Set forth below is the text of an e-mail that I sent to Ken Evoy, owner of the SiteSell.com web hosting company, on April 16, 2014:
Ken:
I work full-time on my site. The long-term success of the site is my top priority. But I don’t have an employer that I need to answer to. So it would be my decision alone as to how much time to direct to a new project.
Yes, I e-mailed 30,000. I am a bit of a bulldog on issues re which I develop a passion. Two of the academics to whom I wrote told me that they have developed course materials on the Valuation-Informed Indexing concept that they are now using to teach their students!
I don’t have an ongoing relationship with Wade today. I am happy to e-mail him. But my preference would be to have a good bit of detail to send him re his precise role before contacting him. He’s a fairly high profile guy today. He is quoted in the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times. So I don’t know whether this is something he would want to be involved in or not. It might depend on the extent of the time commitment. It might be that his employer would not even permit outside work, I just don’t know. I know that his focus today is retirement planning research and teaching.
Please take good care.
Rob
Anonymous says
Here’s the latest from Wade. It is strange that he doesn’t give you any credit, Rob.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/wadepfau/2016/08/04/what-if-retirees-dont-want-to-run-out-of-money-in-30-years/#4a13c11f7a8d
Rob says
It’s not even a tiny bit strange for those who know about the threats that you Goons directed at him, Anonymous. And that Jack Bogle signaled his endorsement of your efforts.
Wade has to make a living like all the rest of us. Financial fraud is bad stuff. It hurts all of us. That’s why I believe that you will be going to prison (possibly for a very long time indeed) following the next price crash.
We’ll see how it all plays out.
Please take good care, old friend.
Rob
Anonymous says
So, is Wade guilty of fraud?
Rob says
I’ve answered this a hundred times before, Anonymous.
Of course he is guilty of fraud. His job is to HELP people trying to learn how to invest effectively. He should be EXPOSING cover-ups, not participating in them.
There’s of course another side to the story. Wade was the first person to contact the authors of the Trinity study and ask them to correct their study. He is the co-author of the most important piece of peer-reviewed research published in this field in over 30 years. He has done amazing research that has helped us all deepen our understanding of how stock investing works in many important ways.
It is up to his jury to determine how long his prison sentence should be or whether he should be permitted to slide altogether given that he has a family to support and he had first-hand knowledge of the viciousness of you Goons at the time when you made your threats.
I will do everything in my power to help Wade out. I love the guy. For obvious reasons.
I won’t commit financial fraud to cover up for him. Going to prison is not high on my bucket list. For equally obvious reasons.
I hope that helps a bit.
Rob
Anonymous says
I guess that means tens of thousands are guilty of fraud. Maybe hundreds of thousands.
Rob says
We are all guilty of fraud in a tiny sense in that we all have deluded ourselves into thinking that Buy-and-Hold could work. Once you study the peer-reviewed research of the past 35 years, you come to realize that it is obvious garbage. There obviously can never be any market in which price discipline is not critically important.
Whenever large numbers of participants in a market are convinced that it is not necessary to exercise price discipline, that market is going to collapse. It is not possible for the rational human mind to imagine any other way that things could work out. And, indeed, we have seen an economic crisis following each of the four times in U.S. history in which Buy-and-Hold “strategies” became popular.
However, the laws of the United States are not written to make such hyper-technical cases of “fraud” a criminal act. For there to be a finding of criminal financial fraud, there has to be a showing of bad intent. There are thousands and thousands and thousands of posts showing that you Goons have been behaving with bad intent for 14 years now. So I don’t think there’s any grounds for doubt as to whether you Goons are on the wrong side of the law.
The matter is far less clear re someone like Wade. Wade engaged in heroic efforts to EXPOSE your acts of financial fraud. Then when he saw that Bogle was supporting you, he backed away from that position and agreed to participate in the cover-up in exchange for being able to continue to work in this field. A jury is going to have to decide whether than constitutes a criminal act of financial fraud or not and, if so, what prison sentence should apply.
Millions of others believe in Buy-and-Hold in perfectly good faith. Yes, they are deluding themselves. But self-delusion is not a crime.
I want nothing to do with this massive act of financial fraud. The only role that I want to play in regard to it is to be the lead figure seeking to EXPOSE it. I am happy to do what I can to get your prison sentence reduced a bit. But I want to be sure that there are thousands and thousands of posts in my file showing that I did everything in my power to EXPOSE this massive act of fraud. Please let everyone on the internet know. You would be doing me a great favor by spreading the word, Anonymous.
I hope that helps a bit, my good friend.
Rob
Anonymous says
If Wade is guilty of fraud, why aren’t you posting comments to his columns to warn people? And why on earth would you try to get Ken involved with a prison-bound fraudster?
Rob says
Because Wade has done heroic work re this matter. Obviously.
Wade obviously does not WANT to commit financial fraud.. He wants to tell the truth about how stock investing works. Nothing could be more clear.
Wade spent years developing the skills needed for him to become one of the top researchers in this field. Should he be required to give that all up because some internet Goon got an important number wrong in a retirement study he posted to the internet? I sure don’t think so. I don’t think your jury is going to think so either. And I hope that Wade’s jury will not think so.
I want EVERYONE who works in this field to feel free to do honest work. What’s the downside?
Had Bogle come clean in 1981, when Shiller published his “revolutionary” (his word) research showing that there is precisely zero chance that a Buy-and-Hold strategy could ever work for even a single long-term investor, you wouldn’t be headed to prison and Wade would feel 100 percent free to do honest work. We all would be better off. Each and every one of us.
I am going to see that Bogle comes clean. Count it. That’s the job.
I have a secret weapon in my fight, Anonymous. Bogle too WANTS to come clean. Bogle included language in his book showing that the Old School retirement studies got the numbers wildly wrong. That wasn’t an accident. Bogle has a conscience. I think it would be fair to conclude that that conscience is going to kick in big time following the next crash.
Bogle is the one who taught me about the errors in Greaney’s study. So this has all come full circle Bogle taught me and I taught the Retire Early and Indexing communities and followng the next crash the members of the Retire Early and Indexing communities will be teaching Bogle by demanding his imprisonment. We all help each other. I think that’s pretty darn cool.
And once Bogle’s prison sentence is announced, we all will be able to talk honestly about what really work in stock investing and people will learn just how important Bogle’s genuine contributions really. It will make me very happy indeed to be telling that part of the story. As you know, Bogle is a hero to me. I rank him second in influence only to Shiller.
I am always going to be spreading knowledge of Bogle’s work and Pfau’s work. Why the heck wouldn’t I?
And I am NEVER going to participate in any criminal acts of financial fraud. Why the heck would I?
Some of these things are so darn hard to figure out!
Rob
Anonymous says
Doesn’t WANT to commit fraud? What does that matter? A crime is a crime. No one is forcing him to write for Forbes. He could just teach his classes.
The least you could do, as a law-abiding citizen, is post a comment there. The fact that you don’t proves you don’t believe what you spew here, where nobody sees.
Rob says
I hope that you don’t get picked to serve on Wade’s jury, Anonymous.
Holy moly!
Rob
Anonymous says
” followng the next crash the members of the Retire Early and Indexing communities will be teaching Bogle by demanding his imprisonment. We all help each other. I think that’s pretty darn cool.”
That will be cool! And can we get rivers of chocolate as well? Even cooler! Let’s dream big on this one!
Anonymous says
“There obviously can never be any market in which price discipline is not critically important.”
It certainly is in the stock market – if a piece of unexpected information comes out about a company, its stock price will immediately respond.
Rob says
And can we get rivers of chocolate as well?
Chocolate works.
I like this move in the direction of positive thinking on the part of you Goons.
It seems like all humans have some Goon buried inside and all Goons have some human buried inside!
Take care, man.
Rob
Rob says
if a piece of unexpected information comes out about a company, its stock price will immediately respond.
Oh, my.
I was getting hopeful there for a second.
Rob