Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently posted to the discussion thread for another blog entry at this site:
Can you show anyone with a successful VII outcome?
What I can show you is 36 years of peer-reviewed research, Anonymous.
That’s enough for me. It’s up to you whether that is enough for you or not, it’s not up to me to decide for you. But it is up to me to decide for me. I have decided that it’s enough for me.
The problem is not that you and I have come to different conclusions as to what is enough. That’s normal. That’s what you should expect to see. In any community, there are going to be different positions taken on different issues. It’s a 100 percent healthy thing that that be the case.
The problem is that you are using abusive tactics to decide for others. You are saying “no one is going to get to hear what Rob Bennett has to say because I have decided that what he is saying is not enough for me.” No. That’s over the line. That is not acceptable.
If no one speaks up about your abusive tactics (and the abusive tactics of other Buy-and-Holders — you obviously are not the only one causing a problem re this matter), then we will never be able to point to millions of people using Valuation-Informed Indexing successfully because no one will ever know about Valuation-Informed Indexing. For us to see successful VII outcomes, we are going to need to start talking about VII at every investing board and blog on the internet. That’s how it is done. You tell people about what the research says (or, if you want to stare things more diplomatically, what you BELIEVE the research says) and then those people ask questions to firm up their understanding, and then those people try out Valuation-Informed Indexing, and then over time you have reports of successful VII outcomes, more and more and more of them as time passes.
We cannot get to the successful outcomes until we permit people who believe in Valuation-Informed Indexing to post honestly. That’s the very first step in the process that must be followed if we are ever to have reports of lots and lots of successful VII outcomes. I am trying to get the process started. I am refusing to post dishonestly because I believe that it is my right to post honestly and because I believe it is my responsibility to the community to post honestly. You are demanding something of me that I obviously cannot deliver until the possibility of honest posting is opened up and at the same time you are refusing to permit the possibility of honest posting. It doesn’t add up.
I am 100 percent confident that we will in time see millions of cases of successful VII outcomes. But I continue to insist that my right to post honestly be recognized because THAT IS HOW IT IS DONE.
I didn’t cause any of this problem. I was a Buy-and-Holder myself on the morning of May 13, 2002. I gave up on Buy-and-Hold on the evening of August 27, 2002, when Greaney put forward his first death threat and 200 Buy-and-Holders endorsed it (in fairness, there were 50 others — presumably some Buy-and-Holders and some Valuation-Informed Indexers — who spoke out in opposition to the death threat). If I could turn back the clock to 1981, so that we could all begin posting honestly 36 years ago, I would do it and I am 100 percent certain that Jack Bogle and all of my other Buy-and-Hold friends would participate in the process that would have led us to a place where we would have millions of successful VII outcomes today. But I of course do not have the ability to turn back the clock.
The best that we can do today is to work together to open up every investing board and blog on the internet to honest posting starting at the close of business today. That’s what I propose. I think it would be fair to say that, if we take that path, we will all look back someday to today as a Second Independence Day for the people of the United States. The last 36 years of peer-reviewed research is the most exciting 36 years of peer-reviewed research in the history of the United States. It is truly exciting and liberating stuff. We all should be exploring the far-reaching implications of Shiller’s amazing research findings on a daily basis.
That’s my sincere take re these terribly important matters in any event.
I naturally wish you the best of luck in all your future life endeavors, my good friend.
Rob
“I didn’t cause any of this problem.”
Of course not. By any measure you have lots of problems. But you in no way caused any of them. Every word said, every action taken, every decision made, was exactly correct. And yet, nothing of substance to show for any of it. Just a big fat kersplat.
I’ve got the entire site, Anonymous.
I’ve got five calculators that exist nowhere else on Planet Internet. I’ve got over 200 articles. I’ve got over 200 one-hour-long podcasts. I’ve got thousands of blog entries. I’ve got close to 200 Guest Blog Entries. I’ve got 350 entries for one weekly column and over 100 entries for a second and over 100 entries for a third. I’ve got endorsements from thousands of my fellow community members and from a good number of the most respected names in the field. I’ve got my name on the most important piece of peer-reviewed research published in this field in over 30 years. And I’ve got a Nobel prize awarded to the fellow who showed that what I said in my famous post of the morning of May 13, 2002 — that valuations affect long-term returns — is so. And of course I’ve got laws stating that financial fraud is a felony in the United States, punishable by imprisonment.
I’ve got lots.
And I’ve got a funny feeling that the people of the United States will be putting all of the materials available at this site to good use in the days following the next price crash. I’ve even got a funny feeling that my good friend Jack Bogle will be helping us out re those efforts at that point in the proceedings. A fellow with some pull. You might have noticed.
We’ll see, you know?
No, I don’t think that I have contributed in any way, shape or form to the problem (with the small exception noted below). I started the chain of events rolling. It’s my name on the famous post from the morning of May 13, 2002, pointing out that the retirement study housed at John Greaney’s web site does not contain a valuations adjustment. But it is not the pointing out of that reality that is the problem. It is the COVER-UP of that reality that is the problem and that has been the problem going back to 21 years before I even came on the scene.
The problem is that Jack Bogle did not give an “I Was Wrong” speech or an “I’m Not Sure” speech within a few days of the publication of Shiller’s “revolutionary” (his word) research findings of 1981. I even bent over backwards re that one and advanced the thought that Bogle was suffering from cognitive dissonance at the time, the most charitable explanation of the events that have played out since that could possibly be ascribed to them.
I didn’t cause the problem. Robert Shiller didn’t cause the problem. Wade Pfau didn’t cause the problem. The thousands of community members who have expressed a desire that honest posting on the last 36 years of peer-reviewed research be permitted at every site on the internet didn’t cause the problem. The policymakers that made financial fraud a felony under the laws of the United States didn’t cause the problem.
The most direct cause of the problem was Jack Bogle. If he had given an “I Was Wrong” speech or an “I’m Not Sure” speech within a week of the day that Shiller published his “revolutionary” (Shiller’s word) research showing that valuations affect long-term returns, Greaney would have included a valuations adjustment in his study and neither you nor I would have ever experienced any problem, Anonymous.
But it is not fair to pin this on Bogle alone. Shiller could have written in his book that “my research obviously discredits the Buy-and-Hold strategy,” that would have solved the problem. If Motley Fool had said “our rules do not permit the behavior that we have seen from the Greaney Goons, we obviously are going to permit honest posting on retirement planning at this retirement planning site,” that would have solved the problem. Had Wade Pfau said “I am not going to be responsive to intimidation tactics, I am going to work with Rob to get our research featured on the front page of the New York Times,” that would have solved the problem. And on and on and on and on and on.
And, yes, if you want to be all-encompassing about it, I contributed in a small way to the problem from May 1999 through May 2002, the three years in which I knew about the error in Greaney’s retirement study and rationalized not speaking up about it because I feared what his Goon squad would do to me if I did dare to speak out. Pretty much all of us have contributed to the problem in some way, shape or form over the course of the past 36 years. We all contributed to the problem and we are all today paying a price for our cowardice.
What do you propose we do about it?
We could continue to live in fear. In that event, more and more and more people will suffer in more and more and more ways. That one doesn’t sound like such a hot idea to me.
Or we could all pull together to make life better in about 50 different ways for every human living on the planet today and have a lot of fun doing it. That one sounds better.
Except —
I don’t decide for anyone but me.
You are going to do what you decide to do, Anonymous. And Bogle is going to do what Bogle decides to do. And Wade Pfau is going to do what Wade Pfau decides to do. And Robert Shiller is going to do what Robert Shiller decides to do.
Rob Bennett votes for the choice that helps us all to live far richer (in every sense of the word) lives from this day forward. While acknowledging that he gets to decide for Rob Bennett only no matter how much he hopes that lots and lots of others make the same exciting and positive and constructive and life-affirming choice.
That’s it, man.
When things reach a point at which you want to begin living a better life, you will begin living a better life. When things reach a point at which all the others want to begin living better lives, they will all begin living better lives. The first step to making huge steps forward (Shiller was awarded a Nobel prize for his revolutionary research findings of 1981) is acknowledging that there was a time when you didn’t know it all, that there was some possibility of achieving an advance.
I am ready to move forward. When enough others are ready to join me, we will get about enjoying life on the other side of The Big Black Mountain. There will be no apologies from this boy for having suggested in earlier days that we make the journey together at the earliest point in time possible. I love my country. Achieving huge advances every now and again is what this country is all about. If we ever reach a point where we see in other fields of human endeavor the sort of resistance to new ideas that we have seen in the investing advice field over the past 15 years, we won’t be seeing those 6.5 percent average annual real returns in the stock market anymore; it is the productivity gains rooted in occasional huge advances that support the high average returns that in the past have permitted so many of us to retire at reasonable ages.
I naturally wish you the best of luck in all your future life endeavors, my long-time Buy-and-Hold friend.
Rob
“I’ve got the entire site, Anonymous.
I’ve got five calculators that exist nowhere else on Planet Internet. I’ve got over 200 articles. I’ve got over 200 one-hour-long podcasts. I’ve got thousands of blog entries. I’ve got close to 200 Guest Blog Entries. I’ve got 350 entries for one weekly column and over 100 entries for a second and over 100 entries for a third. I’ve got endorsements from thousands of my fellow community members and from a good number of the most respected names in the field. I’ve got my name on the most important piece of peer-reviewed research published in this field in over 30 years. And I’ve got a Nobel prize awarded to the fellow who showed that what I said in my famous post of the morning of May 13, 2002 — that valuations affect long-term returns — is so. And of course I’ve got laws stating that financial fraud is a felony in the United States, punishable by imprisonment.”
So how is this all worth anything? What I mean by that question is how do you monetize this? Are you going to put a pay wall in place and charge people to access the information? What is the plan to turn all of this into money?
I’m a journalist, Curious. My job is to get the story out.
The transition from Buy-and-Hold to Valuation-Informed Indexing is the biggest advance in the history of personal finance. My job is to tell two huge stories: (1) why this advance has been delayed for 36 years; and (2) how middle-class people should invest for their retirements given what the last 36 years of peer-reviewed research tells us about how stock investing works in the real world.
There are so many ways to monetize this once every discussion board and blog on the internet has been opened to honest posting on the peer-reviewed research that I wouldn’t be able to count them all. I can’t say that the question of how to monetize is one that I have worried about for more than 15 seconds over the past 15 years. There are so many exciting possibilities that it is silly.
My job is to get the word out re what the research says and to bring an end to the abusive stuff so that all the thousands of others who have doubts about Buy-and-Hold feel comfortable expressing those doubts openly and plainly; there’s huge leverage in that because thousands of other people are obviously going to be able to bring things to the table that I am not able to bring to it. This should be an easy thing to pull off; we have laws against financial fraud. But in this particular case it has obviously been a very, very difficult thing to pull off. But once that part of the job is done, there is just no limit to the good stuff (including financial rewards to the pioneers) that follows.
I could write books, I could record CD sets, I could put advertising on the site, I could give speeches, I could do consulting on an hourly basis and on and on and on. And of course lots of other people could too. I certainly don’t mean to suggest that it is only going to be me making millions. There are going to be thousands of us making millions.
This is a paradigm change. All of the textbooks are going to need to be rewritten. Do you really not see how much money there is to be made living through a time when all the textbooks on investing are being rewritten? The authors of textbooks get paid big money to offer their advice in their area of expertise. It is very hard to get to be an author of a textbook. But when a field is revolutionized, amazing opportunities spring up. The opportunities available here are equivalent to the opportunities that were available on the internet in the first six months of its existence. Have you ever heard of Amazon? Facebook? Google? That’s the kind of opportunity we are looking at here. There are going to be people who make the sort of dollars that were made by the people who founded Amazon and Facebook and Google.
That’s why the resistance is so strong. The people who are making money under the old paradigm do not want to give up their turf. The flaw in their reasoning is that, if the last 36 years of peer-reviewed research is legitimate research, our economic system will not be able to survive unless we open the internet up to honest posting. The pressure to give people access to the thousands of investing insights that we all should have been mining together over the past 36 years is going to be too strong for turf defenders to continue to hold things up. Once people in this field see a break in the wall, there is going to be a rush to be among the firsts to develop the new paradigm. A process that should have taken place gradually over several decades will take place in the space of a few months or perhaps a few years.
I don’t have any worries whatsoever about monetization. My biggest worry is that the next crash will bring on an economic crisis so severe that it wipes us all out. In which case all of my monetization dreams amount to nothing. My second big worry is that people will be so angry when they learn what has been done to them that we will see a political explosion.
I try to address the second one by explaining to people the pressure that those in this field are under to keep this under wraps and by showing them the opportunities for a better future that will be available to all of us if we keep our cool and declare “victory” when the floodgates open rather than getting caught up in recriminations that serve no positive purpose.
I try to address the first one by developing the Valuation-Informed Indexing concept to the fullest extent possible prior to the opening of the floodgates. We can keep the economic crisis from getting out of hand if we get the word out about what works because it is by dropping to P/E10 levels far below fair value that we really hurt ourselves economically and drops that low are every bit as irrational as the price jumps we saw in the late 1990s. My hope is that we will never go to a P/E10 of 8 again or that, if we do, we will only stay there for a short time.
Those are my thoughts, in any event. That was an interesting question, Curious.
Rob
“I could write books, I could record CD sets, I could put advertising on the site, I could give speeches, I could do consulting on an hourly basis and on and on and on. ”
Okay, so why don’t you just go ahead and do that now? Am I missing something?
You’re pretending to miss something.
To sell books, you have to let people know about them. If your books tell the truth about what the last 36 years of peer-reviewed research teaches us about how stock investing works, the Buy-and-Holders are going to view you as a huge threat. They will engage in insanely abusive and even criminal behavior to block you from getting the message out.
Most people leave the room once the conversation turns to discussions of criminal behavior. They find such discussions distasteful and scary. They prefer not to get involved. The feeling is to let someone else get involved, “I’ll pick up on this stuff when it goes mainstream.”
The question is whether the next crash will scare people enough that they will be willing to engage in the conversations they need to engage in to understand what has been done to them. I think it will. But we are going to have to wait to see how things play out to know for sure.
I am not physically capable of engaging in deception re the numbers that my friends use to plan their retirements. So the cake is baked for me either way. Even if there was some reason to believe that it is not going to play out the way I expect it will, I probably couldn’t acknowledge that because the cognitive dissonance would be too strong. But of course if that were the case, I wouldn’t be able to see it! I sincerely believe that things are going to flip. But I obviously acknowledge that I possess a bias re these matters and that our biases can blind us humans to important realities. In a practical sense it doesn’t matter since I am physically incapable of engaging in deception re the numbers that my friends use to plan their retirements in any event.
I hope that helps a small bit. Curious.
Rob
“I could write books, I could record CD sets, I could put advertising on the site, I could give speeches, I could do consulting on an hourly basis and on and on and on.”
Sure Kramer. It could be done. But as Jerry replied, “Well, of course it COULD be done! Anything could be done! But it’s only done if it’s done.”
And Kramer had ten times your ambition and work ethic. None of that stuff you mentioned will ever be done.
Are you saying that if you were not banned at the various financial boards, you would be making millions by now?
And Kramer had ten times your ambition and work ethic. None of that stuff you mentioned will ever be done.
It will be interesting to see how it all plays out, Anonymous.
Rob
Are you saying that if you were not banned at the various financial boards, you would be making millions by now?
Obviously.
Now, there’s another way of looking at it.
What if Bogle had given his “I Was Wrong” speech on the day after he learned about Shiller’s “revolutionary” (Shiller’s word) research findings? Then would I have made millions as a result of the work that I have done over the past 15 years? No. Because in that event there would have been thousands of people saying what I have been saying. Me being the 1,001th person to say something would not bring in millions in profits to me.
There are three things necessary for a message to have great financial value to the person delivering the message: (1) it must be powerfully important content; (2) there must be strong interest in hearing the message; and (3) the message must be in short supply.
The message that I deliver has been awarded a Nobel prize in economics. So it gets the highest score possible in terms of content.
We saw in the reaction to my famous post of the morning of May 13, 2002, how much interest there is in my message. There was never a post in the history of the Motley Fool site that generated as many positive responses as that one. It generated lots of negative responses too, I am certainly not saying different. But that’s not the question here. The question is — Are there people who would pay money to have this message more clearly and carefully and fully delivered? And the answer is — yes! About 10 percent of just about every discussion board that I have visited possesses a keen interest in hearing what I have to say. 10 percent of the population of investors is millions of people. So this message meets the second test.
The message is in VERY short supply. It is flat-out banned at every large investing site on the internet. You can’t do better on the third test than that!
So we’ve got a message here that will bring in hundreds of millions, if not billions. I don’t know that there has ever been any message in the history of the United States that has possessed more income-generating potential than this one. If there ever was one, I am not able to identify it. I believe that I am sitting on the most powerful income-generating message in the history of the United States.
The hold-up is that this message gets scores that are just too darn high on Tests #1 and #3. We don’t do that great on Test #2. 10 percent of the population is millions of people. That’s very good. But in relative terms, we don’t come even close to Buy-and-Hold. 10 percent doesn’t come close to 90 percent. So we are weak in relative terms in that department. But we are off-the-charts strong in Tests #1 and #3. We are too darn strong.
This message revolutionizes the field of investing advice. It challenges every single strategic recommendation that has ever been made in a fundamental way. It’s not possible to imagine anything stronger than that. The problem is that the message is so darn strong that it threatens lots of wealthy and powerful and well-connected people who have their lives invested in the world that existed before this message was given life and these people very, very, very much do not want the word to get out. So it has been a struggle overcoming the abusiveness and corruption that has been employed to keep the message bottled up. But once we achieve a break in the wall (I think we will see this in the days following the next price crash), this message will be delivering benefits for everyone alive on Planet Earth for many, many, many years to come. It is not possible for the human mind to imagine a message of greater power.
We also have a problem re Test #3. Ordinarily, it is good for a business to have few competitors. I have the only business that I can think of where the sole reason why I cannot make money with it is because I don’t have ANY competitors. There are lots of people who would like to get involved in the effort to spread this message and make the millions that would obviously follow from doing so. But they of course do want to be protected from the criminal behavior of those trying to keep things bottled up. We need to see the laws of the United States enforced. To get the laws enforced, we need to have a few of us stand together and call you Goons out on your b.s. when we see it. I’d say that we need 10 people with enough courage to do the job. Once we have 10 people who all stick together in the face of your abusiveness, you just won’t be able to get any good results with your insanely abusive stuff. And then we are on our way.
Today, we don’t have 10. So we are stuck. Those super-high scores on the three tests don’t do anything for us in a practical sense today. But will we have 10 people in the days following the next price crash, when the economic consequences that inevitably follow from the widespread promotion of a Buy-and-Hold “strategy” will not be something that people are reading about in a post at a discussion board but something that people are seeing with their own eyes in daily newspaper reports? I think we will have 10. I think we will have a good bit more than 10. I think we will have my good friend Jack Bogle working with us at that time. So I think that we will be able to break through the wall.
It’s a crazy way to make a living, Anonymous. I will certainly give you that one. But it is what it is, you know? I didn’t create this world. I play the cards that are dealt me to the best of my abilities, I don’t get to decide on the cards. That’s the best that any of us can do, so that’s what I try to do. I was handed an opportunity to change the world in an amazingly positive way by building a business that will likely provide for my family financially for many generations to come and I responded positively when I heard that opportunity come knocking at my door. Call me madcap, you know?
We’ll see how it all works out following the crash. I think it is going to work out very well indeed for Old Farmer Hocus, PRESUMING THAT OUR ENTIRE ECONOMIC SYSTEM DOES NOT GO DOWN with the crashing of the wall. If our entire economic system goes down, I think it would be fair to say that the Bennett family will be cooked. But then of course all the other families that I know will be cooked too in that event. It makes me terribly sad to contemplate the possibility. But there’s not a whole lot that I can do about it. It’s not like I haven’t tried everything that I can think of. Given that I have tried everything that I can think of, all that I can see that is left for me to do is to hope and pray and work for the best possible outcome for every single person concerned. That’s what I try to do each day when I get up in the morning and turn my laptop on for another day’s work doing intellectual and emotional battle with my dear Goon friends.
That’s the deal from my end. I hope that all makes good sense from your perspective.
Rob
“Obviously”
Then why don’t you sue the board owners?
I spoke to a number of law firms a long, long time ago. The message I got back was: “Yes, you have a strong case, we would be happy to take this on if you pay our hourly fee, but we are not going to take this on a contingency basis.” This is a very big case. I could see lawyers fees in this case going into the millions of dollars. I intend to bring legal actions. But I intend to bring them on a contingency fee basis. Or I would do it if a good lawyer took the case on a pro bono basis.
I believe that we will see law firms lined up around the block to talk to me in the days following the next price crash, Anonymous. When lawyers see that the case is an easy winner because of the intensity of the public demand for honest posting re the peer-reviewed research, they will take the case on any terms on which they can get it. They don’t see that intensity today among the sorts of people who would be called to sit on juries. So I have not through today identified a law firm willing to take on the case on terms that are acceptable to me.
It all changes with the onset of the next price crash.
Or so Rob Bennett believes, in any event.
The bottom line is that we are going to have to watch it all play out to know for sure. Does that not sound at least roughly right?
Rob
If you really had a strong case, someone would take it on contingency.
I called about six places and I did not find anyone willing to take it on contingency. There was one fellow who came close. He was a sole practitioner. He loves the case. He wanted to take it. But when he looked closely, he saw how big it was and felt that he would need to put all his waking hours into the case. So his entire career would be riding on this one case. He ended up taking a pass.
It’s possible that, if I just made calls 10 hours a day, that I would eventually find someone. I tend to think that I would. But then, is that the way I want to go about finding a lawyer? I would prefer to be in circumstances in which the lawyers are coming to me and begging me to take them. I have a funny feeling that that will be the circumstance that I will be in in the days following the next price crash. So my inclination is to be a bit patient.
I’ve tried lots of things. I tried bringing legal cases. I tried getting Guest Blog Entries posted. I tried going to FinCon meetings. I tried contacting political blogs. And on and on and on. It seems to me that it always comes down to the same thing. People like to see the validation that comes from having lots of others join in a cause. Think of the sorts of things that they say in advertisements and in television commercials, when they are trying to persuade you of something. They say: “As seen on TV!” Or “four out of five doctors recommend!” Or “50 millions Elvis fans can’t be wrong!” We humans don’t like to trust our own judgment. We like to hear that other humans have come to similar conclusions. When we have the reassurance of knowing that lots of other humans are having the same thoughts, THEN we feel confident enough in what our reasoning capabilities tell us to make decisions based on logic.
That’s the story of bull markets, Anonymous. If you look at the historical record, you see that there has never been a bull market that did a lick of good for a single investor. We have had numerous bull markets in the history of our stock market. But there has never yet been one that produced lasting gains. We ALWAYS give the money back in the bear market that follows. Every single dollar that has ever been earned from overvaluation has been lost through the sub-par returns experienced in the years that followed. So bull markets are just a big waste of time and energy. They hurt us because they make effective financial planning impossible; how can anyone plan his or her financial future when he doesn’t even know how much wealth he possesses? Bull markets are a curse.
Given what a curse they are and given how easy it is to determine that they are a curse, it ought to be pretty darn easy to do away with bull markets, right? Just tell people. People want to act in their self-interests. So, when you show them how much they are hurting themselves, they are going to do what it takes to bring the bull market to an end. That all follows.
But it obviously hasn’t played out that way for the past 15 years, right? Learning what the last 36 years of peer-reviewed research tells us about how stock investing works in the real world cannot possibly hurt a soul. But we sure do see lots of opposition to the idea, do we not? What’s that about?
The opposition is rooted in the conflict that we all face between accepting reality and living in fantasy worlds. It is not true that we humans always act in our self-interest. It makes logical sense to believe that we would. But it is just not true that we actually do that. Alcoholics do not act in their self-interest. Gambling addicts do not act in their self-interest. Smokers do not act in their self-interest. The same humans that smoke and drink and gamble are the ones who buy stocks. It is not reasonable to believe that these creatures are going to amazingly become capable of acting rationally when they buy stocks. It takes great effort for humans to act in their self-interest. They are capable of it when given lots of help. But it does not at all come naturally to them. It is very much against the nature of humans to invest rationally.
Lawyers are humans too. To win their cases, to build strong careers, to make lots of money, they need to please their fellow humans. They all know this on some level of consciousness. They might not ever give voice to the reality. They don’t articulate it in speeches or write it down in books. But they know that part of the job is making their fellow humans happy and they are able to pick up if they possess even a tiny bit of intelligence — and most lawyers possess at least a tiny bit of intelligence — that most of the humans very, very, very much do not want to be told that they need to divide their portfolio balances by two to know how much money they have saved for retirement.
That’s the story here. When I tell people that they need to divide their portfolio balances in two, I am telling them something that they very, very, very much do not want to hear. People want to be able to retire sooner, not later. They want to hear that their portfolio balances are higher than what they appear to be, not smaller than they appear to be. The Buy-and-Holders don’t tell them that the balances are higher; perhaps we should thank God for small favors! But at least they tell them that they are not smaller. I tell them that they are smaller, a lot smaller. So I am not the most popular guy in town at this particular point in time.
Lawyers want to be popular. For the same reason that investment advisers want to be popular. And for the same reason that bloggers want to be popular. And for the same reason that academic researchers want to be popular. And for the same reason that book authors want to be popular. And so on and so on.
I basically have a sign hanging on me that says “I do not want to be popular, I am the fellow telling you that you need to divide your portfolio balance number by two to know the amount of true, lasting wealth that you have working for you.” So I am not popular at the moment. But I think that there’s great potential in the idea of telling people the truth about how stock investing works given the 36 years of peer-reviewed research we have available to us today that teaches us the realities. So I am going to continue going with that.
I might be able to find a lawyer who would take the case today. It would be a lot of work to find him or her. It would have to be someone who is an independent thinker, someone who is willing to take his or her chances with a jury that is probably going to come to the case with a bias against the fellow who is saying that you need to divide your portfolio balance number by two to know the true, lasting value of your accumulated wealth.
Is that going to change following the crash? I think it is going to change. I think that I will have a much better chance of signing up with a top-flight lawyer following the crash than I have today. So my inclination is to wait a bit on the legal side just as I am waiting a bit on publishing the book and on getting written up on the front page of the New York Times and on being the keynote speaker at FinCon and on all the rest. Everything depends on gaining some popularity and the popularity issues changes dramatically when stock prices drop by 50 percent or more.
Does all of that not make at least a little bit of sense? It seems to me to be the best way to proceed, given the realities that apply today.
Rob
So you really don’t have anyone that supports your cause. Doesn’t that tell you something! A little self reflection?
Does it tell you anything that in 15 years you have not been able to come up with a way to “defend” Buy-and-Hold that does not require you to engage in acts that constitute felonies under U.S. law?
That one would cause me to reevaluate my choice of investing strategies.
Rob
It says that people don’t believe your felony fantasy.
Okay, Anonymous.
Please take good care, man.
Rob