improved.
What we have done during the first 25 months of the Great SWR Debate is to extend the insights that were offered in the conventional methodology SWR studies. William Bernstein described the Trinity study (the most famous of the conventional methodology studies) as a "breakthrough" piece of research. He was right to say that. The insights provided by the conventional studies really were breakthrough insights. They put all of us on a path to realizing our FIRE/Passion Saving/Retire Early dreams years sooner than would otherwise have been possible.
But the fun didn't stop there. What we have done through a process of learning together over the course of the past 25 months is to take those wonderful conventional methodology insights and extend them, sharpen them, enhance them. We will always be making use of the conventional studies--they serve an important purpose in our investment assessment efforts and always will. But we are not satisifed with the insights those studies offer. We are positively greedy for ever more knowledge of how to achieve financial independence as early in life as possible. We want to achieve our goals years sooner than the time in which it would be possible to achieve them if we fell into the trap of thinking that the conventional methodology studies offered the last word in SWR analysis.
We have a built a better tool, the SWR tool of the future. Will this tool be written up in books and peer-reviewed articles and general-interest magazine articles and all the rest, like the earlier one has been? It will be. Not just yet. We have made a few tentative moves in that direction, but the time is not quite ripe for a full-fledged publicity campaign. We want to get all of our own ducks in a row before we take this breakthrough tool public. With some recent developments we are getting close to the time when it will be right to take it public in a big way, but we remain a step or two short of that point at this moment in time.
But the tool will be taken public and it will stand the "Stocks for the Long Run" paradigm that has dominated investment analysis for two decades now on its head. Is that statement another case of "hocus being hocus'? It is. I'm proud of it too. hocus loves the idea of middle-class workers being able to achieve financial independence early in life and becoming free to do all sorts of things with their lives more exciting than doing the work needed to put food on the table. I positively gush about the potential of this wonderful investing tool because I have worked with the tool for eight years now and I know it to be the most powerful investing tool that I have ever seen in my life. It's a wonderful tool, and as more people begin making use of it, we are all going to come to realize that. That will be a sweet day for the entire FIRE/Passion Saving/Retire Early community.
Is it egotistical for me to say that a tool that I developed is so wonderful? If you are bound and determined to look at things from the most negative perspective possible, you might say that. The tool is wonderful and I want every single community member from every single board community to know about it and to make use of it. How would you expect me to make that happen, by pretending that my post of May 13, 2002, was a "mistake," as it has been referred to on one or two occasions?
No. That post was the most important post ever put to a FIRE board. It was not important because it had my name on it. It was important because of the insights it sent forth into the various communities. The communities grabbed hold of the insight and made it shine. One poster added this, another added the other thing, a third added yet a third enhancement, and look at what we ended up with--the mind-blowing SWR tool you see described in the posts added to this particular discussion board on an almost daily basis.
We changed the world with our creatiion of this tool. I did that. You did it too. We did it together. That's the idea, of course. That's why this new discussion board communications medium is such an exciting communications medium of the future. It allows people like us to pool our talents and thereby do together things that we could never dream of doing with each of us trying to move forward only on the small power of our personal self-generated intellectual steam.
We changed the world. Can we let that in? Can we begin to feel as good about what we have done here as it is proper for us to feel? Can we start giving ourselves some credit for what we have accomplished?
The signs that I read when visiting the various boards tells me that we can. I see a change in the tone of the SWR discussions at every single board. Some are moving faster than others. All are taking at least small steps in the direction of the place where we all want to end up, the place where all community members know that these boards were created for the purpose of allowing people to offer honest and informed insights on how to achieve financial independence early in life, and that that is the purpose that they all once again really do serve.
This place is never going to be the same again. Not after the announcement that ES made last night. We all get a fresh start. That is what ES is saying, if you read between the lines of the post. Starting today, it's as if the Post Archives didn't exist. Any poster can come to this board, put forward any reasonable comment re SWRS that he or she likes, and he or she will be given a warm welcome and a reasonsed response in return. There aren't many places in the world today where you can get that sort of deal without having to pay as much as a dime, are there? That's the deal you get here. Treasure it. Send ES an e-mail thanking him for what he has done. He deserves it.
How about the other boards? You see change coming about at those places too. I have been spending much of my posting time at the Early Retirement Forum of late, so I would like to bring to your attention two absolutely mind-blowing threads that have been developed in recent days over there.
This one is called "SWR of 6.21 Percent for 26 Years." It's the second most read thread in the history of the forum, with 234 posts and close to 6,000 reads. Insights by the bucketful put forward by scores of people with a thirst for learning all that it is possible to learn about how to achieve financial independence early in life.
The charge for gaining access to these mind-blowing insights? Zero. If you count the time it takes you to move your cursor over to the link and give it a little push, darn close to zero. That's what I call a Value Proposition Supreme. It's just words. But what thrilling and life-enhancing words!
Check it out.
http://early-retirement.org/cgi-bin/yab ... 1080235218
It's Dory36 you should thank for that one. And for the next one too.
The more recent Early Retirement Forum mind-blower is a little thing called "True Love." No, it's really a little thing called "Yahoo Finance Quiz," but my pretend title offers you a better idea of the value of what you are going to find on the other side of the link you see below.
Do you want to miss out on something as good as True Love? I didn't think so. Give the baby a little click, my good friend. It's 243 posts and close to 6,300 reads of "sometimes you feel like a data-based SWR and sometimes you don't" indescribable deliciousness.
Are you a Cat in the Hat sort of fellow? The Cat says this thread is "positivelootingly wackicanacious." I think the Cat is on to something. It's worth a ride in the way that going 60 in a red convertible with the top down on the first day of real Spring weather is worth a ride. Listen to what the people are saying about the realities of SWRs. Now! Do it! God gave you a clicker so that you could click on things like this. Click into the ever fresh wonders of the community's rapidly expanding SWR conciousness.
http://early-retirement.org/cgi-bin/yab ... 1085366592
The Debate About Having a Debate is over. That's not precisely so. There are a few holdouts who just can't get enough of the word game posts and the intimidation posts and the blah blah nonsense gibberish threads. There are still remnants of the old days here and there. Just ignore that stuff, OK? Don't even bother to refute it. It's too stupid to refute. Like Scuffy the Tugboat, we were made for better things. Let's all sail down unexplored rivers of adventure. Leave the word games for the political threads. They don't do much real harm there. The stuff we want to talk about matters too much not to want to get it right.
There are lots of little reasons why I say that the Debate About Having a Debate has for practical purposes come to an end. Visit the boards, enjoy the thrill of discovering them for yourself. There are two big reasons that I think I had better make note of just to make sure that no one misses out on the good news.
First, there's the ES post from last night. You know about that. I doubt that there is anyone who doesn't know in his or her heart of hearts that that is a sign of better days to come for this site.
The other big positive sign is the Dory36 post that comes at the end (for the time being) of the "Yahoo Finance Quiz" thread linked above. Here are some healing words from Dory36.
Dory36: "Jeez Louise, folks! I go away for just a short while and you all get crazy on me!
Personally, I think that when a thread becomes a meta discussion, discussing more about the participants and discussion itself than the topic of the thread, it's time to just drop the subject.
It is also pretty unfair to those NOT in the discussion to make them wade through many pages of stuff to find material related to the topic title. "
You get the idea. Debating about Debating is out, Learning Together is in. Don't be retro! Get with the fashions of the day or someone is for sure going to say that you look like your mommy dressed you this morning. None of us want that.
It really have been a great debate for a little more than two years now. You and me are going to make it an even greater one in the next two years to come.
What is it the Numbers Guy is always advising us--Have fun? Imagine being a Numbers Guy and still knowing enough about what matters in Real Life to have come up with that one.
Quotations from Beatles songs have been a sub-theme that has appeared regularly throughout the pages of The Great SWR Debate. I'll take my sign-off from the words of a darn good song from my favorite mop-top, the cute one, the good-natured melodic one. I don't know how he did it but somehow or other he knew in advance what was going to go down in the SWR discussions and what JWR1945 was going to suggest as the best medicine, and what to say to tell people that JWR1945 was the one who has his head on straight re this thing, and so on.
Here's McCartney:
"Oh, won't you listen to what the man said?"
Here's the JWR1945 sign off that McCartney was wise enough to make reference to before it even existed:
"Have Fun!"
Here's a one-word commentary by hocus (my first one-word post ever, it might be argued):
"Normalize!"