Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently posted to the discussion thread for another blog entry at this site:
You did not go to FinCon, presumably because you devoted all your time and energies in this new direction. When can we expect to see Rob Bennett 2.0 on all the major political and social media sites?
I believe that there will come a day when you will see the story of the 15-year cover-up of the errors in the Buy-and-Hold retirement studies on all the major political and social media sites. But I wouldn’t dare to say how soon that will happen. Given the history, my guess today is that we are not going to see that happen until we see another price crash that shakes people up. I of course entertain hopes that it will happen sooner because it would be better for me and for the entire country and even for you Goons for us to see it happen sooner. But I don’t put the odds of our seeing that little dream of mine come true at better than 50/50. I put the odds at a good bit less than 50/50.
I didn’t elect not to attend FinCon2016 because I didn’t have sufficient time and energies to do that as well as to get involved with political sites. I elected not to attend because I think we need to see groundwork done before people at FinCon will be open to the message. The purpose of contacting political sites is to lay that groundwork. So the two things are indeed connected. But it is more that I have come to a conclusion that one needs to be done before the other than that there is not enough time and energy available for both.
I sent one article to a non-investing site about one month ago. That article was not accepted. I would describe that submission as a test case. My goal once I get started on the new path will be to submit one article to a non-investing site each week until one gets accepted and attracts some attention. When the publicity ball gets rolling a bit (probably after the next crash, but perhaps sooner), I will pick up the pace to where I am submitting several articles each week. But until I see some forward movement, my expectation is that I will push myself to submit only one per week.
I am trying to get a few things out of the way before I submit the second one. The main thing is that I want to develop a list of sites that I will be submitting to. I have notes re this that I have been keeping for a few years. Every now and again, I see an article on the internet that makes me think “this would be a good site to submit something to.” I have not followed through in the past. Now I am going to start doing that. I would like to have a list of a good number of sites first. I expect to get to work on putting together the list next week. For this week, I have a few administrative things that I want to catch up on. But my guess is that I will put together the list next week and then send out the second item the following week.
I hope that helps a tiny bit, my good friend.
Rob
Anonymous says
“But my guess is that I will put together the list next week and then send out the second item the following week.”
Those weeks were over 3 months ago. Has the second item been sent out?
Goonie McGoon says
“I believe that there will come a day when you will see the story of the 15-year cover-up of the errors in the Buy-and-Hold retirement studies on all the major political and social media sites. But I wouldn’t dare to say how soon that will happen. ”
Given that you are around 60 years old, don’t you think time is now running short for your plan to come together and that you should be looking for a “plan B”?
Rob says
Those weeks were over 3 months ago. Has the second item been sent out?
Yes, the second item went out. And other items went out. But I have not gotten one item out per week to meet the goal that I set for myself in that earlier comment. Most of those communications will show up as blog entries in future days. So you Goons (and Normals too!) will be able to see who I contacted and what I said to them and how they responded in the event that there was any response.
I wrote about this in a long comment that I put up here about a week ago and that will serve as the text for a future blog entry. I am referring to the one where I explained that I am now attending Al-Anon meetings to develop more effective strategies for dealing with the “disease” of Buy-and-Hold. Get Rich Quick/Buy-and-Hold strategies are addictive. All of the problems that we see associated with addictions like alcoholism or drug abuse or gambling or whatever are present in the case of Buy-and-Hold. And those problems don’t just affect those who suffer from the disease; they also affect those who live among those suffering from the disease. This is why we have gone 36 years since Shiller published his peer-reviewed research showing that there is precisely zero chance that a Buy-and-Hold “strategy” could ever work for a single long-term investor without accepting the reality that we need to permit honest posting re that research. The pull behind Buy-and-Hold is not anything rational — it is pure emotion. So Buy-and-Holders cannot be reached through appeals to reason alone.
It may be that we will as a society become able to overcome our addiction to Get Rich Quick thinking only by first hitting bottom — that is, by experiencing the next price crash, which will bring on a deepening of the economic crisis that began in late 2008. The job today for those of us who love our country (and who of course love our Buy-and-Hold friends we well!) is to learn how to deal with addicts in a loving and yet honest way. I engage in work in that regard on a daily basis. Sometimes it is by attending meetings. Sometimes it is by reading literature. Sometimes it is by going on a walk and reflecting on my interactions with you Goons and on how Normals respond to those interactions.
I am not on a once-per-week contact schedule today. I believe that I will be there within a few months. After I achieve a once-per-week schedule, I expect to up the goal to a once-per-day schedule. It will happen. I would like to give you a target date. But I have learned from hard experience that it is not always possible for me to meet my target dates. We are dealing with tough emotional stuff. And no good purpose is served by me being hard on myself when I fail to meet a target. So I am going to resist the inclination to offer a new target date and just say that I continue to work on a daily basis on the emotional work that I believe will down the road a piece place me in circumstances where I will be contacting the owner of one web site (some investing oriented, some not) each day of the year. This is a numbers gam,. In time those efforts will pay off big time. I am 100 percent sure.
Wish me luck!
Rob
Rob says
Given that you are around 60 years old, don’t you think time is now running short for your plan to come together and that you should be looking for a “plan B”?
No. I love my country. That runs deep. I don’t think that that is something that changes because one finds a few obstacles placed in one’s path.
I am honored to be leading the effort to open up every web site on the internet to honest posting on safe withdrawal rates and scores of other critically important investment-related topics. This is the most important work that anyone in the United States is doing at this time in the history of our nation, in my assessment.
And we are of course very close to success. The growing desperation of you Goons comes across in each additional abusive post that you advance. So it would be foolish in the extreme to retreat even an inch at this point in the proceedings. Or at least so Rob Bennett sincerely believes on the morning of July 4, 2017.
We will of course have to see how things play out to know for certain. I of course see things from my perspective and you Goons of course at least to pretend to see things differently. The truth of the matter will be revealed to all of us as we watch how our nation responds to the next price crash and the economic and political turmoil that is sure to follow the loss of trillions of dollars of additional middle-class wealth.
I naturally wish you all the best that this life has to offer a person in any event, my long-time Goon friend.
Rob
Anonymous says
“I am now attending Al-Anon meetings to develop more effective strategies for dealing with the “disease” of Buy-and-Hold.”
Is that what you say at those meetings when people ask why you are there? Or hasn’t anyone ever asked?
From Al-Anon’s preamble: “Al-Anon has but one purpose: to help families of alcoholics.”
That’s where the “Al” comes from! What gives you the right to waste their time with your imaginary crisis with non-alcoholic non-family? It’s one thing to waste your own time online, but Al-Anon tries to help real people with real problems.
Rob says
It’s really for people dealing with the effects of any type of addiction. Alcoholism came first. But there are people in Al-Anon dealing with the effects of people who have an addiction to narcotics. Or to gambling. Or to whatever.
I am of course 100 percent honest re why I am there. No one has ever complained about it.
There’s nothing even a tiny bit “imaginary” about the Buy-and-Hold Crisis, Anonymous. Millions of people have lost their jobs. Tens of thousands of entrepreneurs have seen their businesses fail. A good number of you Goons are on your way to long prison sentences. Millions will likely be experiencing failed retirements in days to come. We have seen political frictions develop on both the left and the right in the days since the crisis began in late 2008. This is real and serious stuff. I think it would be fair to say that organizing resistance to the Buy-and-Hold Goon Squads is the most important public policy issue before our nation today.
And at the root of it all is our human inclination to become addicted to Get Rich Quick investing schemes. If the 12-step programs can offer us some help, I am 100 percent happy to make use of whatever help is available. And I am of course grateful to the millions of people who over the years have developed the principles employed in the programs that I believe will help us all recover from the effects of our horrible Buy-and-Hold addiction.
I hope that helps a small bit.
Rob
Anonymous says
“No one has ever complained about it.”
I absolutely guarantee that someone has complained. As you did with so many message boards and blogs, you’re putting Al-Anon’s “all are welcome” policy to the ultimate test.
Rob says
Your comment here illustrates the addiction problem, Anonymous.
We cannot overcome the addiction until we acknowledge it. The very first step to recovery is being able to say “I have hit bottom and I need help.”
We hit bottom as a community of investors on the day that John Greaney put forward his first death threat. That should never have happened. The Wall Street Con Men pretend that there is peer-reviewed research supporting the Buy-and-Hold “strategy.” If that were so, we never would have seen any death threats. If Buy-and-Hold were a legitimate strategy, the Buy-and-Holders would just point to the research supporting it, they would never dream of advancing death threats or of encouraging the advancement of death threats. But here we are.
My favorite saying that I have learned from reading the literature of the 12-step programs is: “You are only as sick as your secrets.” The fact that the Buy-and-Hold retirement studies get the numbers wildly wrong is one of our most carefully guarded secrets, no? We must keep that secret to keep the addiction from being exposed. You could see how important it was to the Buy-and-Holders to keep that secret when our board community exploded following my post from the morning of November 23, 2002, urging Greaney’s removal from the board community. I think it would be fair to describe the follow-up discussion to that post as the hottest moment in the history of this new communications medium. Why did our board community explode at that time? Because I had publicly exposed the sickest of our Buy-and-Hold secrets.
When I used that phrase “Stock Drunk” as the name of one of the sections of the site a number of years back. I was really just making a joke. I was sincere about it. But it was not my intent to say that Buy-and-Hold is literally an addiction. But I thought about it more over time and I came to believe that there really is at least a small literal truth to the idea that Buy-and-Hold investing is an addiction. I cannot refer to anything said at meetings because of the anonymity rules. But much of the literature is available on Amazon.com; there are no anonymity rules that apply to much of the literature. So it is fair for me to report how the observation that “you are only as sick as your secrets” applies to the Buy-and-Hold phenomenon. And of course there are lots of other observations developed by those trying to help others escape the pain of addictions that very, very, very much apply in the Buy-and-Hold context.
We are not dealing with a rational phenomenon, Anonymous. Not when we see death threats. Not when we see demands for unjustified board bannings. Not when we see tens of thousands of acts of defamation. Not when we see threats to get academic researchers fired from their jobs. And of course the behavior of you Goons is only a small part of what we are up against. There are Goons everywhere on the internet. Responsible people stand up to them and they are overcome. We don’t see that in the investing realm. Freakin’ Jack Bogle has ENDORSED Mel Lindauer’s freakin’ book! What the h? How does something like that happen?
Crazy things happen when addictions enter the picture. That’s the story here. It’s my job to tell this story as completely and charitably and honestly as I possibly can. I cannot tell the story effectively without addressing the addiction side of it. So that’s what I am going to do.
Please understand that the 12-step literature is a literature rooted in love. I have often noted how I intend to do what I can to get your prison sentence reduced a wee bit. This is part of that. The 12-step literature refers to addictions as a “disease.” If your jury members become convinced that you Goons are suffering from a disease, I could see them seeing fit to reduce your prison sentence a bit. That’s fine by me. I want to see your jury do what is right. I believe that you are indeed suffering from a disease. So I have no problem accepting that my words re these matters may cause your jury to give you a shorter prison sentence. I believe in our system of justice. If a shorter prison sentence is the result of my efforts in this direction, then so be it. So long as that shorter prison sentence is a result of the proper functioning of our system of justice, I see it as a good thing.
Addiction are real things. Addictions hurt us. They don’t just hurt the addicted. They hurt the people who live with the addictions and who are seen by the addicts as threats to their addictions. We are all suffering from our collective addiction to the Buy-and-Hold investing strategy. We need as a nation to find our way to recovery. I offer no apologies for doing what I can to take us to a good place.
You are an addict, Anonymous. That is why you are headed to prison. Your first step to recovery is acknowledging that you have hit bottom. It’s my job as your friend to say that to you. I know that the odds that you will take the message to heart are very small. But I need to say the words to be able to live with myself and to avoid getting caught up in the craziness that you bring to the world. I hope that in days to come that we will be able to be friends again. It will certainly be my intent to do everything in my power to make that possible.
My best and warmest wishes to you, my long-time Buy-and-Hold addicted friend.
Rob
Anonymous says
“We are not dealing with a rational phenomenon”
Truer words were never spoken.
You won’t make predictions anymore, but I’ll make one. Within a year, you will not be attending Al-Anon meetings. Either you’ll stop by choice, or because you were asked not to return, or because that particular group mysteriously decided to disband.
Today is July 5, 2017. Hold me accountable if I’m wrong.
Rob says
Okay, Anonymous. You are entitled to your opinion. I have no desire to hold you accountable re such a thing.
My intent is to attend meetings so long as it helps and to stop attending when it no longer helps. I want to be as effective in combating the Buy-and-Hold addiction that so many of us suffer from that I possibly can be.
I make no claims as to how long I will attend meetings other than that it is my intent to attend them for so long as they are providing benefits for all of us seeking to cope with this addiction, which is of course all of us. I intend to write more about the addiction issues in days to come. I don’t know how soon that will be. I don’t intend to write about that stuff until I am clear in my thinking about it and I do not feel that I am 100 percent ready to move ahead today.
My best wishes to you, my good friend.
Rob
Laugh says
I am not following. Do you go to AA meetings to talk about the addictions of millions of people other than yourself?
This seems very absurd and you should stop Wasting their valuable time. They have far more important topics to cover and real people to help.
What a disgrace.
Rob says
It is my job to heal the wounds that you Goons have ripped open in our discussion-board and blog communities, Laugh. I have things that I have done that were aimed at helping everyone concerned. This particular job has been a tough one. I may need to learn about some new tricks. If the Al-Anon program can teach me some new tricks, it would be irresponsible of me not to make use of the benefits that it offers to us all.
I would not say that I attend to discuss your addiction. I talk here about your addiction on a daily basis. I don’t need a new outlet to talk about that stuff.
It’s more than I want to learn new techniques for healing the wounds created by your addictive behavior. I want to learn what I can do differently to produce better results for all concerned.
I’ll give you a concrete example of what I am getting at. The program has a book that sets forth daily reflections. Yesterday there was a passage that was listing some resolutions to make for the new day at the beginning of it. It said something like: “show good cheer to the people you encounter this day.” I certainly see the merit of that one. But there was one line that made me uneasy. It said: “Criticize not one bit.”
Okay. My father used to say: “If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all.” That line expresses the same general spirit. So I see where the passage in the Al-Anon book is coming from. As a general rule, we all should refrain from criticizing others and focus any improvement efforts on ourselves. I get that. I agree with that.
But I say that you Goons have committed fraud and that you will be going to prison following the next price crash. That kinda, sorta sounds like a criticism, does it not?
I am a journalist. Journalists tell stories that people need to hear about to live better lives. Some of those stories are happy ones. It would be big news if we discovered a cure for cancer. But not all important stories are happy ones. Watergate was not a happy story. But there were two good journalists who told that story and I don’t think that there are too many who would say that they were wrong to do so. If I don’t mention the financial fraud and the prison sentences, the financial fraud is going to continue and the prison sentences are going to be longer than they would be if it didn’t continue. It seems to Rob the Journalist that I am obligated in conscience to tell the story of financial fraud and prison sentences.
The Normals don’t like it when I do that. When I had my column at the Out of Your Rut site, there was a fellow who used to come by each week and leave a comment or two. He wasn’t the biggest believer in VII in the world but for whatever reason he made an effort to say something each week. That made me happy because the dynamic on a blog is that, when people see someone else leave a comment, it gives them the courage to leave a comment. So this guy was helping me out in a big way and I was grateful. I had one column where I noted that Jack Bogle did more than anyone else alive to bring on the economic crisis. I also included language pointing out that Bogle is a great man from whom I have learned much and so on. But this fellow did not like it that I said what I did about Bogle and the economic crisis and he told me so. I explained why I felt that I needed to say that. He did not respond. And he did not comment on my column entries ever again.
Do you see?
I do not think that I am wrong to talk about financial fraud and prison sentences. But, if I am handling things improperly even in some small way, I want to know about it. Reflecting on the words “criticize not one bit” may or may not help me go about the job that I have been elected by circumstances to perform. So I think that I need to place myself in circumstances in which I am exposed to those sorts of words. I am not saying that I will stop referring to financial fraud and prison sentences. I am saying that I will reflect on whether there is another, better way to go about things.
I attend Al-Anon meetings to learn if there is a better way to go about things. I am not there to fix you. That’s on you. I am there to fix me. I am there to learn better ways of coping with the problems that you cause because of your addiction.
I hope that helps a small bit.
Rob