Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently posted to the discussion thread for another blog entry at this site:
“I will be joking around with Robert Shiller in those days. I will say “Robert, you were kind of a liar re that safe withdrawal rate question for all those years, were you not, my good friend?” And he will say in return “Touche’, Rob, but no more so than you were from May 1999 through May 2002, right?” And I will laugh and we will embrace and we will both get back to the business of helping the flawed but generally good humans to overcome the Get Rich Quick urge that resides within all of us and to invest their retirement money more effectively.”
You really believe this? You think you will actually be talking to Shiller?
I do.
Everything that has happened to me over the past 17 years is powerful evidence that Shiller is right re his “revolutionary” (his word) ideas about how stock investing works. Shiller presented the theory but held back from discussing the how-to implications of the theory. I explored the how-to implications of the theory. Good for me, you know? The theory doesn’t help anyone until people come to understand the how-to implications. The work that I have done plants Shiller’s theory in the real world. That’s a very important advance,
Yes, I believe that I will be talking things over with Shiller when we all work our way to the other side of The Big Black Mountain, in the days following the next price crash. I believed that Shiller and I would be talking things over with our good friend Jack Bogle in those days too and that we would all be enjoying working through these amazing advances together. It of course saddens me that it is no longer possible that Bogle will be a part of that exciting discussion. However, we will be giving him credit for all of his many powerful contributions and making sure that everyone knows that we couldn’t have done the work that we have done had Bogle not laid the foundation for the advances with his earlier contributions.
If you didn’t think that my work was of great importance, you never would have advanced a single death threat or a single demand for a single unjustified board banning or a single act of defamation or a single threat to get a single academic researcher fired from a single job. If you didn’t think that my work was a major advance, you would never have felt threatened by it. So deep in your heart you believe that I will be working with Shiller and lots of others in the days following the next price crash too. You just can’t bear to acknowledge that you made a mistake in thinking that it really is not necessary to practice price discipline when buying stocks. So you play a stupid game of acting like this stuff doesn’t matter. It matters. Big time.
Shiller knows that, and when he feels free to say so openly and clearly and firmly, I will be working with him to advance the ball as far and as quickly as we are able to advance it. Why wouldn’t I want to do that? And why wouldn’t he want to do that?
After the next crash, why would ANYONE not want to do that? All of the appeal of the Get Rich Quick garbage disappears after the Pretend Money has gone “Poof!”
Rob
Rob,
If someone left a flaming bag of dog crap outside your front door, would see that as a positive sign about the last 17 years?
If I learned that someone had left a flaming bag of dog crap outside of someone’s front door, I would wonder what was going on. That’s unusual behavior. Someone would have to have a reason to do something like that.
Say that someone discovered the cure for cancer and had had many people respond to his discovery in very favorable ways. And that some people who were employed on the cancer treatment industry left a flaming bag of dog crap outside of his front door to intimidate him. That wouldn’t tell me that the cure does not work. It would suggest to me that the cure DOES work and the purpose of the intimidation was to stop work from getting out. It wouldn’t by itself prove that the cure works. But it would suggest that a powerful case could be made that it does. Otherwise, the people in the industry would not feel so threatened.
That’s the dynamic that I see here. Shiller was awarded a Nobel prize. So his work is top-notch stuff. The normal state of affairs is that we would all feel free to post about Shiller’s research findings at every site on the internet. But the Buy-and-Holders are INTENSELY defensive about Shiller’s research. That by itself does not prove with absolute certainty that Shiller is right. But it is a strong signal that he is. No one is more motivated than the Buy-and-Holders to show that Shiller is wrong. The fact that they have has to resort to intimidation tactics tells us that they have not been able to come up with legitimate arguments to refute Shiller. If the people with the most motivation to refute Shiller have concluded that it cannot be done in a legitimate way, that’s a very good sign in favor of the legitimacy of Shiller’s research.
Rob
“If I learned that someone had left a flaming bag of dog crap outside of someone’s front door, I would wonder what was going on. That’s unusual behavior. Someone would have to have a reason to do something like that.”
When there is a flaming bag of dog crap on your doorstep, the meaning is obvious. When you have been banned from the boards repeatedly, the meaning is obvious. If people keep leaving flaming bags of dog crap at your doorstep for 17 years, the sensible person would come to the conclusion that they have been doing something wrong.
If people keep leaving flaming bags of dog crap at your doorstep for 17 years, the sensible person would come to the conclusion that they have been doing something wrong.
I obviously see it differently, Anonymous. My take is that, if you find yourself continually leaving flaming bags of dog crap at doorsteps, you need to ask yourself what is driving you to do that. I don’t like being on the receiving end of flaming piles of dog crap. But I think that I would like being on the delivering side of flaming piles of dog crap even less.
My sincere take.
Rob
“I obviously see it differently, Anonymous”
And that is why you have dog crap on your shoe.
If millions of people suffer failed retirements in the days following the next price crash, I will be able to say that I did everything in my power to get them accurate retirement planning numbers at a time when it could do them some good, Anonymous. That means something to me.
Rob
Your not saving anyone from a failed retirement. In fact, you haven’t even saved yourself.
I don’t think that anyone can make judgments about these matters for other people. I believe that you are okay with the 4 percent rule. So I am fine with it if you reject everything that I have ever said. But I have had HUNDREDS of people tell me that they love my stuff. I have had people tell me that I am the first person whom they have ever read who makes full sense out of stock investing. I have had big-name experts endorse my work. So I believe strongly that it is for each community member to decide whether to go with the 4 percent rule or to go with an approach to the calculation of safe withdrawal rates that includes consideration of the valuation level that applies on the day the retirement begins.
You are in the majority. There is no question about that one. But the published rules of all the boards do not say “those in the majority may say what they please but those holding minority positions must get permussion from the majority before speaking.” The laws of our country reject that formulation and all of the social norms of our country reject that formulation. I love my country. So I go with the laws of my country and the social norms of my country.
I have not been able to obtain the support of enough others who believe in the laws of our country and in the social norms of our country to overcome the criminally abusive behavior of you Goons. So here we are. But is that going to continue to remain the case after the next price crash, when we may be millions of people lose large percentages of their life savings? I don’t think so. I think that more people are going to speak up in support of the laws of our country and in support of the social norms of our country at that time. And then we will be off to the races.
Shiller’s ideas about how stock investing works are new ideas. They have been around for a time — 38 years. But in the grand scheme of things they have only been around for 38 years. And there has never in that 38 years been a time when a bull/bear cycle came to an end and people saw the enormous pain that inevitably follows when large numbers of people are persuaded to follow Buy-and-Hold strategies. If Shiller is right, we are going to experience that within the next year or two or three. I think that that is going to change things. We are just going to have to wait a bit to find out for sure.
There is no way for a new idea to grow other than for it to be widely discussed. That’s how it has happened in every case in history in which a new idea over time became popular. If there had never been any intimidation coming from the Buy-and-Hold side of the table, I believe that Valuation-Informed Indexing would be the dominant model today. That’s not the world that we live in. There has been intimidation. And Valuation-Informed Indexing is very much the minority-view model. I want that to change. The only way that it can ever change is for people who believe in it to refuse to post dishonestly, we have to stand up to the intimidation, try to not permit it to frighten us. So that’s what I try to do. I try to do myself what I am asking many others to do.
That’s the story here. I do not believe that John Greaney included a valuations adjustment in the retirement study that he posed at his site. So I say that. You Goons don’t want me to say that and so you employ intimidation tactics to shut me up. I do my best to ignore those tactics and just say what I believe. And that pattern just repeats over and over and over and over again.
I do not want to post dishonesty. Do not.
You do not want me to post honestly. Do not.
I cannot get enough people to object to your criminal acts of intimidation to achieve my goals. So you have prevailed for now.
I believe that I will be able to get more people to speak up after millions have suffered horribly for following a pure Get Rich Quick approach. We are going to have to wait a bit to see how that one plays out.
That’s the deal. That was the deal on the afternoon of May 13, 2002. The essential realities of this matter have never changed in 17 years. We are going to have to wait for the next price crash to take place to see if they are going to change in the future.
My best wishes.
Rob
“But I have had HUNDREDS of people tell me that they love my stuff. I have had people tell me that I am the first person whom they have ever read who makes full sense out of stock investing. I have had big-name experts endorse my work.”
This is all your spin. Here is the bottom line. If you had a successful track record with your retirement and you had real world examples of people that have utilized VII with successful track records, then you would have all sorts of real support, including me. But this is not the case. All you have is a bunch of storytelling with a worn out message that lacks truthful substance.
I disagree with your characterization, Anonymous.
I certainly agree that there are millions of good and smart people who believe in Buy-and-Hold. But I believe that there are two academic school of thought as to how stock investing works, Buy-and-Hold and Valuation-Informed Indexing. And I believe that those of us who believe in Valuation-Informed Indexing have every right and responsibility in the world to post honestly at every site on the internet. Those listening in to the discussions should decide for themselves which model to follow. But they cannot make an intelligent choice unless they can hear advocates of both schools of thought present their case honestly. So I think that it is very important that people on both sides be permitted to post their sincere views without intimidation tactics being employed by “the other side.”
I certainly wish you all the best that this life has to offer a person, in any event.
Rob
“I disagree with your characterization, Anonymous”
It is not a characterization. It is just stating facts.
Okay.
What is ironic is that you aren’t planning on providing for your retirement via investing with the VII strategy. Instead, you plan relies on getting settlement payments.
There’s nothing ironic about that.
I spent years saving enough money to permit me to leave corporate employment and start my own internet business, which would be work that would be more fulfilling and that would provide me much higher compensation once I got it off the ground. When you look at the amazing number of endorsements that I have received from big-name experts, I obviously would have earning an amazing amount of money from my internet business. The only thing that held me back was the criminally abusive behavior of you Goons.
I earned every penny of that $500 million many times over. Getting the word out about how stock investing really works is the most important project being worked on in the United States today and I have put 17 years of work into developing the Valuation-Informed Indexing concept. And I obviously am going to invest the $500 million pursuant to VII principles. So VII will be paying off for me for many years to come. Passion Saving principles (detailed in my earlier book) helped me earn that money and VII principles will help me to protect it and to grow it.
These new ideas on saving and investing work better than the old ideas. I am extremely proud to be able to share them with interested parties. And there are a LOT of interested parties when you Goons don’t disrupt conversations with your criminally abusive behavior.
Please don’t forget that the announcement of my settlement payment will change the internet in a very, very positive way. The internet has great potential to do good. But abusive posters like you Goons frighten away good and smart people. When word spreads that I have received a $500 million settlement payment, I can guaranty you that lots of good and smart people are going to try to replicate the things that i have done and they are not going to permit abusive Goon posters to hold them back. That’s a plus for everyone alive on the planet. Good for the planet, you know?
Rob
If only you considered this wise advice and adjusted your approach:
“You go about it in a manner that is catastrophically unproductive by adding missionary zeal that inflates your importance and demeans others. The whole idea that there is a new school of Safe Withdrawal Rates reeks of personal aggrandizement.”
It was Scott Burns who said that. Scott was one of my favorite personal finance columnists.
Those words do an outstanding job of highlighting the problems that we all need to overcome re these matters. There are two suggestions made in those words: (1) that it is not a big deal to point out errors in retirement studies for the purpose of getting them corrected; and (2) that the person who points out errors in retirement studies is in some respect “demeaning” the person who made the error.
I couldn’t possibly disagree more with both suggestions. There were thousands of people at the Retire Early board who used Greaney’s study to plan their retirement. I helped them in a big way by pointing out the error. And of course I helped Greaney even more. By pointing out his error, I permitted him to correct the study and avoid incurring additional legal liabilities. John Greaney has never had a better friend than Rob Bennett.
Rob
You never want to listen to anyone, unless you can spin it in a way that favors you. 17 years of failure hasn’t taught you one thing.
Okay, Anonymous.
I do wish you the best of luck in all your future life endeavors. I hope that that helps at least a tiny bit.
Rob
What Scott Burns is saying is that you are trying to make yourself seem important (self promotion).
Thank you for saying that.
I agree completely. That is certainly his message. And I feel great respect for Scott. So I try to listen carefully when I hear that message delivered by him. And he is not the only person whom I respect who has expressed a message along those lines. So I think we are focused in here on something that matters.
I am in the process of writing a book on these matters. Everything that I have written at this point is tentative; I can leave it in or I can take it out or I can modify it. There is a line in it that states: “I believe that this is the most important book ever published in the personal finance field.” I am uneasy about it because that sounds like a wildly overstated, self-promoting claim. On the other hand, if is is true, it is something that needs to be said. So my expectation is that that line is going to appear in some form. There is going to be an explanation attached to it, it will not stand alone. But the idea that the book is of huge importance is going to be expressed.
Please understand that I took a very modest approach when I first ventured forward with these ideas. My post of May 13, 2002, was not in the form of a declarative statement. It was in the form of a question. I did not say “the Buy-and-Hold retirement studies are wrong.” I said “Should we be taking valuations into consideration when calculating safe withdrawal rates?” So I made an effort NOT to self-promote, NOT to assign myself too much importance.
But the reaction that I saw told me that THE ISSUE (not me) is of HUGE importance. My book will be the most important book ever published in this field not because I am some amazing human but because I am a more-or-less ordinary human who happened by circumstance to stumble into an amazing ISSUE. As a society, we desperately need to know whether the market is efficient (that is, that stock prices are set through the exercise of human reason) or whether valuations affect long-term returns (that is, that there are times when most of our portfolio value is the product of a temporary irrational exuberance). Answering this question properly is so important that it may affect the survival of our economic system; it is even possible that it will affect the survival of our political system.
The issue couldn’t be more important. It is the most important issue before our nation today. It is more important than immigration policy. It is more important than how we will provide health care. It is more important than trade or tax policy. I believe that. I absolutely believe that.
I am just some guy. I don’t even think that I am fully qualified to do this work. I do it because no one else has shown a willingness to take the ball and I am firmly convinced that this work must be done by someone. So I just do it because no one else is available. But I am certainly not saying that I am some super genius or any such nonsense. I believe that I possess an average level of intelligence, perhaps a bit more than that. But I don’t see myself as special. But I see this issue as super, super, super special. Whatever specialness is attached to me is attached to me because of the issue that I am working.
Does that help?
I believe strongly that as a nation we need to address this issue, that we need to have a national debate on the merit of Shiller’s Nobel-prize-winning research findings. I believe that my contribution will be to play a big role in getting that debate rolling. But once people are participating actively on both sides, my intent is to ease my way out of it. One of the reasons why it took me three years to work up the courage to put up the May 13, 2002, post is that I preferred talking about saving issues. So I didn’t even want to be involved on the investing side. But circumstances played out in such a way that I ultimately could not avoid getting involved and then things got more and more and more intense and now here I am where I am today.
I am not trying to make myself seem important. But I believe that the issue is the most important issue before our nation today. The launching of this national debate will go down as a turning point in U.S. history. So it is very, very, very important work that I am doing, work that is so important that I would feel that I had betrayed my country if I failed to do everything in my power to get that debate launched.
Rob
“Please understand that I took a very modest approach when I first ventured forward with these ideas.”
Rob, you never take a modest approach and you lack the self awareness to see this.
“The issue couldn’t be more important. It is the most important issue before our nation today. It is more important than immigration policy. It is more important than how we will provide health care. It is more important than trade or tax policy. I believe that. I absolutely believe that.”
Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong………….and again……..wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong. Your ability to reason anything is so far off. You have no sense of reality.
…..with the tiny exception of just this one little line:
“I am just some guy. I don’t even think that I am fully qualified to do this work. ”
You have finally said something that is truthful.
Okay, Anonymous.
I wish you all the best.
Rob
When is your book coming out ?
I don’t think that there will be much market for it until after the next crash. So I do not intend to do anything with it until then. However, I think it would be a huge plus to have it completed when the crash comes because there may be lots of people who will be hungry for explanations for what happened to their money at that time. So my internal aim is to have it completed by the end of this year.
Rob