Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently put to a discussion of a blog entry at this site:
It doesn’t matter, even if you are right. Not one bit. Because everyone thinks you are a complete ass and you will be long forgotten when someone actually does anything semi-productive with the vague notions you have been spewing for 10+ years.
You’re wrong, What.
You pretend to think I am an ass. You are in a tiny minority. When I go to the Financial Bloggers Conferences, I meet lots of people. Not one of them has ever indicated in any way to suggest that he or she thinks I am an ass.
People are EMBARRASSED. That much is so.
People are SCARED. That much is so.
People are CONFUSED. That much is so.
That’s not at all the same thing as thinking I am an ass.
I have seen a parallel case showing how this will turn out. My site host (SiteSell) is owned by a fellow named “Ken Evoy.” He is a smart guy and he came up with some ideas for how to get traffic on the internet that were ahead of their time. His ideas worked for a good number of years. People LOVED him. I never followed his system because it didn’t make sense for what I am trying to do with my site. But I certainly noticed how much people loved the guy. It was over the top.
The Evoy system no longer works since Google came out with its Panda and Penguin changes. People don’t say “Oh, Evoy had good ideas but Google has changed.” Hardly anyone does that. There is one group, smaller than before, that continues to love him to this day. That group says that Panda and Penguin don’t affect the system despite a mountain of evidence to the contrary. Another group now hates the guy with a burning passion. Their businesses have failed. They blame him.
Evoy is John Bogle.
Bogle is very smart. Bogle did things no one before him was able to do. Bogle deserves to be lauded as a hero. I laud him as a hero and always will. But I do that with an appreciation of the one thing he got wrong. Those who today laud him without an appreciation of the thing he got wrong are going to turn on him after the next price crash. I OPPOSE that. I think that’s a mistake. But I cannot control the world. I am virtually sure that that is what is going to happen.
I am not certain to succeed. But the risk for me is not the risk you point to. If people reach a point where they are willing to hear the realities of stock investing, I have the only site on the internet with 11 years of material exploring those realities. My site will go viral if a good percentage of the population opens up to the message. I am not worried about what happens to me in that event. In that event, I won’t have to file any legal papers to enjoy a $500 million payday. I will have multiple parties pushing the money on me, asking me to take it fast to help them with their guilt feelings.
My risk is that people are going to become excessively disillusioned with Buy-and-Hold. Valuation-Informed Indexing is Buy-and-Hold with one change. If people come to hate Buy-and-Hold with a burning passion, their emotionalism may cause them to tune out Valuation-Informed Indexing as well on the grounds that they just cannot bear to hear about anything that even reminds them of Buy-and-Hold.
If you were smart, you would join me in doing what you can to insure that that doesn’t happen. People don’t hate Buy-and-Hold today. So, if the Buy-and-Holders joined forces with me, we could stop the next crash from happening and all would be well on about 20 different fronts. But I obviously don’t control what people do. I am not expecting the Buy-and-Holders to help out. I hope they will. I urge them to. But I understand that that part of this is out of my hands.
I think you are wrong in your take as to how things will play out. I think you are being emotional once again. You are so ashamed of what you have done over the 11 years that you would rather see the entire planet go to hell over seeing Rob Bennett get any acknowledgment for the amazing work he has done over these past 11 years.
That’s on you, What. Your hate doesn’t just hurt me. It hurts you too. In very, very serious ways. It so blinds you that you cannot even see how much it is hurting you. All I can do is type out those words and hope that they cause some melting of your heart. I have said many times that I am happy to help you in any possible way and I of course stand by those words today. If you are too filled with false pride to accept my help, then that’s just the way it is. It makes me very sad. But there’s not one darn thing I can do to change the situation if that is indeed what the situations is (all signs indicate that it is).
I wish you well, man. I will keep on saying that with a hope that one of the times I say it the message will get through to a part of you that remains capable of hearing it.
Rob
The Deleted plop contributor says
Rob said:”You’re wrong, What.
Rob said: “You pretend to think I am an ass. You are in a tiny minority. When I go to the Financial Bloggers Conferences, I meet lots of people. Not one of them has ever indicated in any way to suggest that he or she thinks I am an ass.
People are EMBARRASSED. That much is so.
People are SCARED. That much is so.
People are CONFUSED. That much is so.
That’s not at all the same thing as thinking I am an ass.”
Rob, most people will not call someone an ass to their face. However, we can see the real thoughts when people can post on boards. We can all give you thousands of links in which we can show you what people really think about you and I am sure you have seen many of them. To the opposite, we do not see that level of support in your favor. Look at this board. You don’t have numbers of people leaving positive comments. Your people talking section is not as positive as you claim and in many situations you have people that don’t really know you or you have twisted their responses.
No, people are not embarrassed, confused or scared. They just won’t tell you their true feelings to your face as we still live in a somewhat polite society.
No, we are not hurting, but you clearly are. No, we do not need your help, but I don’t think we can help you as most of us are not experts in the field of mental health. All we can do is ask you to seek out treatment.
Rob says
We disagree, Deleted.
I wish you the best of luck in all your future life endeavors in any event.
Rob
The Deleted plop contributor says
Rob said:”In that event, I won’t have to file any legal papers to enjoy a $500 million payday. I will have multiple parties pushing the money on me, asking me to take it fast to help them with their guilt feelings.”
That ranks near the top of some of the most delusional comments you have ever made.
By the way, is this your revised retirement plan?
Rob says
I don’t think it is delusional, Deleted. I don’t believe that I am going to have to file papers to get the $500 million.
Is there anyone who objects to the millions that Steve Jobs earned? Or the millions that Peyton Manning earned? Or the millions that the Beatles earned?
This is bigger than anything that Steve Jobs or Peyton Manning or the Beatles did. It’s not even a close call.
We are talking about reducing the risk of stock investing by 70 percent. We are talking about bringing an end to the economic crises that for 140 years now have required us to rebuild our economic system every 40 years or so. People are sick of stock investing risk and people are sick of economic crises. Not one person is going to object to seeing the guy who brought it all to an end pocketing $500 million for his troubles.
It’s not a revised retirement plan. It’s the one I have been following for many years now.
Please read the book Passion Saving. I discuss this concept in the book. I say that, once you obtain a high level of financial independence, it frees you to do amazing things with your life because you don’t have to hold yourself back in the ways necessary when you are employed by a big corporation.
Jack Bogle holds himself back today. Bill Bernstein holds himself back today. Wade Pfau holds himself back today. I don’t.
That’s the difference. That’s why I was able to publish the first peer-reviewed research showing people how to reduce the risk of stock investing by 70 percent. Wade was amazed by that. He kept looking at the numbers and saying “This cannot possibly be so! And yet it is so! I keep thinking I am missing something! But it really is so!”
What Wade was missing is that people who have corporate jobs are compromised. I’m not because I achieved a high level of financial freedom before I entered this field.
People become liberated to do amazing things when they achieve a high level of financial freedom early in life. The subtitle of the book is: “The Path to Plentiful Free Time and SOUL-SATISFYING WORK.” All of this is according to plan.
I wish you all good things, old friend.
Rob
The Deleted plop contributor says
Rob said:”Is there anyone who objects to the millions that Steve Jobs earned? Or the millions that Peyton Manning earned? Or the millions that the Beatles earned?”
They earned the money, you haven’t earned anything and have stated that people will give you the money out of guilt. If you want to earn money, get a job.
The rest of your post is just egotistical blatherings.
Rob says
you haven’t earned anything
We disagree, Deleted.
That’s two times in one thread!
Why do these sorts of things keep happening to us?
Rob
Rob says
that people will give you the money out of guilt.
We all have a Get Rich Quick urge.
And we all also have a desire to live lives of integrity.
The humans have both good and bad in them.
That’s my sincere take re this important matter in any event.
My best wishes to you, man.
Rob
Sanity says
Sell in May and go away.
One example of specific, actionable investment advice. One more than will be found anywhere on this site. That will be 500 million dollars.
Rob says
The check is in the mail, Sanity.
Take care, old buddy.
Rob
The Deleted plop contributor says
Rob,
Why don’t you come up with a list of respected financial bloggers or advisors that also be acceptable to your detractors and then ask the question as to whether or not you are making an ass of yourself. In fact, you could create some kind of online survey.
Rob says
I’ve spoken to hundreds of experts in this field, Deleted. Nearly every one tells me the same basic story.
In private, they say that they LOVE, LOVE, LOVE the idea of being able to tell their clients what they truly believe about stock investing.
In public, they want no part of it. They have seen the millions of acts of intimidation that the Buy-and-Hold Mafia have employed to keep investors from learning what the academic research says and they want no part of it. (I have of course not personally seen millions of acts of intimidation but I have seen tens of thousands just in a few small internet communities — the total number of acts of intimidation that have been employed since Shiller published his research in 1981 is obviously in the millions).
Once Bogle gives his “I Was Wrong” speech and it is is written up on the front page of the New York Times, there will obviously be no problem. No one is going to be afraid of being sued or of having his career destroyed once the big newspapers have written about the decades-long Campaign of Terror against those who prefer research-based strategies over the pure Get Rich Quick approach and once they have seen that the vast majority of us oppose these ugly tactics in no uncertain terms.
We are in a Catch-22 today, Deleted. 90 percent of us want to hear the truth about stock investing. But the 10 percent of you Goons possess a power far greater than your numbers should provide you because you are utterly ruthless in the tactics you employ. Bogle is obviously afraid of you. Benrstein is obviously afraid of you. Burns is obviously afraid of you. Pfau is obviously afraid of you.
My view is that any “expert” who fails to say publicly what he truly believe about the subject matter in which he possesses expertise because he is afraid of what Goons will do to him if he does is not a true expert. I feel for these people. But, if they do not possess the courage to stand up to you, they need to find a new way of making a living. Pretending that there is some mystical blue pixie dust that is going to cause the stock market to start behaving in a manner in which never before in history it has behaved is just not cutting the mustard. True experts tell the truth REGARDLESS of how much it may hurt the feelings of the social misfits among us.
The investing field is 100 percent corrupt today. We cannot trust anything that anyone says until you Goons have been put in prison and as a society we have thereby sent the message that the same standards of ethics that already apply in every other field of human endeavor are going to be made applicable in the investing advice field as well.
We don’t need surveys. We already have thousands of researchers and economists and academics and journalists and bloggers and investing experts who know what the last 32 years of academic research says about the subject of stock investing. We need prison sentences for those who employ death threats and board bannings and defamation and threats to get academic researchers fired from their jobs to keep the word from getting out. Prison sentences for those who have violated our laws send a very different message than surveys. It is prison sentences we need for the millions who have expressed a desire to learn the realities to feel safe exploring and discussing these issues in a serious way.
I wish you all good things, my soon-to-be-prison-dwelling friend.
Rob