Set forth below is the text of excerpts of an e-mail sent to me by Ken Evoy, owner of the SiteSell.com web hosting company, on April 16, 2004:
Hey Rob,
I can see you’re excited about potential business in this!
First, thanks for jumping in with those posts. They’ve been excellent!!
I believe, like you, that there is an opportunity here.
Not in stock investing, there’s just too much out there.
ETFs provide thinner air, but still pretty competitive.
Focusing on showing folks how to allocate resources optimally is not a bad (free) place to start. Lots of room for great discussions and folks should be able to establish strong passive portfolios just doing that.
I think, though, that the bigger business opportunity goes beyond that..
With investing, it could/should be possible to provide “the answers” to the test. And, with some low-level understanding of the why and how, to deliver ONE “active” approach that works (perhaps do-able to various levels of risk or areas — Europe, USA, Canada).
It needs differentiating and fleshing out, but when I have an idea for anything, I don’t push it until I see the idea sticking and growing by itself, while I find out more info that confirms the need/viability.
We’d need to establish a one-year track record, something that I’ll be doing when I actually start investing (there were times when that horizon got farther and farther away, but now getting closer).
In a nutshell…
I’m toying with the idea of this being a new product. It depends on where I end up at.
We’d need an academic to help with what I’ve been doing, and to stress-test what I’ve been doing.
And we’d need one person, perhaps you(?), to drive content and marketing, to be “the guy.”
The actual concept needs to find its unique niche — that should reveal itself over the next couple of months.
Your thoughts?
Thanks again for all that you’ve contributed!
All the best,
Ken
Based on Ken’s advice, it looks like you need an academic guy, or some expert, to be your spokesperson. Does anyone come to mind?
I have a feeling that there might be someone who could help but I can’t quite bring the name to my mind at this moment. It’s on the tip of my tongue.
I’ll get back to you if it comes to me, Anonymous.
Take good care, man.
Rob
You sent tens of thousands of unsolicited VII emails. Are you CURRENTLY in contact with any of those people?
Not on a daily basis.
I had scores and scores of academic researchers respond to my e-mail by asking: “What can I do to help?”
People are afraid. They have seen what the Wall Street Con Men and their Internet Goon Squads do go those who dare to “cross” them. A lot of these people have families to feed, as was the case with Wade Pfau. Their fear of speaking honestly about what the peer-reviewed research says is not exactly difficult to understand.
I intend to send follow-up e-mails to all 30,000 of the academic researchers following the next price crash. There are lots of people who love this country, Anonymous. They will stand together following the next price crash. Once they do that, Buy-and-Hold is history.
It’s just a matter of time. The behavior that we have seen over the past 14 years is not the sort of behavior that you see among people who remain confident of the strategy they are pushing on people. Buy-and-Hold is going down and the sooner the better for Valuation-Informed Indexers and Buy-and-Holders alike.
Can you wait for the next crash?
Are you in some kind of hurry to see things happen?
I used to be in a hurry. I see a need for quick action. But I have come to the conclusion that for effective action we are all going to have to wait until people can see the dangers of Buy-and-Hold in a concrete and personal way. So I have pulled back on my activities a good bit over the past few years.
I don’t feel 100 percent good about it. But I am made of flesh and blood too, Anonymous. The relentless personal attacks began to get to me a few years back. I need to hear more positive reactions to energize me. So my inclination today is to hold back a wee bit and wait for times to arrive in which the emotional fallback from telling the truth about the last 35 years of peer-reviewed research will not be so great.
I hope that makes at least a little bit of sense to you.
I naturally wish you all the best things that this life has to offer a person, my old friend.
Rob
Some dads work to support their families. Others wait around for something to happen.
Others still accept the call to serve their country when their country is in greater immediate need of their services.
This country provides great opportunities for families that work hard, as does mine. But if this country collapses, my family will be hurt in a very serious way. My mother lived through the Great Depression. She had to leave school to work to put food on the table when she was in eight grade and she never got over that pain; it is the reason why she pushed me so hard to succeed in school that I was one of few in my neighborhood who went to college much less law school.
There are millions of citizens of this country who today are putting their money aside to provide for their retirements, having no idea that the investing “strategy” they are following is a con designed to take as much money as possible out of their pockets and into the pockets of a small number of Wall Street Con Men. If those of us who are aware of the massive con do not put an end to it shortly after the onset of the next price crash, we will be likely be heading into the Second Great Depression. If stocks continue to perform in the future anything at all as they have always performed in the past, the Second Great Depression will be deeper and will last longer than the First Great Depression (the P/E10 level of the Buy-and-Hold bull market was FAR worse than the one that caused the First Great Depression).
The people of this country are tough and the people of this country are kind. They can overcome a lot. But they are entitled to honesty re what the last 35 years of peer-reviewed research says about what works in stock investing. They need to hear some honest voices if there is ever to be healing re the biggest (by a factor of 50) act of financial fraud in U.S. history.
It’s not even just the millions of middle-class families who need honesty. The Wall Street Con Men want out of the trap in which they today find themselves. Freakin’ Jack Bogle himself wants out. It was one of Jack’s honest statements that helped me understand why the numbers in Gtreaney’s study are so wildly off the mark. I myself would not have seen through the con had Jack Bogle not had a desire for honesty within him that found expression in his books and in his speeches.
The need for personal integrity is a widely felt need. You Goons feel it. You have been pretending that you do not in the hundreds of thousands of abusive posts that you have put forward over the first 14 years of our discussions over whether or not to permit honest posting on the last 35 years of peer-reviewed research. But it is clear to anyone paying close attention that you are lying. You are hurting because of your relentless abusiveness and your relentless criminality. There was a day when you aspired to something better. Each day that goes by in which those who live in fear of you fail to speak up to stop you, you feel a little worse about yourselves.
Not this boy.
I am there for my wife. I am there for my children. I am there for my fellow middle-class workers. I am there for the many good and smart people who work in this field and who long to feel free to do honest work again. I am there for the Wall Street Con Men. I am there for you Goons.
There is no conflict between my duty to support my family and my duty to serve my country. I support my family BY serving my country.
I have zero intention of using that $500 million check to buy rare Bob Dylan albums, Anonymous. That money is the fruit of the blood, sweat and tears that I have devoted to overcoming this massive act of financial fraud for 14 years now. And that money goes to my family. I have a funny hunch that that will be enough for them to somehow struggle by for a few years. It might even supply the slack needed for them to take in an extra week at the beach one or two times. We’ll see. I can imagine something like that happening.
Yes, I have a duty to support my family financially. I will fulfill that duty. Count it.
I also have a duty to serve my country by seeing that you Goons are placed in prison cells, where you belong. That duty is equally clear and even more important. There will be no middle-class families for anyone to support unless you Goons are placed in prison cells shortly following the onset of the next price crash (if not before!). That’s the primary duty. That’s the one that comes first.
I take my responsibilities seriously. I have said that I will do the work needed to insure that those who have posted in “defense” of Mel Lindauer and John Greaney and Jack Bogle spend a long time in prison cells so that those who live in the same country as they do and who have a natural desire to craft effective retirement plans can learn what they need to learn to do so without being intimidated into silence by the types of individuals who have long enjoyed the blessings of this country but who have given in to feelings of hate for the millions of middle-class workers who did the work that provides for those blessings.
I am no Numbers Guy, Anonymous. I have from time to time had to ask for help re the numbers-related stuff that has come up over the course of the past 14 years. We all have our strengths and weaknesses. I think it would be fair to say that my strength is that I understood the responsibilities that fell to those of us who have taken a look at the last 35 years of peer-reviewed research in this field long before most others who work in this field.
I am 100 percent confident that all the others were aware of those responsibilities on one level of consciousness. I have either been blessed or cursed with a keen awareness of how important it is that those responsibilities be fulfilled REGARDLESS of the level of abusiveness directed at those seeking to fulfill them. I think it would be fair to say that I have proven myself “special” in that regard, may God have mercy on my soul for whatever sins I have committed that caused Him in his great wisdom to bestow that “honor” on me.
Please don’t devote any further moments of your precious last few days of freedom worrying whether Old Farmer Hocus will satisfy his obligation to provide for his family. He’s doing it. This is how it is done. Wade Pfau’s family needed money. He did what he had to do to get it for them. Don’t think for two seconds that Wade isn’t aware somewhere in his heart that he did the wrong thing by getting the money his family legitimately needs by betraying his country.
Not one of us should ever have to make that choice. In a world in which the laws against financial fraud are being properly enforced, not one of us will ever again have to do so. In a world in which it is in all the papers how you Goons have been taken away in handcuffs, no one in this field is going to feel afraid to report honestly on what the last 35 years of peer-reviewed research tells us about safe withdrawal rates or about any other critically important investment-related topics.
I am going to do what I can to insure that I fulfill ALL my responsibilities. Count it.
And that’s all I can do. If my best efforts are not enough to get the job done, that’s God’s plan and I will have to accept it whether my feeble brain is capable of understanding it or not.
When my boys were small, I read to them before they went to sleep each night. Usually, we voted for adventure stories. But there were a few times when I felt obligated to read Bible stories. One time I read them the story of Abraham and Issac (God asks Abraham to put a stake through Issac’s heart). I was horrified by the story that I was telling as I was hearing the words come out of my mouth. At the end, I told my boys that this was the Bible and that it was the word of God and that they needed to learn its lessons to live their lives properly. And I added: “But your dad would never do that!”
I sometimes wonder if God was playing a little joke on me (if so, it’s not funny, God!) by placing me in circumstances in which I would be asked to place stakes in both of my boys’ hearts SLOWLY AND GRADUALLY over the course of the following 14 years since I was such a smarty pants as to question the way Abraham was asked to show his obedience.
Who knows? Maybe it’s all just coincidence. Maybe there is no God. Maybe it’s all just in my head.
Whether it is all just in my head or not, there are things that a person can do and there are things that a person cannot do. I had 40 binders in my basement in the days when I was putting together my retirement plan because we didn’t have clouds on which to store our stuff in those days and getting those darn numbers right mattered to me. The thought of deliberately telling lies about those numbers because some group of internet Goons intimidated me into doing so horrifies me. I can never become that person. It is not remotely possible that I will ever become that person even if I live as long as Abraham lived (Google tells me it was 175 years).
It’s not going to happen.
Nice try, though.
Take care, man.
Rob
If you don’t get the $500 million, what will your family do to get by?
Look in bushes for thrown-away coke bottles and take them to the store for the bottle return fee that applies in some states?
Take good care, old friend.
Rob
“If you don’t get the $500 million, what will your family do to get by?”
Live in a tiny house and forego vacations and the other stuff normal kids get.
“You’re on your own for college son, but Dad’s got big dreams for the future! BIG DREAMS!”
I wouldn’t include the sarcastic tone if I were the one saying it, Anonymous. But the THRUST of what you are communicating here is not too terribly off the mark.
I wrote my book on money management (Passion Saving: The Path to Plentiful Free Time and Soul-Satisfying Work) prior to the onset of the 14-year Campaign of Terror against our board and blog communities. Yet I addressed this issue in an indirect way in Chapter 12 of that book. I’ve always thought that that was sort of weird. It is not an issue that most people would address in a book on money management. But something in my head told me that it should be addressed in my book and so I spoke to it.
The book explains how to make use of one’s savings not to finance an old-age retirement but to finance a shift to a more fulfilling type of employment, a job that pays less in the early days but that stands a good chance of paying more in the long term because it is more aligned to one’s personal strengths. The other chapters explore in depth the considerations that need to be addressed in putting together a plan for making such a career shift. Chapter 12 deals with some of the personal issues, such as the effect that following such a path might have on one’s family.
One downside of the shift that I made (the book wasn’t only about my plan but I obviously used my thinking about the development of my own plan to guide my thinking on the general concept) is that you can never know for certain whether a plan is going to work financially. You can take care of hundreds of details and it could still fail in the flesh-and-blood world. You might assume that stocks will continue to generate returns of 6.5 percent real but the currency might be destabilized and there might be a time when the money we all have invested in stocks becomes worthless. What then? There is no plan that covers all eventualities.
I said in that chapter that the right thing to do is to do one’s absolute best to cover all eventualities — I believe that a husband and father has a responsibility to do that (not in all families, many are set up differently today, but this is how ours was set up through mutual agreement of my wife and me — her responsibility was to homeschool our children). So I fully accepted my responsibility to provide financially for four human beings but I also recognized that there was a tiny possibility that despite my extensive planning efforts things might fall through on the financial side.
That’s what has happened, at least for a time. I left my corporate job on August 1, 2000, and in the 16 years since I have brought in not one penny. So the plan did not work in one very important sense. I have an asset (this web site) worth many millions and I believe with something close to 100 percent confidence that I will be able following the next price crash to cash that asset in for many millions of dollars and thereby to provide financially for many generations of Bennetts. But the brutally clear reality of the day is that I have generated not one penny of financial support for my family in 16 years and this is my responsibility according to all involved.
What to do, what to do?
What I say in Chapter 12 is that, when this sort of thing happens, you have to accept that it is God’s will. I don’t refer to God. But I think the word is implicit in what I do say. I essentially say that we cannot plan for every eventuality, that we have a responsibility to plan for everything that we can anticipate but that it is beyond the power of humans to plan for every eventuality and that at some point you just have to accept that a good plan may not work out for reasons 100 percent beyond the control of the person who developed the plan and you just have to accept that as God’s will.
Now —
I believe that God loves us. So, when I say that something is God’s will, I am by implication saying that it is a good thing. I BELIEVE THAT IT WAS THE PLAN OF A LOVING GOD THAT I NOT EARN ONE PENNY IN 16 YEARS FROM THE AMAZINGLY GOOD AND IMPORTANT WORK THAT I HAVE DONE DURING THAT TIME. It drives me freakin’ nuts. I have some questions that I intend to put to this kind and loving God the next time I catch up with him. But this is what I believe.
It is sometimes impossible for us poor deluded humans to understand what God is up to, He does some things that to our minds do not seem good and loving AT ALL. But we just have to accept that there are things that we cannot understand and let it go. That’s the way it is. We can rage at God if we like. But it won’t change things for the better and it probably will change things for the worse for us to do so. We have to accept Gods’s will for us and try to let it go. So says Rob Bennett. I say it and so it must be so. (That’s a joke.)
This takes us back to the story of Abraham and Issac. I said out loud when I told that story to my boys that “Your dad would never do that.” I couldn’t tell the story without adding those words because I felt that it would be dishonest of me not to add that caveat. But the full and funny reality is that I have done something not so terribly different from what Abraham did. I didn’t put a literal stake through the hearts of my boys. But I have damaged their chances of getting a good start in life by making choices that have limited the amount of money that my wife and I can use to help get them started.
We are of course going to do all that we possibly can and that probably will be enough in the eyes of most people. But I will always know in my head that we might have done more if I had not been so darn stubborn as to stand up to you Goons and insist on my right (and the right of thousands of others) to post honesty on what the last 35 years of peer-reviewed research says re safe withdrawal rates and scores of other critically important investment-related topics.
I’ll give one example of how it works according to my assessment.
I mentioned in an earlier comment how my mother had to leave school in eight grade because her family needed her to work in a factory to help put food on the table. My mother loved school and she was greatly ashamed that she never finished eight grade. When she would go on dates, boys would ask her where she went to school. When she had to say that she worked in a factory, it pained her. She never got over this. She still talked about having to leave school in eighth grade when she was in her early 90s and preparing to die.
This changed my life in about 20 different ways. I went to college. Most of the kids who grew up in my neighborhood did not. Then I went to law school. That was rare for kids in my neighborhood. Then I took on all these various jobs as a result of going to college and law school. These things happened in my life because my mother had to leave school in eight grade and because she never forgot that pain and because she drilled into me and my brothers the importance of school because of that experience. We didn’t know why she was so crazy re the subject. I know now. It is clear to me now that I am older. When she was checking my homework every night and I knew that none of my friends were having their homework checked, I just figured that she was a nutcase and a big pain in the ass.
That was God’s plan. In my assessment. I could be wrong. But that’s what I truly believe.
God wanted Rob Bennett to go to law school. This was part of his grand plan. To make it happen, he had to take my mother out of school in eight grade. It caused her great pain. She lived through that pain while being influenced by it and thereby she played a role in seeing that God’s plan was fulfilled here on Planet Earth. My hope is that some of the sins that she surely committed during her time down here in the Valley of Tears will be overlooked because she was willing to submit to God’s will and play a role in seeing it fulfilled in the way in which it was fulfilled when I applied to and was accepted into law school.
So it is with my boys.
I never in a million years would have planned to be in the financial circumstances that I am in today as a result of my unwillingness to lie about the numbers that my friends use to plan their retirements. It’s not my plan. But it is God’s plan. I had a duty to create my own plan. Had I failed to do that, I would have sinned, in my assessment. But I had a plan, a good plan. My plan assumed that the laws of the United States would be promptly enforced when you Goons violated them with your death threats and your threats to get academic researchers fired from their jobs and with all the other garbage that you have thrown at the wall. I did good re the part of this that is my responsibility. Then I let it go. I have accepted God’s will for me and for my family re the part that God does not intend for me to control.
My boys could learn something from this that will cause them to do great things in some future day just as I ended up going to law school because of my mother’s pain when she was a girl. I don’t know what those great things will be. It would probably be foolish for me to speculate too much. My brain is not big enough for me to grasp God’s plan in detail. I just believe that there is one. If I stop believing that, I am not sure that I would be able to pull myself out of bed tomorrow morning. If I stop believing that, everything that happens in this world is random and without purpose and I cannot bear the pain that I often see playing out before my eyes.
Take it or leave it, that’s this boy’s story.
I have caused my wife pain. I have caused my boys pain. I hate the idea. I hate it, hate it, hate it. Just as much as Abraham hated driving a stake through his boy’s heart. But Abraham did what he felt he was required to do and I am in the process of doing what I believe that I am required to do and that’s that. Right or wrong (one never knows for absolute certain), I am just going to have to watch the thing play out to the end. I do not have it in me to play it any other way.
This is why people become alcoholics, you know? We never know. And sometimes the pain of not knowing becomes so great that we have to do something to dull that pain and drinking can do that for a time. So people make this crazy decision to become alcoholics. I have not become an alcoholic. But I was eating too many chocolate-chip cookies for a time an now I have a diabetes condition to deal with. So I am no better than all the alcoholics. The cookie thing is now under control and I continue on with life. But there’s been pain.
If that’s what you Goons want to hear, well here is the announcement. You Goons have caused the family of Old Farmer Hocus great pain. Good for you, you know? Heaven help us all.
But God is bigger than even Mel Lindauer and John Greaney and Jack Bogle and all the members of all their various Goon Squads all put together. That’s what I sincerely believe. God will take this to someplace good over time. I just have to exercise enough patience to watch it all play out. I am forbidden from ever letting hate enter my own heart. That’s a no-no. If I go there, I become a Goon myself and then all the “it will all work out for the best” stuff gets cancelled.
So that one is a big deal. But so long as I don’t make the fatal mistake of giving in to feelings of hate that I might be tempted to feel towards you Goons, all is cool. God will take care of me. I might end up destitute. That is within the realm of possibility. But even after I am officially declared destitute, it will all work out somehow. If not in this life, in the next. I am not in control. The Big Guy is in control. He calls the shots, I just carry out his orders for me to the best of my ability.
That’s it. That’s the deal. FOR ME. You are free to say that I need to take my meds. That’s on you. But what I have written here is my testimony. I will let me wife know about it. She may read it if she pleases (or she may elect not to read it if she pleases). I will let my boys know about it. I will let me priest know about it. The Big Guy already knows. I don’t need to read it to him. I might do so just because it’s something to talk about with him and I need to make an effort to stay in touch more frequently. But I think he knew all this before you posted your question. I am just one of the Big Guy’s many stenographers.
I hope this all makes at least a tiny bit of sense to you, my old friend.
I naturally wish you all the best that this life has to offer a person.
Rob
“Others still accept the call to serve their country when their country is in greater immediate need of their services.”
But I thought you just wrote that:
” So I have pulled back on my activities a good bit over the past few years.”
So what do you do everyday? Wake up and hope for a market crash so you can ‘get back to work’? Seems very sad.
Have your wife or kids put up a gofundme page. Seriously. They have it all, a unique story, innocent victims, a despicable villain (we know who that is) and ample proof that the story isn’t made up.
I do lots of things, Laugh. Some are public. Some are not.
There’s a new blog entry here every day. Most of them are pulled from my conversations with you Goons. Most people think that it’s crazy that I even speak with you Goons, much less write blog entries about our conversations. I don’t agree with those people. I think that that belief is rooted in a belief in the Buy-and-Hold Model for understanding how stock investing works, which was discredited by Shiller’s “revolutionary” (his word) finding that valuations affect long-term returns. I don’t agree with their premise that the market is efficient and that investors are rational. I believe that investors are human and thus highly emotional. That changes everything.
I often call you Goons “Goons.” Most people don’t approve of my decision to do that. They say: “oh, it serves no purpose to do that, calling people names is never a good ida.” I certainly agree that “Goon” is a name and as a general principle I certainly agree that calling people names is not a good idea. But I believe that the circumstances that apply in this particular case are unusual and that that reality needs to be taken into account when someone writing in this field is debating whether to call someone a “Goon” or not. It is my sincere belief at this point in time (I hope that I remain open to other ways of thinking re this matter and indeed re all matters) that calling you Goons “Goons” is indeed a good and necessary thing. I do not believe that I can achieve my goals, which I believe are important and to a large extent unselfish goals, without referring to your Goonish behavior as “Goonish behavior.”
Goonishness is sin. The two concepts are essentially synonymous. When we commit sins, we are messing ourselves up. That’s why God doesn’t want us to commit sins. He loves us and he doesn’t want us to cause ourselves misery. We are tempted to sin because we are imperfect creatures not fully capable of appreciating what is in our best interest. God sees things that we do not see and advises us to avoid the dumb stuff that hurts us. He labels self-destructive behavior “sin.” He direct us to knock off the funny business when he sees us messing up our lives by committing sins.
The Get Rich Quick urge is a sinful inclination possessed by every human and therefore by every stock investor. Shiller showed that we can come close to making stock investing risk disappear by avoiding the sin of thinking that there might be some mystical, magical alternate universe where it is not required of us always to practice price discipline when buying stocks.
The entire history of the stock market supports Shiller’s finding. There is zero evidence going the other way. But there IS this sinful inclination to adopt Get Rich Quick investing strategies and there is of course a mountain of money to be made promoting Buy-and-Hold and so stock investing in reality has always been a high-risk approach to investing. That ended in 1981 when Shiller published his Nobel-Prize-winning research showing that risk is variable and that investors seeking to keep their risk profiles roughly constant over time need to always, always, always take price into consideration when buying stocks.
The peer-reviewed research that I co-authored with Wade Pfau shows that taking the one step of considering valuations when setting one’s stock allocation reduces risk by 70 percent. Everyone wants to reduce risk. So our research would in a purely rational world have been featured on the front page of the New York Times within one week of its publication in a peer-reviewed journal.
It hasn’t happened.
As you Goons well know.
Why?
It hasn’t happened because the reporters and editors who work at the New York Times are sinners!
That’s a funny way of putting it. I of course get that. But when you boil away all the verbiage, that’s what it comes down to. The reporters and editors at the New York Times are sinners. They are Goons. They are drawn to Get Rich Quick strategies. They think that Buy-and-Hold is the cat’s pajamas. They think that Rob Bennett fellow who keeps talking about those darn errors in those darn Old School safe-withdrawal-rate studies should just give it a rest already and get with the program. What does he think, that he is better than all the rest of us?
I don’t think that I am better than all the sinners, Laugh. I am a sinner myself. I believed in Buy-and-Hold at one point in my life. I possess a Get Rich Quick urge. I had my money in stocks prior to the Summer of 1996 and I got excited one year when I counted all my winnings and pondered what a smart fellow I was for following a Buy-and-Hold strategy and for counting the “gains” that I had “earned” as being a good bit greater than 6.5 percent real.
I am not better than everyone else. But I have been placed in circumstances in which I have become better able than anyone else to see with clarity how our Get Rich Quick sinfulness hurts us all and I have thereby been given the opportunity to help millions of middle-class investors as well as myself by writing in great depth about this terrible sin that has caused so much human misery for so long a time now.
That’s it. It’s my job to point out this sin and to steer people away from it. I don’t call it “sin” because that sort of language would turn people off even more than the term that I do employ — Goonishness. But that’s what it comes to.
Doctors tell people not to smoke. They do this because smoking is self-destructive; it causes human misery and doctors know this to an extent even more than most of the rest of us know it. It could be said that they are calling the executives at the tobacco companies names when they point out that smoking causes cancer, they certainly are not approving of the promotion of smoking when they tell their tale of how smoking causes an early death. But they soldier on. They see it as their jobs to help people maintain their health and they know from looking at the evidence that smoking is not the way and so they say what they say even though it probably does indeed hurt the feelings of tobacco company executives for them to say it.
It is my job to warn people of the dangers of Get Rich Quick investing strategies. Buy-and-Hold is the purest and most dangerous Get Rich Quick investing strategy ever concocted by the human mind. ALL of the peer-reviewed research in this field shows that the worst mistake that an investor an make is to fail to exercise price discipline when buying stocks and the Buy-and-Holders say that there might be some alternate universe where that is not necessary, that we should just take their word for it even though 100 percent of the evidence as well as common sense points in the opposite direction. And of course they make millions as a result of these lies they shove down our throats on a daily basis.
I don’t buy it, Laugh. I think that people need to hear the truth about what the peer-reviewed research shows. I see it as my job to tell that truth. So I do that.
I don’t spend my hours wishing for a price crash. I spend my hours thinking up more effective ways to tell these truths. People don’t like it when I use the word “Goons” and yet I need to point out the dangers of the pure Get Rich Quick mindset to be able to do my job effectively and so I need to call cancer “cancer” I spend my hours trying to come up with better ways of getting the job done.
That’s why I engage in conversations with you Goons. You are like all the rest of us in that you possess a Get Rich Quick urge that causes you to be attracted to the Buy-and-Hold Lies pushed so relentlessly by the Wall Street Con Men for profit. There’s something different about you, though. You don’t smoke a cigarette now and again, like some. You smoke four packs a day. You are the freakin’ addicts. You take the Get Rich Quick concept to places that it has never been taken before. You are willing to go to prison over it. Get Rich Quick/Buy-and-Hold is your life, your religion. You are strident about it. You are obsessed over it.
It is my job to try to understand better the roots of that obsession. I need to come to understand on a deeper and deeper level where the Get Rich Quick urge comes from and how it manifests itself and how the humans can go about the business of getting it under control. The behavior of you Goons can provide us all with clues as to the answers to those questions if only we go to the trouble to mine the insights.
It’s hard work. It’s emotionally draining. But it is the work that a loving God has directed me to do. So I work it as hard as I can. And then I let it go.
It doesn’t take me all day to craft the responses to your questions and comments that I post as daily blog entries here. But the writing of the words is only a small part of the job. There’s a lot more to it than happens behind the scenes.
I need to read books on investing and on psychology and on philosophy and even on religion to get the bottom of what is going on. Sometimes I need to go on walks to sort through things in my mind. Sometimes I need to talk things over with others. Sometimes I need to play songs that have something to say about these matters, sometimes several times before the insights that I am seeking kick in. It’s hard work.
That’s what I spend my time on. I aim to go deeper and deeper and deeper.
The results of these efforts are here for all to see. No charge. This is the wonder of the internet. I am not being sarcastic. I view this as a magical reality. I love the internet. Not the hate that you Goons bring to the table. But I am greatly excited about the power to do good that this new communications medium brings to the world.
Shiller showed that human emotion is 80 percent of the investing story. Before he came along, people thought that it was perhaps 10 percent of the story. Shiller opened up a new continent of insights for us all to mine together.
No one who came before me attempted to mine these insights to the full. Even Shiller only hinted at the possibilities. I have for 14 years now attempted to take Shiller’s “revolutionary” finding as far as it can be taken by the human mind. I build one insight on top of another, over and over and over again.
This requires looking at things that no one in this field has ever looked at before. Most investment advisors don’t bother to spend much time studying psychology texts or listening to songs. They think that I am a fool to do that. I think that they are fools not to do so. I see that stuff as being where the action is today. All of the non-emotional stuff has been studied in great depth. There are not many new insights to be developed looking at that stuff. But the emotional side of the investing equation is little studied. There is a wealth of insights to be mined looking at how investing truly works according to the last 35 years of peer-reviewed research in this field.
I spend my time going deeper and deeper re all the stuff that matter greatly but that has been ignored until now. You see the work product in my daily blog entries and in my weekly columns. But it takes a lot more time than what it takes to write the words to develop the insights advanced in the blog entries and in the weekly columns.
I hope that that all meets with your approval, my Goon friend.
Of course I am going to continue walking this wonderful path that I have found for myself whether it happens to meet with your approval or not. I like you. But I don’t aim to please you. I aim to please myself and the loving God who put me here and I of course aim to help the millions of middle-class workers whom that loving God also put here. It would make me happy to see you advance words of approval because it would make both of our lives go easier if you were to do so. But I don’t intend to let your decision as to whether or not to advance words of approval to influence my decision re what path to follow in any way, shape or form.
I wish you the best of luck in all your future life endeavors regardless of what path YOU choose to follow, my fellow traveller in this journey through the Valley of Tears.
Rob
Have your wife or kids put up a gofundme page. Seriously. They have it all, a unique story, innocent victims, a despicable villain (we know who that is) and ample proof that the story isn’t made up.
This one got past the Censoring Board because of the “despicable villain” part. I am a sucker for anything even the slightest bit silly or lighthearted. You Goons can post a threat to cut my wife and children up into tiny little pieces and if you include a line that evidences a tiny bit of a fun-loving spirit, I tell the Distinguished Members of my Censoring Board to take a nap, that I would prefer to see that one show up.
I am not aware of the existence of a GoFundMe page. Of course, if my wife were of a mind to go to the trouble to set one up, she probably would also be of a mind not to tell me about it. So it is at least theoretically possible that she has set one up and that I just am not aware of its existence at this point in time.
Please let me know if you research the question and come up with something juicy, Anonymous. This is something that my Distinguished Team of Divorce Lawyers needs to know about.
Oops!
Take good care, man.
Rob
Once there was a man whose house was flooding. He climbed onto the roof of his porch watching the water rise. His neighbor towed by offering to take him to safety but the owner said no, God would take care of him.
The water rose and forced him to his roof. Another neighbor rowed by offering to help. No, the owner said. He had faith in God.
Finally as the water was lapping the top of his roof a helicopter flew by and the pilot demanded that the owner climb the rope to safety. No, said the owner. My God will keep me safe.
The owner drowned and upon meeting God in heaven asked why He did not come to his rescue and instead let him die.
“Are you kidding?” asked God. “I sent you two boats and a helicopter.”
He probably called them goons.
I’m not able to post dishonestly re the numbers that my friends are using to plan their retirements, Curious. It’s not in me.
We are just going to have to wait and see how things go following the next price crash.
I hope that we can remain friends regardless. I know that from my end we certainly can.
My best wishes to you.
Rob
You miss the point.
What if your interpretation of the data and its implications–which you admit is at odds with everyone including Shiller himself–is flawed?
What if you are wrong? Is that not possible?
I’ve said that it is possible hundreds of times. You know that. Why do you play dumb re something like this?
Nothing that I have said is at odds with Shiller. Everything that I have ever written re stock investing follows from Shiller’s “revolutionary” (his word) findings of 1981. Every single word.
Shiller doesn’t spell things out the way I do. I agree with that much. I spell things out in much greater detail and with much more clarity and detail. I say things that Shiller has never said publicly. But everything that I say follows from what Shiller showed with his research. It’s just a question of proceeding down the logic chain step by step by step by step.
You should be asking why Shiller doesn’t proceed down the logic chain the way I do? Why doesn’t Shiller publicly discuss the implications of his research? Why is there not one word in Shiller’s book addressing the question of what investors should do with their money given his revolutionary findings? That’s odd. People buy investing books to learn what to do with their money. Why does Shiller address every question BUT the most important one of all?
And why don’t people like you ask him that question?
You don’t ask him because you want to remain in your fantasyland where Buy-and-Hold works. It would cause you pain if Shiller were to speak clearly and honestly to the question of what investors should do with their money as a result of his “revolutionary” findings of 1981.
Shiller doesn’t address these questions because he understands that it would hurt you and because he understands that you would attack him the same way you attack me if he did so and, like all the other humans, he prefers not to be attacked so viciously.
Shiller is doing the right thing for Shiller. Is he doing the right thing for you? Is he doing the right thing for Bogle? Is he doing the right thing for Pfau? Is he doing the right thing for his profession? Is he doing the right thing for his country?
You know what I think, Curious. I think we have to violate the crazy Social Taboo that has been holding us back for 35 years now. We now know how stock investing works. That’s wonderful. That’s a huge advance. But it is an advance that is doing us little practical good because, while we now know intellectually how stock investing works, we don’t talk about what we know and as a result we don’t know it with enough clarity and confidence to take much advantage of what we know.
I want to take full advantage of what we have learned from the past 35 years of peer-reviewed research. I want to leave Buy-and-Hold in the dust and move on to something a lot better. That’s where you and I differ. That’s why we are working at cross purposes. You want to protect Buy-and-Hold from effective challenges and I want to blow Buy-and-Hold up and move on to something better, the something that would have become the dominant investing model way back in 1981 had only there never been a Buy-and-Hold. If we didn’t have these rich and powerful Wall Street Con Men protecting this Get Rich Quick approach, we all would have become Valuation-Informed Indexers a long time ago.
Say that I am wrong. Is there any harm that could possibly come of it? I sure cannot see what that might be. If I am wrong, there are thousands and thousands of Buy-and-Holders happy to point out any flaws in my arguments. So my ideas will never catch on if I am wrong. The reality is quite to the contrary. If I am wrong, that will come out and the showing that I am wrong will make people more confident in Buy-and-Hold. If I am wrong and the Buy-and-Holders are right, opening every investing discussion board and blog to honest posting will prove to be a plus for Buy-and-Hold. Which is a good thing presuming that I am wrong and the Buy-and-Holders are right.
The only thing that could possibly justify a ban is that the Buy-and-Holders worry that I might be right and that Valuation-Informed Indexing might prevail in the marketplace of ideas. That possibility represents a threat to the pocketbooks of the Wall Street Con Men and a threat to the pride of you Goons. You hate me with a burning hate not because you think that I might be wrong but because you have seen how many people are drawn to what I say until you Goons step in and destroy the reasoned conversations that people want to have with injections of insane abusiveness.
I will win in time. Because we live in a great country with great laws and great people and both common sense and 35 years of peer-reviewed research support me and nothing but threats of violence and career destruction support Buy-and-Hold. Buy-and-Hold is hanging on by a thread in the year 2016. Buy-and-Hold is going down. The sooner it goes down, the fewer lives you will have destroyed and the shorter will be your prison sentence. So we all benefit by letting the millions of middle-class people who need to know about the last 35 years of peer-reviewed research learn what they need to learn.
I wish that everyone were speaking out today, Curious. Shiller, sure. But not just Shiller. Everyone. The answer is not for me to stop speaking out. The answer is for Shiller and all the others to join me.
My take.
Rob
Sorry, I thought you were still contemplating the path that had led you to where you currently find yourself.
Might I suggest that the next time you find yourself in a contemplative mood, you try the following exercise:
Start with a statement of fact: I’m X years old, my net worth is Y, my business and approach to investing has produced XYZ since I’ve embarked upon this path. My family is (fully supportive/skeptical/doubtful/in full revolt) about both the wisdom of my decisions that have led to this and the long term outlook for the same.
Armed with that, build a simple hypothesis tree to determine the most likely drivers of this outcome:
A) There’s a vast conspiracy that’s developed among millions of individuals / institutions / corporations / other economic actors (each with their own diverse and conflicting financial interests) that is actively working in concert to undermine the success of your approach and subvert you personally.
B) Your beliefs about how markets work, and the implications of such, are mistaken, a fact that people who learn of them come to see rather quickly.
Then simply go through and list all of the things that have to be true in order to support either hypothesis.
I think it might be a revealing exercise, if undertaken in the spirit of true examination.
And might I suggest that while you analyze the results, you keep Occam’s Razor in the back of your mind.
I wish you good luck, Rob. I truly hope you find peace.
I certainly wish you the best of luck in all your future life endeavors, Curious.
It will all work out.
Take care, man.
Rob
I truly hope you find peace.
I don’t have perfect peace today.
But I know that I would have less peace if I agreed to post dishonestly re the numbers that my friends use to plan their retirements. I know that that is not the right road for me.
I have a good life. I am grateful for that. I would like to have more peace and I believe that someday I will. But I think that it makes more sense to be grateful for all the good things that I possess rather than to worry about the few that I do not possess.
More peace would be great. But at what cost?
The price that you Goons charge for peace is a price that I am not willing even to consider paying.
Rob
Armed with that, build a simple hypothesis tree to determine the most likely drivers of this outcome:
A) There’s a vast conspiracy that’s developed among millions of individuals / institutions / corporations / other economic actors (each with their own diverse and conflicting financial interests) that is actively working in concert to undermine the success of your approach and subvert you personally.
B) Your beliefs about how markets work, and the implications of such, are mistaken, a fact that people who learn of them come to see rather quickly.
Then simply go through and list all of the things that have to be true in order to support either hypothesis.
I think it might be a revealing exercise, if undertaken in the spirit of true examination.
Your descriptions of both Possibility A and Possibility B are slanted.
There is as much of a “conspiracy” for humans to believe that they are closer to having enough money to retire than they are as there is a “conspiracy” for humans to believe that they are getting enough exercise or that their diets are healthy enough. We all deceive ourselves on important questions every day of our lives.
The difference in the investing realm is that there was once thought to be scientific evidence showing that those deceptions didn’t matter and then it was discovered that in fact they matter a great deal indeed. An entire industry was built up around the now-discredited findings. We are today living through a process of working up the courage to get the new findings more widely discussed and accepted. It’s a Conspiracy of Ignorance.
Humans are flawed creatures. But they are not the cartoon characters that you make them out to be in the slanted description you employ to try to justify the Goon tactics you employ in your effort to perpetuate the ignorance that has caused so much human misery while enriching a small number of Wall Street Con Men. Human ignorance is not always the result of a conspiracy. But it is always something that we should all want to eradicate. My take.
Your description of Possibility B is of course a lie. I have had thousands of community members describe my work in this field as the most exciting work that they have come across. The fact that you feel a need to threaten either physical violence or career destruction to keep those people quiet shows the desperate circumstances in which those determined to “defend” the Buy-and-Hold “strategy” today find themselves. Yucko!
Rob
And might I suggest that while you analyze the results, you keep Occam’s Razor in the back of your mind.
Occam’s Razor tells me that the party making use of threats of physical violence and threats of career destruction lacks confidence in his or her position.
If you don’t truly believe in Buy-and-Hold, why should I? If Bogle doesn’t truly believe in Buy-and-Hold, why should anyone?
Rob
Start with a statement of fact: I’m X years old, my net worth is Y, my business and approach to investing has produced XYZ since I’ve embarked upon this path.
You are leaving out a big part of the story.
I am the co-author of the most important piece of peer-reviewed research published in this field in 35 years. I own a web site that will be worth hundreds of millions of dollars following the next price crash.
That ain’t nothing, Curious. These are accomplishments that should be beyond someone with my background. And yet here I am.
I must be doing something right.
Or so says Rob Bennett in any event.
Rob
My family is (fully supportive/skeptical/doubtful/in full revolt) about both the wisdom of my decisions that have led to this and the long term outlook for the same.
I would say either “skeptical” or “doubtful.”
I wish the reality was otherwise. But an argument can be made that it is better this way. When I find myself getting frustrated either with you Goons or with the Normals who are reluctant to speak out in strong terms in opposition to you Goons, I often try to focus on the reality that my own wife is not 100 percent supportive. That helps me to feel less of the negative feelings that would cause me to say or do things that would bring on more antagonism. I like to think that we would all agree that the less antagonism there is between the two “sides,” the better for all of us.
So it may be that my wife’s doubts or skepticism re certain aspects of these matters turns out to be a plus. I believe that God may have put her in my life in part to play a role of pulling me back a bit when I become too confident of my positions.
It’s not healthy for spouses to agree on everything. No one likes to experience conflict with someone one loves. But zero friction is not always a good sign. I like strong women. I think it would be fair to say that it takes a certain measure of strength for my wife to stand up to me on some of these issues given how important they are in my assessment and how strong my confidence is in them. I admire her for that even at times when she says something that frustrates me just as I admire the spirit behind SOME of the things you Goons say.
It of course gratifies me to hear people say that they think I am right, Curious. But it wouldn’t surprise me at all if in the end it is people who express a measure of skepticism re certain points who end up doing the most to steer me in a direction that helps me to bring us all to a good place. I of course want my wife to “support” me but I do not at all want her to give voice to more agreement with me than she feels. My job is to dig deep and try to understand what is behind any doubts or reservations she feels and then put what I learn from that effort to good use in persuading more people to join the cause.
Rob
Might I suggest that the next time you find yourself in a contemplative mood
I think it would be fair to say that I am always in a contemplative mood. Reasonable arguments can be made that it’s a blessing and reasonable arguments can be made that it is a curse. But I don’t think that reasonable arguments can be made that I don’t love thinking over puzzles until I get them figured out. It’s that trait of mine that gets me into so much trouble!
Contemplation doesn’t always being peace. That’s the thing. I see the appeal in peace. And there certainly are circumstances in which contemplation leads to peace. But there are also circumstances in which the peace achieved through contemplation is long-delayed. And there are circumstances in which contemplation takes one down a road filled with turbulence, at least for a time.
Faced with a choice of achieving quick peace or working through the turbulence that goes with deeper and deeper and deeper contemplation in a particular area, I choose delayed peace every time. It’s so core an aspect of my being that I cannot even question too much whether it is a good thing or a bad thing. Asking me not to contemplate because it takes me temporarily into turbulence and away from peace is like asking a dog not to bark at a squirrel.
The dog is going to bark, you know? It’s what dogs do.
Old Farmer Hocus is going to steer into turbulence when he sees a learning experience to be achieved by getting to the other side.
Someone says “I’ll ban you if you say that again!” and most people respond with an “I’m sorry, I’ll watch it.” I wonder: “Why is this such a big deal to that person, what about what I said so concerns them that they cannot bear to hear it repeated? What is the emotional driver here?”
Ruff! Ruff!
Rob