Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently posted to the discussion thread for one of my columns at the Value Walk site:

You are only disagreeing with yourself. Anyone can go back and look at the plan you posted in 2002. They can look at all your historical updates since that time as well. Would you like me to post them? People can also visit your website and see all the childish posts as well (referred to in point #2 above). They can see all the lies you made up.

Here is a tip. Stop blaming everything and everyone else for your own retirement plan failure. Move on and get a job while you still can.

It all comes down to whether or not Greaney included a valuation adjustment in the retirement study posted at his web site. If he included a valuation adjustment, then I am in the wrong and always have been. But if he had included a valuation adjustment, why would not one person (including Greaney himself!) have been able to identify it in 18 years? It doesn’t take 18 years to identify a valuation adjustment in a retirement study.

The problem is the embarrassment over the cover-up. The bigger cover-up has been going on not for 18 years but for 39 years. If we had all been thinking clearly, we would have all started talking about the far-reaching implications of Shiller’s work back in 1981.

Every article from that point forward that recommended Buy-and-Hold should have included a note that there was new peer-reviewed research pointing in a very different direction. We did not as a society launch the national debate that we needed to begin in 1981 and by 2002, when I advanced my famous post pointing out that Greaney’s study lacked a valuation adjustment, the Buy-and-Holders realized that it would look very bad for them to acknowledge that. What kind of expert would be 21 years behind in his reading of the peer-reviewed research? To fail to note in the year 2002 that a retirement study lacked a valuation adjustment would have been to acknowledge that you were 21 years behind in your reading of the peer-reviewed research.

If I had a magic wand, I would wave it in the air and take us all back to 1981 and we could play it the other way. I am 100 percent certain that that’s what we would do if we had another chance at it. But I am fresh out of magic wands, you know? So we have to figure out some way to fix things from the situation that we are in today, with a 39-year cover-up on the books and with stocks priced at two times their fair value. It’s a mess.

The other side of the story is that the last 39 years of peer-reviewed research in this field is the most important 39 years of peer-reviewed research in the history of investment analysis, We have been collectively slamming our head against the wall for 39 years now. To ignore the peer-reviewed research when developing your investment strategy is to slam your head against the wall. Do you know the one great thing about slamming your head against the wall for 39 years running? The one great thing is that at any moment you could make a decision to stop doing that thing. And that will feel so, so good! That option will remain open to us in the days following the next price crash, when we will be able to see with our own eyes how much pain always follows from the widespread promotion of Get Rich Quick.Buy-and-Hold investment strategies.

The 10 percent of us who understand that Shiller’s Nobel-prize-winning research is legitimate research are not going to bring this long national nightmare to an end by keeping quiet about what we know in deference to the delicate feelings of our Buy-and-Hold friends. We have to show our Buy-and-Hold friends the respect of believing that deep down inside they want to get this stuff right and want to be called out on their b.s. when they get something terribly wrong. It’s by calling them out (while recognizing their many amazing contributions as well, to be sure) that we bring the long national nightmare to an end.

Those of us who believe that Shiller’s Nobel-prize-winning research is legitimate research need to work up the courage to call the Buy-and-Holders out when they suggest that there might be some magical, mystical alternate universe in which it is not 100 percent required for every long-term stock investor to practice long-term market timing (price discipline!)

That’s the answer, Sammy. I am sure.

Rob

Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently posted to the discussion thread for one of my columns at the Value Walk site:

Like you frequently do, you make a long winded response hoping to distract from my post. No one if afraid to post. That is just plain silly.

I don’t think it is silly, Sammy.

Here are some words by Brett Arends that appeared in an article in the Wall Street Journal on October 14, 2010 titled “The Market Timing Myth”: “For years the investment industry has tried to scare clients into staying fully invested in the stock market at all times, no matter how high stocks go. It’s hooey. They’re leaving out more than half the story. Anyone who followed the numbers would have avoided the disaster of the 1929 crash, the 1970s or the past lost decade on Wall Street…. I wonder how many stayed fully invested because their brokers warned them ‘you can’t time the market’.”

That’s shocking stuff, deeply scary stuff. If Arends is right that 90 percent of what we hear from the experts in this field about how stock investing works is “hooey,” we are in a bad situation. How did we get to this place? The academics once thought that the market is efficient. If that were so, market timing would be a bad thing. But Shiller showed in 1981 that the market is NOT efficient, that valuations affect long-term returns (and that risk is thus not constant but variable).

Had everybody switched to Valuation-Informed Indexing back when Shiller showed how essential it is to practice market timing, everything would be good today. But that’s not what happened. Shiller’s advance was so huge that it caused lots of good and smart people to suffer cognitive dissonance. So they just kept on promoting Buy-and-Hold and acted as if Shiller’s work didn’t matter. Now we are 39 years down the line and it makes the Buy-and-Holders look very bad for anyone to speak frankly about what the peer-reviewed research in this field teaches us about how stock investing works.

So, yes, people are afraid to say what works. Anyone who speaks clearly and honestly makes most of the experts look bad. That’s not a good plan for career growth, Sammy. We’re stuck. To get unstuck, we all need to be trying to understand how we got to this place and what we need to do to begin moving forward. The very first step is to recognize that we are afraid to say what we truly believe about how stock investing works. Nothing else happens until we work up the courage to do that much.

I was once afraid. I am still. I just work very hard to overcome my fears. Because I feel that it is the only way that I can do good work in this field.

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:

The community gives us feedback that allows for an impartial view. The fact that you have been consistently warned and banned gives us this objective view.

But never once in nearly 18 years have I put forward an abusive post!

The shows the power of the Get Rich Quick/Buy-and-Hold urge that resides within each and every one of us. That’s the entire deal here. Is the investment advice field just about turning a quick buck regardless of how much human misery you cause doing it? Or is there a place in this field for advice that actually helps your clients and readers?

I believe that there is a place for honest and accurate investment advice. I believe that we are going to get there. Shiller was able to find a publisher for his book. It became a best-seller. He was awarded a Nobel prize. Wade and I were able to get our research published in a peer-reviewed journal. Thousands of our fellow community members have worked up the courage to “cross” you Goons by expressing a desire that honest posting be permitted. We are close. We are not where we all deep in our hearts want to be. But we are very close.

I agree strongly about the community feedback issue. But I don’t tale the dark view of what the community has done that you do. Yes, honest posting is banned just about everywhere today. Obviously that is an exceedingly unfortunate reality. But there have been lots of good signs. We are an imperfect people but we are a fundamentally good people. We are working ourselves to a place where we will all be able to pull together and change the world in a very life-affirming way.

I think that the next price crash will do the trick. If you look at the Bernie Madoff matter, you see that people take a very different view of Get Rich Quick approaches after they have been exposed for what they are. I think that that is what we are going to see with Buy-and-Hold. And, once there are a few people posting honestly, the floodgates are going to open. There are millions of investors who would love to have access to honest, accurate, research-based reports on how stock investing works. So there are hundreds of millions of dollars to be made promoting Valuation-Informed Indexing strategies. I don’t think it is realistic for you Goons to think that you will be able to hold back the History Train indefinitely.

I wear my many bans as a badge of honor. You can’t post honestly about the last 38 years of peer-reviewed research without getting banned in today’s InvestoWorld. I would rather be honest than be non-banned and celebrated for encouraging people to take steps that will likely ruin their lives somewhere down the road a piece. That one is not even a close call in my book. And I have a funny feeling that a lot of the people who are for the time-being keeping their mouths shut about the dangers of Buy-and-Hold feel the same. Once the floodgates open, we are going to see an explosion of honest, accurate, research-based posting.

It will be interesting to see how it all plays out in the days following the next price crash. That much is for sure. I believe that we will be seeing the greatest economic advance in our nation’s history in those days. I just wish that we didn’t need to see the widespread human misery that will come with a price crash to get us there.

My best and warmest wishes to you and yours.

Proudly Banned 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:

Sounds like the stock market should always be about half of where it is, and you’re the only person on the planet who knows that astounding fact. Seems just a little odd.

It’s very odd, Anonymous.

But it is not only me who says that valuations affect long-term returns. Robert Shiller was awarded a Nobel prize for showing with peer-reviewed research that this is so. Wade Pfau spent 16 months studying the matter in great depth and concluded that: “Yes, Virginia, Valuation-Informed Indexing works!” And we have had thousands of community members express a desire that honest posting be permitted. If those people don’t know the realities, they at least suspect them and appreciate that they need to explore them more to enjoy a super learning experience.

So what the heck is holding us back? It’s that darn Ban on Honest Posting. Do away with that, and we all live better lives from that point forward. The only problem here is that Fama published his research before Shiller published his. If Shiller had published his research first, we would all be Valuation-Informed Indexers today. But it didn’t happen that way. Fama was first and an entire industry was formed around the promotion of Buy-and-Hold. And now it is very, very, very hard for all of the people who have promoted Buy-and-Hold to acknowledge their mistake.

It doesn’t get easier when the Ban is extended. It gets harder. Every day that the cover-up continues it is harder than it was the day before for our Buy-and-Hold friends to come clean. So we have have to pull together and do everything in our power to bring that darn Ban on Honest Posting to a full and complete stop.

Are you in?

Cover-Up Critic 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:

Why do these comments only exist on this website? If Wade and others truly said everything that you say, why don’t we see this on other websites?

Because they are afraid to say these things, Anonymous. They are afraid that what happened to me will happen to them.

The human race did not start out knowing everything there is to know about how stock investing works. The Buy-and-Holders took a good first stab at setting up a research-based model. At the time that model was developed, the belief in the academic world was that the market is efficient. If the market were efficient, risk would be constant and market timing would be a mistake. No one had checked whether long-term timing works at that time. Shiller discovered that stock market risk is not constant but variable and that long-term timing always works in research published from 1981 forward.

If we all were perfectly rational creatures, we all would have incorporated Shiller’s research into our thinking at the time it was published and Valuation-Informed Indexing would have become the dominant model for understanding how stock investing works 38 years ago. We are not perfectly rational creatures. The idea that market timing always works and is required for investors seeking to keep their risk profile constant over time came as a shock to those who believed in Buy-and-Hold and cognitive dissonance set in.

By the time that I advanced my famous post of the morning of May 13, 2002, pointing out that the retirement study posted at John Greaney’s web site lacks an adjustment for the valuation level that applies on the day the retirement begins, the cover-up had already been going on for 21 years. There was a great deal of embarrassment among Buy-and-Holders about the cover-up and most who work in this field had become fearful of what would happen to them if they spoke frankly about the matter. So most held back.

But the people who work in this field are like most other people — they want to do good work and to help people with the work they do. So there have been numerous expressions of intense interest in the Valuation-Informed Indexing concept and of support for the idea of widespread promotion of it. But people have seen the insanely abusive behavior of you Goons and have seen that numerous experts in the field and owners of web sites have failed to take effective action to rein you in. So support for the idea of opening every site on the internet to honest posting has not gained the traction that it needs to gain for us to bring The Buy-and-Hold Crisis to a full and complete stop.

It takes a lot of courage to speak honestly in the face of death threats and demands for unjustified board bannings and thousands of acts of defamation and threats to get academic researchers fired from their jobs. Once we see prison sentences and large awards for damages suffered and front-page news reports in the New York Times and other leading newspapers, everyone will feel free to speak honestly and we will be able to quickly put all of the ugly stuff behind us and work together to achieve an amazing learning learning experience, the most important learning experience in the personal finance field in the history of the United States.

In the meantime, those who believe that it would be a good idea to permit (and encourage!) honest posting should all be doing everything in their power to assure others of like mind that they will stick with them when they are attacked by you Goons. Appeasing you Goons makes things worse. Standing up to you makes things better.

My best wishes to you, Anonymous.

Frightened (But More by What Is Happening to Our Country as a Result of the 38-Year Cover-Up Than of You Goons) 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:

Has anyone else ever agreed with you by publicly saying you have earned $500 million?

When I go for a job, they tell me that my labor is worth a certain dollar amount. I might feel that I should be paid more, but that is irrelevant. The value of anything is based on what someone says they will pay you.

So, has anyone agreed with you on the $500 million?

No one has ever told me that they think that I have $500 million coming to me. I once was speaking to my brother Steven and I casually observed that “I expect to make millions from this.” He said: “everyone knows that you’re not going to make millions.” Steven loves me. So that was not goonishnesss. That was his sincere take.

The $500 million thing is not something that I came up with on my own. You Goons pressed me into that. You never try to make the case that Greaney really did include a valuation adjustment in his retirement study (I wonder why). You always argue that there’s no money to be made pointing out the far-reaching implications of Shiller’s “revolutionary” (his word) research findings. You say: “Oh, how many people do you have posting here?” Or: “How many sites are linking to yours?” Or whatever. I want sites linking to me. I want people posting here. So I felt that I needed to address that.

The point that you were making was that research-based strategies are not popular, that only Get Rich Quick (Buy-and-Hold) strategies are popular. I obviously want to see that change. So I had to ask myself — What is it going to take to make it happen? This is not the only area in which something that is bad for people is more popular than something that is good for people. There was a time when the companies that make cigarettes used to advertise their health benefits: “Live a Long Life, Smoke a Ciggie and Relax!” Now you don’t see that. Doctors became alarmed when they saw research showing that smoking causes cancer and they worked up the courage to blow the whistle on the demonstrably false claims. Then it all changed. Today you hear people promoting products and services that help people stop smoking. That’s what we need to see happen in the investment advice field. We need the idea of AVOIDING the Get Rich Quick impulse to become more popular and the idea of giving in to it entirely to become less popular. How will it happen? We need to not just permit honest posting but to reward it. When there are rewards for posting honestly rather than penalties, we are going to see more and more honest posting.

The rewards can’t go just to me. It makes sense that I would see very big rewards being that I have been working this hard for over 17 years now. But we want people like Wade Pfau to be rewarded too. Wade had visions of being awarded a Nobel prize for the research that he co-authored with me. He also had fears of seeing his career destroyed by you Goons. What if Jack Bogle had spoken up and said “this is amazing work, this is worthy of a Nobel prize, I wish that Lindauer individual would knock off the funny business.” Had Bogle said that, Wade would not have flipped. He would have persisted. Millions of people would have learned about our research, It would have been written up on the front page of the New York Times. Prices wouldn’t be where they are today. We all would be living better lives.

Wade earned that comment from Bogle. And that comment would have changed the world in a very big and a very positive way. You don’t defeat a group of internet Goons by appeasing them. You defeat a group of internet Goons by EXPOSING them. And that statement by Bogle would have exposed you Goons. He wouldn’t have even had to have said that he thought that Buy-and-Hold was bad or that Valuation-Informed Indexing is good. All that we needed to hear him say is that the Bennett/Pfau paper was exciting stuff, that everyone on the planet needed to learn about it and consider its findings. We need to as a society reward research-based investment advice as much as we do Get Rich Quick stuff, if not more. That’s the key to everything.

We send a message as a society when we determine how much money an activity will earn the individual performing that activity. You Goons are right that it says something that I have not made a dime with this stuff for 17 years. The statement that we make as a society when that happens is that: “Valuation-Informed Indexing is not worth much.” That’s a bad statement. Greaney got the numbers wildly wrong in his retirement study. He hurt lots of people. We should want to help those people. We should as a society want to send the message that: “Valuation-Informed Indexing is awesome.” We can send that statement by awarding $500 million to Rob Bennett in compensation for his amazing work of the past 17 years. That sort of payment would change everything.

I obviously earned that money. Shiller predicted the 2008 economic crisis. His research shows us how to avoid such crises in the future (teach every investor alive on the planet the importance of market timing). Anyone who says that it would not be worth $500 million for us to avoid the next economic crisis is not thinking straight. It’s worth a whole big bunch more than that. If my compensation for my work of the past 17 years is going to be determined by the value I have added to the world by doing it, the number is going to be a lot bigger than $500 million. I offered to settle for that amount because I want to get the ugliness behind us and I think that the public announcement of a settlement would help us get there.

There are three things that are going to cause Valuation-Informed Indexing to start spreading like wildfire. One is me being awarded a settlement of $500 million. I guaranty you that I will be the keynote speaker at the next FinCon event the year after I am awarded a settlement payment of $500 million. Everyone is going to want to know how I did it and how they can go about earning a similar amount. Two is you Goons being placed in prison cells, where you belong. No one is going to want to employ criminal tactics to promote Buy-and-Hold once you Goons have been placed in prison cells. So the day that that happens is the day that things start moving forward at a rapid pace. Three is us all seeing an article on the front page of the New York Times talking about all of the wonderful people who have endorsed Valuation-Informed Indexing and about the abusive tactics that the Buy-and-Holders have employed to keep discussion of it suppressed for 38 years. The intimidation stuff only works for so long as people feel that they are isolated in thinking that it might make sense to follow a research-based approach. No one is going to feel isolated ever again once this stuff has been written up on the front page of the New York Times.

The last words of my book are: “I offer no apologies. No apologies whatsoever.” Too often people who make the case for Valuation-Informed Indexing do so in a tentative way. There’s nothing to be apologetic about! Research-based strategies are wonderful. The reason why people are tentative is that they sense that posting honestly will enrage the Buy-and-Holders and we all want to do what we can not to offend others. That gives the Buy-and-Holders an edge. That’s what we do not want to do. We have the better approach, We should say so!

One thing that I can do is to say: “Yes, my work is worth a lot more than $500 million and I am happy to accept that amount as part of an effort to pull us all together and get us all working for the same life-affirming goal.” You Goons like to say that I engaged in “bad behavior” by pointing out the error in Greaney’s study. I see it very, very differently. I think that was wonderful behavior. I think that every last one of us should be doing all we can to make people aware of errors in retirement studies. I am proud of that famous post of May 13, 2002. Very proud of it.

No one has ever told me that I will be receiving a $500 million settlement payment. The way in which our society works in every field of human endeavor other than the investment advice field tells me that. In every other field we reward positive contributions and we penalize criminal stuff. We need to start following that policy in the investment advice field too. I think that we will start doing so in the days following the next price crash. I think that the people who have done good work to get us there will be rewarded handsomely at that time. My $500 million payment will send a very strong message to lots of people. Good for me for playing my part in sending that message, you know?

I only wish that I had had the courage to start posting honestly three years earlier, you know? Maybe if I had played it that way we would be talking about a $600 million settlement payment. Holy moly!

We should reward good work and we should discourage bad work. So says Rob Bennett. Opening every site on the internet to honest posting re the last 38 years of peer-reviewed research in this field is the most important public policy issue before our nation today. So we need to reward those who do what it takes to turn this in a positive direction. $500 million is nothing when you think of the benefits that will follow from permitting (and encouraging!) honest posting.

I earned every penny of that $500 million. And all of the people who hesitate to say so indirectly send that message by their silence. No one is going to be afraid to say it in the days following the next price crash. The trick is working up the courage to say it today when doing so would do a lot of good. People are afraid to stand up to you Goons. But I have a funny feeling that we will see some work up the courage to overcome that fear when they realize that there’s $500 million or some similar figure in play when they do so. Let’s show people that there can be rewards for doing honest work in this field as great as the rewards for pushing the smelly Get Rich Quick garbage.

Shiller would not have been awarded a Nobel prize if this stuff were not of immense importance, I mean, come on. A $500 million settlement makes the statement that needs to be made in very, very clear terms. Terms that no one listening in could possibly miss.

My sincere take.

Filthy Rich (Someday Soon!) 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:

The most recent blog post on Get Rich Slowly is very interesting

https://www.getrichslowly.org/how-to-change-careers/

After spending a decade as a pastor, I realized in May of 2018 that I was ready to make a drastic career change…into personal finance education.

I’ve always loved to write, so I wanted to first see if I could actually make money writing about personal finance. But I made a commitment to myself. In one year’s time, I was going to have a day job where I helped people learn how to handle their money wisely. The question was just in what capacity.

So I set a deadline for myself. If I hadn’t figured out a way by May 2019 to make enough money as a freelance writer to pay the bills, I would get certified as a teacher and apply to be an economics teacher at local high schools.

Fast forward twelve months. This past May I did quit my day job. In one year’s time, I was able to create a full-time income in a career that I previously had no experience in.

How did I do it? More importantly, how can you turn your dream job into a reality as quickly as possible?…

A very interesting and inspirational story

Most of the things that he says make sense, Evidence. I presume that your purpose in posting the link is to make the point that, since I have not made money with Valuation-Informed Indexing for 17 years now, I should move on. I obviously do not agree.

The rule that this guy is putting forward — make money in a reasonable amount of time — does not apply in my case. I would have agreed with that rule when I was starting out. It makes sense. But the situation that I am dealing with is exceptional. The peer-reviewed research that I co-authored with Wade Pfau is the most important research published in this field in three decades. That is worth millions. And the only reason that I haven’t collected is that you Goons engaged in extortion to stop Wade from continuing to promote our research. And it worked!

What does that tell you? It tells you that there is a goldmine here. I have said that I expect to see a $500 million settlement payment in the days following the next price crash. Is that a big number? Obviously. It is a HUGE number. But it is not big in context. Shiller predicted the 2008 economic crisis. His research showed us how to avoid that economic crisis. The next price crash will bring on another economic crisis. Is it not worth a whole big bunch more than $500 million to avoid an economic crisis? It sure seems so to me. The fact that discussion of the far-reaching implications of Shiller’s research findings has been suppressed for 38 years makes the telling of the story of how that happened MORE VALUABLE than it would have been had none of the suppression taken place.

I didn’t ask you Goons to engage in any of the crazy stuff. I asked you to play it the other way. But you (and all the other Goons in the world — it is obviously not just you responsible for the 38-year cover-up) have made the telling of this story very, very, very valuable to everyone who lives in this country. We need to figure out a way to permit millions of investors to gain access to honest and accurate reports of how stock investing works. We simply must do that. It is not optional. It is 100 percent imperative. And I have the story. I have had a front-row seat to everything that has happened for the past 17 years.

If you didn’t think that it is a big deal to get the safe withdrawal rate right, you never would have engaged in any criminal acts. That’s the deal. You acknowledge that you see how important this stuff is with your abusive behavior. Well, I am not the kind of guy who sees $500 million sitting on the sidewalk and just walks by, concluding that “if there were really $500 million sitting on the sidewalk, someone else would have picked it up.” No one else has picked it up. Life would have gone a lot easier for me over the past 17 years if someone had done so. But the value of the work that I have done is greater because no one else has done it, Your criminally abusive behavior has kept me free of competition. So be it, you know?

Valuations affect long-term returns. All of the research available to us shows that. So the safe withdrawal rate cannot possibly be the same number at all valuation levels. We need to get the word out! We once thought that the market was efficient, we know now that that is not so, and we need to correct all of the mistakes we made back when we did not know what we needed to know to get this stuff right.

We are at a turning point in U.S. history. Buy-and-Hold/Get Rich Quick has been hurting investors for a long, long time. Until 1981, we just didn’t know any better. So it was just one of those things. But now we know better. So we need to move forward. But the 38-year cover-up has made it very, very, very hard to move forward. Everyone who works in this field has built a career around teaching the approach that doesn’t work and doesn’t want to admit having made a mistake. But we need to move forward. We need to admit our mistakes and start getting this stock investing stuff right. We have no choice.

I help everyone when I post honestly. Every person on the planet. I help you when I do that. You don’t see it. But I do. I hurt no one and I help everyone. In a very, very, very big way. That’s an amazing value proposition. There has never been a value proposition like this. I am going to do what I can. Partly for myself and my family. But also for my country. It’s good that I can help my country in such a big way while also helping myself in such a big way. It’s wonderful.

This guy would do the same thing if he fell into the circumstances in which I fell into. So would you. You will say “Oh, I would never do that.” But that’s just talk. You have never experienced what it is like to fall into an opportunity like this. How do you think it made me feel when Wade Pfau, a guy with a Ph.D. in Economics told me that he couldn’t sleep at night because he was so excited by all the stuff that he was learning from me? It made me feel good. That feeling helped me to see the magnitude of the opportunity open to me. I never studied stock investing. I shouldn’t be able to teach a Ph.D. in Economics anything about the subject. But I sure did. I just worked up the courage to post honestly on the morning of May 13, 2002, and followed the breadcrumbs where they led me.

And the Wade Pfau thing was far from an isolated experience. I had the same general experience dozens and dozens of times. Freakin’ Jack Bogle came within an inch of endorsing Valuation-Informed Indexing! I mean, come on. Freakin’ Jack Bogle learned from me. That just shouldn’t be able to happen. But it did. And how about Mel Lindauer? In ordinary circumstances, Mel Lindauer would be singing the praises of someone who taught Jack Bogle important stuff. But Mel cannot bring himself to sing my praises to this day. Huh? What the f?

Mel cannot sing my praises because he cannot bear to let in how big this is. If Shiller is right, then everything that Mel Lindauer says about stock investing in his book is wrong. He cannot bear to acknowledge that. I didn’t show that all his stuff is wrong because I wanted to hurt his feelings. I just want to help the people who are looking for good advice and none of the Buy-and-Hold stuff — which is rooted in a belief that the market is efficient — can possibly be right if it turns out that valuations affect long-term returns.

I believe that Shiller’s Nobel-prize-winning research is legitimate research. So I say that everything that Mel Lindauer says about the subject of stock investing is wrong. I am Mel’s best friend. If he had listened to all of the people at the Bogleheads Forum who asked that I be permitted to post honestly, Mel could have fixed his stuff years ago and he would be in a better place today.

If Shiller is right, the Buy-and-Holders need to fix their stuff. And there is a ton of money in telling the story of the 18-year cover-up. That cover-up affects every last one of us in a very serious way and we are going to see what that means in the days following the next price crash. Would you prefer that we just never learn? Are you crazy?

I want to see us all move forward. And I can’t say that I am too upset about the idea of making hundreds of millions of dollars helping us all to learn what we need to learn to move forward. $500 million for me for doing top-notch journalism work? I’ll take it, you know?

What does the guy who wrote that article say about committing multiple felonies because you learned that you got an important number wrong in a retirement study posted at your web site and you really, really, really don’t want to acknowledge the error? I have a funny feeling that he wouldn’t think that that is such a hot idea. I’d rather have a $500 million payday than a long prison sentence any day of the week. I mean, come on.

Those are my sincere thoughts re this terribly important matter, in any event.

I naturally wish you the best of luck in all your future life endeavors.

Dream-Job-Seeker 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:

I believe you make up a lot off stuff. I believe Shiller would think you have a screw loose. I believe you have wasted much of your adult life.

There’s an easy way to learn what Shiller thinks about me. Drop all the abusive stuff and invite him to participate in discussions at the Bogleheads Forum. Ask him during the first discussion whether he believes that the safe withdrawal rate is always the same number or whether he believes that it is a number that changes with changes in valuations.

We should all be talking about Shiller’s Nobel-prize-winning research at every discussion board and blog on the internet. We all should feel 100 percent free to post honestly in all of those discussions. That’s how we all learn. And we should all want to learn as much as we possibly can about the subject of stock investing.

I don”t think that I have wasted any time. Every abusive post that I see tells me that I am on to something important. Otherwise, we would not see such defensiveness. If the amount of effort put into supression of a discussion indicates how important it it to have that discussion, then I think it would be fair to say that there has never been a subject that we so much needed to discuss as the subject of the far-reaching implications of Shiller’s Nobel-prize-winning research.

We are as a nation on the threshold of discovering some very exciting stuff. It’s a horrible reality that we are going to need to live through another price crash to get there. But it takes what it takes. And the good here is 50 times as good as the bad here is bad. So we just have to hang in there and do our best to take things in a positive direction.

My sincere take.

Loose Screws (or Not?) 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:

Rob,

I just asked for one example. Since you said buy and hold never worked, you should have a long list. Just give us one person. It should be easy for you.

That’s like asking for one example of someone who made a mistake by driving drunk. The answer is — “every single person who ever did it.”

We should be permitting honest posting on the last 38 years of peer-reviewed research at every investing discussion board and blog on the internet, without a single exception.

So says Rob Bennett, in any event.

I naturally wish you all good things.

Sober Driving Advocate 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:

“But I do not believe that the market is efficient.”

And it doesn’t matter whether it is efficient or not.

A buy and hold investor will receive the market return (minus very low costs) over any given period.

Investors as a whole will receive the market return (minus higher costs) over any given period.

The buy and hold investor will get a higher investment return than investors as a whole.

If buy and hold doesn’t work then investing doesn’t work.

John Greaney was telling people that the safe withdrawal rate was 4 percent at a time when it really was 1.6 percent. A failed retirement is a serious life setback. I believe that we all should be trying to get the numbers right in retirement studies that we publish. I think that accuracy and honesty matter a great deal.

Sue me.

Stickler-for-Honesty-and-Accuracy-in-Retirement-Studies Rob