Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently posted to the discussion thread for another blog entry at this site:
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
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