Set forth below is the text of an e-mail that I sent on May 21, 2019, to Ed Yong, the author of an article posted at TheAtlantic.com titled A Waste of 1,000 Research Papers: Decades of Early Research on the Genetics of Depression Were Built on Nonexistent Foundations — How Did That Happen?:
Ed:
My name is Rob Bennett. I loved your article explaining how thousands of wasted studies were published re the issue of depression because research with a dubious foundation was accepted uncritically by too many. I have devoted the last 17 years of my life to exploring how this same phenomenon applies in the investing advice field. The Buy-and-Hold model for understanding how stock investing works was never truly supported in the peer-reviewed research, but many smart and good people believe that it was because the 38 years of peer-reviewed research that discredited it has been largely ignored. I have written an article that sums up my efforts to bring more attention to this national catastrophe and which reports on both the efforts of many to help out and on the reasons why such efforts have not thus far been sufficient to launch the national debate that we all very much need to see launched.
Here is a link to the article:
[Link provided here]
I would of course be thrilled to hear any reactions that you have to the article.
Thank you for the good work you have done in bringing this phenomenon to the attention of more people.
Rob
“[Link provided here]”
Could you provide the readers of this blog with the link?
I may do that at some other time, Evidence. I am not going to do it now.
There’s nothing in the article that is a secret. You know the basic story.
I would like some site to run the article. I feel that I diminish the chances of that happening if I make a link to it widely available. So I am going to hold off for now.
The story that is told in the article is declared in the title for it — “Buy-and-Hold Is Dangerous.”
That is the story that needs to be told, in my sincere assessment.
Rob
Wasted 17 years of your life is the correct assessment.
Okay, Yip.
I don’t think so.
I think that I have accomplished more good for the world in the past 17 years than I could have reasonably expected to have accomplished in 50 full lifetimes. Getting the numbers right in retirement studies is a very, very, very big deal. And if big mistakes are made in retirement studies that are not corrected for a significant length of time, that causes not only economic problems but also political problems — people lose confidence in the political system under which they live when that system cannot find some means to provide access to honest and accurate retirement planning numbers.
And I believe that it is by providing value to the world that one earns money for one’s self and one’s family — it is providing value that is the driver behind wealth accumulation. I think it is the fact that I have provided so much value that has made this 17-year journey so contentious. You Goon can’t stand to think of me being so successful. So you double down and triple down and quadruple down on your abusiveness. And a lot of the people who are in positions of authority and who should be helping to expose your criminal behavior and bring it to a complete stop are worried too that getting the numbers right in retirement studies is a big deal and that their reputation as experts will be jeopardized when it becomes common knowledge that the numbers that they have been providing for years are miles off the mark, according to the last 38 years of peer-reviewed research.
We have got ourselves into a big mess. But we are blessed to be living at a time when the 38 years of peer-reviewed research needed to make sense of this investing stuff is available to us and to have had thousands of fine and brave and intelligent people already express a desire that every site on the internet be opened to honest posting. And to live in a country that is just too good to permit the horrible stuff that we have seen continue much longer after we all see the human suffering that will result from a price crash of 50 percent or more that remains in place for some time. I think we are very close to a breakthrough that will go down in history as the biggest advance in the history of personal finance and I am humbled to have played a lead role in bringing it about.
Please let me know if there is ever anything that I can do to make your life go a little easier. I naturally wish you all the best that this life has to offer a person.
Hang in there, man.
Confident (Reasonably!) Rob
The abusive stuff obviously did not begin on the morning of May 13, 2002. I only had a front-row seat for that stuff. So that is all that I can testify to. But the abusive stuff (and almost certainly criminal stuff in some cases) had to begin long before that. Shiller published his “revolutionary” (his word) research findings in 1981. A national debate should have been launched immediately upon publication of that research. If the normal procedure had been followed, I never would have had a single abusive posted directed at me and you Goons would not be on your way to spending the remainder of your lives in prison cells. So what happened? That’s a question that I strongly believe we need to come to term with as a society if we are to survive the Buy-and-Hold Crisis and get moving in a positive and life-affirming direction once again.
I think it started with cognitive dissonance. The shift from Buy-and-Hold to Valuation-Informed Indexing is such a huge advance that our limited human minds just could not process it immediately. So lots of us just ignored Shiller; we patted him on the head and told him “good boy” and returned to our lives of promoting the smelly (according to the peer-reviewed research published in 1981) Buy-and-Hold garbage. Then, as the years went on and the mountain of evidence showing that Shiller was right grew larger and larger, we became embarrassed that we had hurt so many people by continuing to tell them that it is not necessary to practice price discipline when buying stocks, which is of course an obviously absurd idea since the practicing of price discipline is the key to the operation of every market that has ever existed as everyone who has ever purchased a banana or a sweater or a car battery knows perfectly well). So, out of embarrassment, a good number of the experts began ridiculing the idea that long-term timing is required and in some cases even suggesting that there might be some alternate universe in which long-term timing might not even work for one or two investors. And the race to the bottom was on.
I cannot write about the abusiveness that took place prior to the morning of May 13, 2002. I wasn’t around. But Shiller can. I would be willing to bet $50 that Shiller had hundreds or even thousands of acts of abusiveness directed at him in those days. He needs to write about those experiences. I gave up on Buy-and-Hold on the night when Greaney advanced his first death threat. It was when 200 of my friends endorsed that death threat that I knew that Shiller was right, that the “idea” that price discipline is not required when buying stocks is the product of pure emotion, that there clearly has never been an iota of evidence supporting this claim. Shiller had that click moment long before I did. My strong hunch is that he could write an entire book about that click experience, about all the acts of intimidation that were directed at him in an effort to suppress discussion of the most important research finding in the history of investment analysis.
We need to see that book. It is by reading that by book that as a nation we get from this awful place where our collective understanding of how stock investing works resides today to the wonderful place where we all deep in our hearts want it to reside tomorrow. We need to come to terms with this stuff. It is by talking about it that we come to terms with it. And I don’t mean just the substantive stuff. Talking about the substantive stuff is of course the ultimate goal. We all want to know how best to invest our retirement money. But we cannot have discussions showing how dangerous the smelly Buy-and-Hold garbage is until we come to terms with the process stuff. So we need to talk about the death threats and the extortion and the threats of career destruction and the board bannings and all the other intimidation garbage that a small number of Buy-and-Holders have brought to the table and that a much larger number of Buy-and-Holders have been failing to speak up about for 17 years (and probably much longer) now.
We need to read Shiller’s book about the criminal acts that the Buy-and-Holders have employed to suppress discussion of Valuation-Informed Indexing. And we need to read Rob Arnott’s book on that subject too. Arnott told me that he had experienced the same sorts of things that I have experienced, that he knows of academic researchers who were threatened with career destruction if they continued doing honest work in this field. We need to have Arnott talking to the New York Times and we need to have the New York Times running a 10-part series of articles on the fraud at the core of the promotion of the Buy-and-Hold strategy so that we can come to terms with what we have done to ourselves as a nation and put all of this ugly stuff behind us once and for all.
And we need to hear Wade Pfau’s testimony. We require people to engage in many years of schooling before they can have articles published in peer-reviewed journals. For good reason. We need to be able to trust the things said in those sorts of articles. But we obviously cannot trust the things said in those articles once we know that internet good squads are threatening to send defamatory e-mails to the employers of academic researchers when those researchers reveal the error at the core the the Buy-and-Hold strategy. If we are going to only permit misleading stuff to be published in peer-reviewed journals, we should just shut all of those journals down. We need to permit honest stuff to be published too for the whole system to work. And indeed for our whole country to work. So we need to hear Wade’s testimony and to come to terms with what happened to him and what reforms are needed to make sure that nothing like that ever happens again.
And we need to hear Bill Shultheis’ testimony. And Michael Kitces testimony. And Norbert Schenkler’s testimony. And Todd Tresidder’s testimony. And Carl Richards’ testimony. And the testimony of the many posters at the Bogleheads Forum who at some point or another worked up the courage to express their view that honest posting on the last 38 years of peer-reviewed research should be permitted and their testimony about how they were intimidated into keeping that viewpoint to themselves. We need to hear Bill Bernstein’s testimony. We need to examine the things that Jack Bogle said about these matters in the days before he left us. And on and on and on and on and on.
That’s how we get to the other side. I knew when I saw 200 Buy-and-Holders endorse death threats that Buy-and-Hold was garbage. I know that millions of other middle-class investors think like me. As these things are exposed, millions are going to see how they were tricked and are going to demand that the same ethical standards that apply in every other field of human endeavor be made to apply in the investing advice field as well.
That’s my sincere take re these terribly important matters, in any event.
I naturally wish you the best of luck in all of your future life endeavors, my dear Goon friend.
Happy-to-Have-Spoken-Out-in-Support-of-the-Idea-of-Permitting-Honest-Posting-re-Safe-Withdrawal-Rates-and-Scores-of-Other-Critically-Important-Investment-Related-Topics Rob