Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently posted to another blog entry at this site:
Rob,
The crisis has come. The Wall Street Con Men ™ have of course, rumaged their lapels, and pooled together to provide 1 BILLION untraceable, untaxable U.S. dollars to you, to ensure a quick settlement. It is already in your bank account. The sun rises over 160 N Hatcher. You roll over, wipe the sleep from your eyes, and the day begins. Rob, please describe for us the typical day of a Valuation Informed Billionaire. I’m dying to hear what it is that you intend to do with yourself!
I’m going to use the $500 million number, not the $1 billion number.
I intend to use 5 percent ($25 million) to finance a number of blogs that will further develop the Valuation-Informed Indexing concept. My guess is that it might work to give $100,000 to each of 250 bloggers.
I intend to use another 5 percent to promote this blog all over the internet. That will solve that nasty problem that you refer to from time to time of there not being enough comments at the blog entries at this site.
I intend to take over control of the Bogleheads Forum and set it up here as a sub-domain. That will also help with the comments.
I would like to work out an arrangement with Motley Fool where I would write a newsletter on Valuation-Informed Indexing that they would publish and promote. I would like to have a weekly column there that would appear on the front page of the site and bring more traffic here.
I of course will publish the book — Investing for Humans: How to Get What Works on Paper to Work in Real Life.
After publishing the investing book, I will look for a big-name publisher for my saving book, Passion Saving: The Path to Plentiful Free Time and Soul-Satisfying Work.
I view those two books as part of a trilogy. When I am caught up with work on the saving and investing side, I will get to work on a book on career growth, The Self-Directed Life. I haven’t finalized a sub-title for that one yet.
I intend to do a lot of speeches. I love interacting with people. I intend to do a weekly podcast. I could see becoming active in FinCon. I believe that the internet changes the world of personal finance in a big and positive way. I want to be part of efforts to develop blogs that make a difference.
I expect to work for the passage of legislation that will protect internet posters from Goons and that will hold accountable site owners who know about Goon activity at their sites and fail to take action to deal with it.
I also expect to set up a system whereby internet communities concerned with personal finance issues help the public to identify the good guys, a Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval sort of thing. I believe that lots of people in this field want to do good work but feel pressured to engage in unethical activities because others are doing it and it gives them a marketing edge. People should be able to promote themselves as honest and as holistic in their approach. They need a respected authority site to identify them as such for their claims to be meaningful to everyday people.
My expectation is that I will continue doing this work until I die. I would like my two boys to get involved in the business as I get older.
I want to explore the Goon issue in more depth with both my Valuation-Informed Indexing friends and my Buy-and-Hold friends. The Goon issue really is the key to everything. People don’t like to talk about it because they view it as yucky. It IS yucky in its way. But it is also the key to long-term investing success. We ALL have a Get Rich Quick urge within us. It is that GRQ urge that makes stock investing risky. We are on the verge of discovering that reality. Once we do, 80 percent of the investing project will be helping people to develop tools to overcome the GRQ urge within, to avoid goonishness at all costs. Behavioral Finance is the future in this field, both on the investing side and on the saving side. I am pretty darn sure of that one.
People like Bogle and Bernstein and Burns and so on should be looking at my interactions with you Goons and writing about what they tell us about the pitfalls of stock investing. They are afraid to do so. They created a monster with their promotion of Buy-and-Hold. But this is where the action is. People don’t need to study annual reports in the days of indexing. People need to worry about becoming so emotional that they overlook the need to adjust their stock allocation and thereby keep their risk profile roughly constant. With the internet, we now can identify the rationalizations that people use to fool themselves Everyone in this field should be writing and talking about that aspect of the story on a daily basis.
I think that pretty much covers it. My sense is that the agenda outlined above will keep me more than busy for the remaining days of my time here on Planet Earth.
My best wishes to you and yours, my long-time Goon friend.
Rob
Evidence Based Investing says
I intend to take over control of the Bogleheads Forum and set it up here as a sub-domain.
The owners of the Bogleheads forum will not sell or give you the forum.
Rob says
They are not going to give it to me today, Evidence. I think that much is more than fair to say.
I am talking about after the next crash. The next crash changes things.
You have to come to an understanding of some basic realities to figure out where things are headed.
I do not believe that the current owners of the Bogleheads Forum are bad people. And I certainly do not think that they are dumb people. I think that they are smart and good people. Okay? That’s my core premise. Everything else I say follows from that belief.
I believe that the owners of the Bogleheads Forum are wrong about the need for price discipline (long-term timing) when buying stocks. Smart and good people sometimes get things wrong, no? That’s what I believe has happened here.
Those smart and good people suspect that they may be wrong re price discipline (long-term timing). They are not sure that they are wrong. In fact, they still follow Buy-and-Hold strategies themselves. So I think it would be fair to say that they think it more likely than not that following Buy-and-Hold strategies will produce good long-term results. They are sincere in their advocacy of Buy-and-Hold. But they are not without inner doubts. That’s why we have seen so much friction. Their doubts trouble them. They very, very much want to silence those doubts. And this Rob Bennett fellow won’t shut the heck up about them. That’s why they are not so crazy in love with this Rob Bennett fellow at this particular moment in time.
What happens after the crash?
After the crash, the floodgates open. People will give up their feelings of embarrassment and shame and become determined to get things back on the right track. It won’t just be the Valuation-Informed Indexers who will do that. It will be the Buy-and-Holders doing that too. We are all on the same side. We are all in this together. We all need to know the realities of stock investing. After we experience the next crash, we are going to see that. Everything is going to change. The Buy-and-Holders did not intend to cause the Second Great Depression and, when they see that that is where we are headed, they are going to change their behavior in whatever ways are required to pull us back to a good place.
At that point the owners of the Bogleheads Forum are not going to be resisting my efforts to take over the forum. They are going to be encouraging them. They are going to be asking me to take over the forum. We are going to be friends. We are all in this together. We all want the same things. There is no reason why we shouldn’t be friends. It makes no sense to play it any other way.
I say that I am going to take over the forum because I am trying to help.
Say that we open every investing board and blog on the internet to honest posting following the crash. That’s going to be a huge step. But we are not instantly going to know the answer to every possible question. There are questions that I have not been able to answer in these 13 years. There are almost without a doubt things that I have gotten wrong. There are questions that have not even occurred to me. We are going to need to be exploring all those questions.
The Valuation-Informed Indexers cannot do the job alone. We need the Buy-and-Holders helping us out. The Buy-and-Holders have different beliefs and different life experiences. We need to add those to the mix to make sense of things. I am uniquely qualified to run a board that permits and encourages honest posting from both sides. I have been arguing for 13 years that the Valuation-Informed Indexers must be permitted to post honestly. But I have for that entire time-period also made a point that the Buy-and-Holders must be permitted and encouraged to post their honest views. I am the only one who can say that, Evidence. It’s not my intent to brag. I am just explaining where things stand re this matter.
When we are speaking as friends, we will be able to talk about all sorts of questions in a very different spirit. It could be that we will all participate in a discussion in which it would become evident that I am not the best person to run the board. Perhaps I will be too busy with other things or something. If that happens, we will make a different decision. Good for us! We will do what we think is right. What else can we do?
The point that I am making when I say that it is my intent to take over the Bogleheads Forum is that I think that the board community there must be permitted to work its will. The board community has made clear on numerous occasions that it wants honest posting to be permitted. It is an act of financial fraud for the current owners to reject that 100 percent proper demand. When honest posting is banned, the board becomes a corrupt enterprise. That must change. That will change. That’s the point.
Once the owners of that board committed financial fraud, they set a trap for themselves that they cannot escape. I have been trying to help them out to the extent that they can be helped. I will continue to do that. I cannot force them to help themselves. If they are bound and determined to completely destroy themselves, I guess we are going to see them completely destroy themselves.
But you are never going to see me endorse their acts of self-destruction. I want to help in any way that I can. I want to help the owners of the board. And I want to help the board community to which they have done so much harm. That’s where I am coming from and that’s why I have formed an intent to take over that board following the next price crash. When I take over operation of the Bogleheads Forum, I help every single person involved. I naturally want to do that. So I intend to pursue that goal with a good bit of determination.
I hope that helps you to understand things a little bit better.
I naturally wish you all the good things that this life has to offer a person.
Rob
Anonymous says
Why the Bogleheads forum and not other forums?
Rob says
One reason is that it is so big. The Bogleheads Forum is the largest investing forum on the internet that I know about.
Another reason is that the board community there has on many occasions expressed a strong desire that honest posting be permitted. So we already have the community on board.
A third reasons is that the Bogleheads Forum has a long history of trying to deal with these issues. I put my first post to that forum on the SWR issue back in July 2005. We have had THOUSANDS of threads at that forum on The Great Debate stuff in the years since. So there is an intense and longstanding interest there in getting this stuff resolved.
Fourth, there are a good number of top-name experts who post there. Bogle. Bernstein. Swedroe. Ferri. Wade Pfau has posted there. In fact, Wade and I linked up because of what he learned about safe withdrawal rates from reading my posts there. These experts can help us spread the word about our findings. So it makes all the sense in the world to conduct our discussions there.
We also have the ability to question those experts. So, for example, I have said that Bogle’s claim that it is never necessary to lower your stock allocation by more than 15 percent is based on a number (the 15 percent number) that “he pulled out of his backside.” We should be asking Bogle where he got that number if he claims that he did not in fact pull it out of his backside. Since he is available at the forum and appears at the annual meeting, that’s the perfect place to put him on the hot seat.
Finally, Valuation-Informed Indexing is the next step in the development of Bogle’s ideas re investing. So it makes all the sense in the world to discuss VII there, where lots of people who are informed re his ideas congregate. VII is the new Buy-and-Hold, it is Buy-and-Hold 2.0. People interested in the further development of Bogle’s ideas congregate there already. Why not take advantage of that in choosing a place to do work to further develop the ideas?
Rob