Pinyo, the brains behind such sites as Moolanomy and PFBuzz has come up with another new site which he has just launched called GreatNexus. This an aggragator site which has a personal finance section as well as various other general interest topics.
The site houses various types of websites:
- Blogs – like this one.
- Other aggragators such as Tipd.
- Forums – all relevant to the topic (Canadian Money Forum will probably added at some point).
If you go to the site you will see the site name and the last 5 posts that were published which should give you some idea if a site is interesting to you. Check it out!
Some links
Clever Dude went way over budget in his “eating out” category – it’s a rather amusing post and one I can relate to.
I heard about this post from Jim on his new radio show. The Post that never was is a good reminder that work/hobbies shouldn’t take over your whole life.
Pete from BMM had an amusing story about a shopping trip that involved a whole pile of store credit card pitches. I’m not sure if I’d want to shop at a store like that, although having sold credit cards myself as a part time job (a long, long, long time ago) I know that the only way to have any success is to pester, pester and pester some more.
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“Forums – all relevant to the topic (Canadian Money Forum will probably added at some point).”
Four Pillars:
I want to make you (and any other blog owners listening) aware of a problem that I believe all of us who own personal finance blogs should be concerned about.
You know from our earlier conversations that I do not advocate Passive Investing, that I advocate that this model for understanding how stocks work be replaced with a model that I call “Rational Investing.” You also know that this upsets some people, that there are “defenders” of the old model who have made it a practice to engage in abusive posting practices to shut down discussions of the flaws of the old model. I am virtually certain from comments that I have seen you make that you do not approve of this practice. I presume that the same is true of most other blog owners.
We have a problem. The Canadian Money Forum has imposed a ban on honest posting on the flaws of the Passive Investing model. I saw the link to the forum here the other day and went over to sign up. I never received the e-mail needed to activate my account. A long-time abusive poster bragged about the shutdown at the Goon Central board (a board set up solely to monitor discussions on the internet and be sure that no one permits discussions of these questions). I presume that this individual (he is a part owner of the Financial WebRing Forum, another Canadian board) has some influence at the Canadian Money Forum and used his influence to see that I was not granted posting privileges. I think it would be safe to say that he is going to do the same if others try to sign up to talk about the findings developed in the Retire Early and Indexing communities during the first seven years of our discussions of these questions.
Do you not see a problem? These are integrity issues. People are spending lots of time building up blogs and boards and all this sort of thing and they are compromising the integrity of the enterprises by permitting a gang of ruthless Goon posters to dictate what can be said at them. This does not lead to a good place. A lot of these people are friends from mine from the days before they engaged in abusive posting practices. I have seen them destroy themselves first by engaging in these practices and then by engaging in worse stuff to cover up the earlier abusive stuff.
I have tried to do all that I can to steer things in the right direction. You were there on the thread discussing these matters that was hosted at the Money Blog Forum. That entire thread was taken down because one abusive poster put up two abusive posts. I have heard from blog owners who I contacted about running guest blog entries that they thought my entries were great work but that they feared what would be done to them if they “crossed” the goons. A long-running intimidation campaign determines what can be said about investing on all personal finance blogs today. That’s the incredible reality.
We are today living through an economic crisis caused by the discredited conventional investing wisdom. Thousands of community members have expressed an interest in learning about the realities. And we have a situation where a good number of our friends are putting themselves in circumstances in which their integrity is being compromised. Is there nothing we can do? Should we not have some concern for both our readers and for the people who are destroying themselves by becoming involved in this insane ugliness?
I’ve spoken with Pinyo about these questions. My sense is that he personally is open to hearing both sides of the story. Yet he is involving himself in an enterprise that is banning honest posting on a money topic of great importance. If you are a friend of his, is there not something that you could say to get him to reconsider?
The Canadian Money Forum should be open to honest posting on investing topics. It’s an absurd reality that we are now in circumstances in which I even need to post such words. It’s crazy as all get-out. And yet the reality remains that as of today that forum does not permit those who advocate Passive Investing to be questioned. I think that all owners of personal finance blogs need to be concerned and need to get involved.
I am open to discussing this in any manner or forum which you or other concerned parties see fit. But I really think it needs to be discussed and that effective action needs to be taken about this problem. Integrity issues are the most important issues of all. So long as a ban on honest posting on these questions remains in place, all the work that we all do in this field is under a dark cloud. I sincerely do not think that that is an overstatement of the realities that apply today.
I’d be very interested to hear any constructive suggestions that you or any others have as to how best to proceed to bring this unfortunate situation to a quick end. Surely all see that the current state of play is an unmitigated disaster for every single person involved.
Rob
Rob, you’ll have to take it up with the forum owners. Pinyo has nothing to do with the Canadian Money forums.
Pinyo has nothing to do with the Canadian Money forums.
He does if he adds it to his aggregator service. That’s an endorsement. And you have something to do with it if you endorse the forum at your blog, Four Pillars.
I am not saying that you or Pinyo support this kind of thing,. I do not believe you do. I am saying that this sort of thing could not happen without a lot of people tolerating it, failing to act when they see problems.
I put a post to the Motley Fool board showing that the Old School safe-withdrawal-rate studies get the numbers wildly wrong on May 13, 2002. This has been confirmed by numerous experts in the time since, including William Bernstein (of “Four Pillars” fame). Yet the studies remain uncorrected to this day. Whose fault is that? Is it the fault of the study authors alone? Or is it the fault of Bernstein too? And of you too? And of me too (I knew about the flaws in the studies for several years before I worked up the courage to post about them).
People are having a hard time understanding why we are today in possibly the worst economic crisis in our nation’s history. What people don’t get is how dangerous is most of the investing advice they have heard for the past 30 years and how reluctant those who have endorsed that advice are to own up to the mistakes they made in doing so. You have a blog on the ABCs of investing. Do you know if the ABCs you report on are the true ABCs? How could you? How can you trust what you have heard or read about the ABCs in an environment in which no one is telling the straight story, an environment in which we know that the studies we use to plan our retirements report wildly wrong numbers and yet those studies have remained uncorrected for seven years after the matter was brought to the attention of numerous experts?
A crisis like this doesn’t just happen. It happened because we collectively permitted it to happen. We all played a role (as noted above, I include myself in that). We overcome it by working together to undo all the bad stuff that we went along with over the many years in which the problem was being created. I think we need to get to work. I think the first step is informing people of the realities and I would like to get a group of blog owners working together to do just that.
I am grateful to you for letting me say my piece re all this, Four Pillars. If you want me to drop it now, I am fine with that. It is not my intent to highjack the comments section for this blog entry. I really do think this is important and I really do think it is appropriate to put forward a comment when you mention an investing forum that banned honest posting on key investing topics as its first order of business. But I don’t mean to suggest that you have any special responsibility. You are one guy who has gotten tied up in all this with no intent to do so, just like most of the rest of us (that is certainly true of me!).
So please accept my apologies for any discomfort I have caused. I have to do what I think is right and I think that we are causing great pain for many people by failing collectively to act more responsibly. But I don’t want to be seen as pushing too hard. I believe that people will eventually come around because I don’t see any way that our society can continue to function unless we come to agree that people need to have access to accurate retirement planning information. You have done your part and you are entitled to a rest from this for a bit. It will come up again somewhere else at some later time and perhaps we will be able to work together then to take some positive steps.
Rob
Four Pillars, thank you for sharing Greatnexus with your readers. I really appreciate it. Also, I just added Canadian Money Forums to the personal finance page, unfortunately, it doesn’t have RSS for me to syndicate so I can only list it under the forums section.
“I believe that people will eventually come around”
Rob,
More than a dozen forums have banned you. You wrote to your congressman and the police and they took no action. Perhaps people already have come around.
More than a dozen forums have banned you. You wrote to your congressman and the police and they took no action.
This is a generally accurate statement. I don’t think it is a dozen forums that have banned me. But it is more than half a dozen. My congressman (Rep. Frank Wolf) referred the matter to the Federal Trade Commission, and they sent me a letter, but I wouldn’t say that effective action has been taken. I was told to let the police know so that things would be on the record and the local police did refer me to a special internet crimes division of the state police. So some action was taken there, but we have not yet seen action significant enough to bring the matter to a close. I have also discussed the matter with the FBI.
I believe that effective action will be taken at some point. But we’ll have to wait and see. In any event, I would be grateful if people would make an effort to direct further comments on this thread to other issues raised in the blog entry. In the event that there are any who have questions re the matters that I raised, I can be contacted at my blog (please click the “About” tab).
I of course wish the Canadian Money Forum the best of luck. I saw some good stuff there in the brief time that I looked at it. I am confident that we will be seeing more good stuff there in days to come and perhaps at some point even a revisiting of the unfortunate decisions noted in my comments above. The part of me that tries to see the glass as being half full believes that things have a way of working out for the best in the end.
Rob
“I have also discussed the matter with the FBI.”
I’m sure Special Agent Fox Mulder could get to the bottom of this.
Pinyo – no problem, the new site looks pretty good.
Linda – Mulder is retired – I believe Jack Bauer has taken over his duties.
I have to tell you, 4P, you have the patience of a saint to let Rob keep commenting here with his conspiracy theories and desperate pleas for inclusion. If he’s so concerned, he should just open his own forums and let those “thousands” of concerned people come flocking. If he has mod privileges, then he can ban anyone he doesn’t like and his own version of the truth can be discussed. Not that thousands of people are discussing it on his blog. *sigh*
ROFL at the Bauer comment. If Mulder is retired & Jack Bauer is too busy, I suggest he turn to the people on Fringe.
Ever notice how every forum that Rob posts to, the subject becomes… Rob?
Rob tells us this is due to some mysterious conspiracy that follows him from place to place…. I think there is a much simpler explanation, and in fact, ample evidence is self-contained within this very thread. No “outside agitators” required; Bennett neatly turns every topic to something about HIM, every time…
Here is Rob performing the same hocus-pocus trickery SEVEN YEARS ago!
Don’t believe it? Take a read!
You’d think he would at least update his material and his tricks, no?
http://boards.fool.com/Message.asp?mid=19070467
Mrs. Micah – thanks for laughing at my Jack Bauer joke…