Kathleen:

My name is Rob Bennett. I am the author of the “A Rich Life” blog (http:arichlife.passionsaving.com). I saw your comment at the “Psy-Fi Blog” (my personal favorite) and followed the link to your site.

My sense is that you take a holistic approach to financial planning. It’s very much my belief that we need to see a big shift in that direction. So I wanted to make contact with you and let you know about an article that I recently wrote that might hold some interest for you.

Here is a link to an article that I wrote for “The Integrative Advisor” entitled “Humble Money Experts Are the Best Money Experts”:

http://www.aiflp.org/pdfs/IntegrativeAdviserNo0203.pdf

Please let me know if you have any reactions or questions.

I wish you the best of luck with your future endeavors in any event!

Rob
http:arichlife.passionsaving.com

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Andrew:

My name is Rob Bennett. I am the author of the “A Rich Life” blog (http://arichlife.passionsaving.com) and have long been a big fan of your work. Your article at the ”Free Exchange” blog entitled “Lucas Roundtable: The EMH Must Be Discarded,”

http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2009/08/lucas_roundtable_the_emh_must

is in my assessment one of the clearest and most powerful investing articles ever written. It is perfect!

I would be grateful if you would take a look at a Google Knol that I recently posted entitled “Why Buy-and-Hold Investing Can Never Work.” I am leading an effort to have the internet opened to honest posting on the Big Fail of the Buy-and-Hold Model (numerous discussion boards and blogs have banned honest posting on the flaws of Buy-and-Hold because it upsets those who have confidence in this model to learn of its weaknesses). I would be grateful for any feedback on the Knol that you might be able to offer.

Good luck in all your future endeavors!

Rob
http:arichlife.passionsaving.com

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Greg:

My name is Rob Bennett. I am the author of the “A Rich Life” blog (http://arichlife.passionsaving.com). I found your web site today through Twitter.

I would be grateful if you would take a look at a Google Knol that I have posted entitled “Why Buy-and-Hold Investing Can Never Work”.

I have been trying for eight years to bring the matters discussed in this Knol to the attention of middle-class investors. Many have expressed great interest but I have run into brick walls when site owners or “experts” who have endorsed Buy-and-Hold have shut the discussions down. I believe that people need to be able to ask questions to learn what they need to learn for us all to survive this economic crisis.

I have come to believe that the answer lies in getting the word out about this issue to the Tea Party movement. Ordinary middle-class people care about these issues in a way that those who make money promoting Buy-and-Hold strategies do not, in my experience. If you believe that the message that I am putting forward in the Knol has merit and that my idea of spreading this message to members of the Tea Party movement is a good idea, I would be grateful for any suggestions or help you can offer in getting me on the right track in doing so.

Thanks for any help you can offer. Best of luck with your blog and other endeavors!

Rob
http://arichlife.passionsaving.com

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Juicy Excerpt: We can bid stock prices up to any level we want. We can all vote ourselves raises if we like. The only penalty is that, when we bid them up too high, they must crash back down in the following years. What is made from nothing must eventually return to nothing. It always happens that way. It always will happen that way. Now you know.

Lotsa good comments.

Juicy Excerpt #1: Thanks for following up, Rob. Your comments have given me more to think about, for sure.

Juicy Excerpt #2: What a nice thing to say! You’ve made my morning, Wojciech. Please understand that my investing stuff is “controversial.” I say what I sincerely believe and I work it hard to be as sure as I can possibly be that I have gotten it right. But there are lots of good and smart people who think I am out to lunch re this stuff.

These discussions sure are a lot more pleasant when they aren’t a bunch of Know-It-Alls seeking to dominate and intimidate. Buy-and-Hold Dogmatics make me so mad! Grrrrr….

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I put a comment to a blog entry there entitled U.S. Historical Asset Class Returns. Here are the words of my comment:

“Stocks tend to outpace other asset classes over the medium to long-term, but if you buy them at the end of a bubble period such as 1999 or 1929, you’re unlikely to do very well.

“Precisely so!

 ”The obvious question is — Why do the “experts” not tell people this at the time, when it could do them some good? Why were Bogle and Buffett and Bernstein and all these others not warning us to lower our stock allocations when prices were so high that the odds of achieving good long-term results were dismal?

“The obvious answer is that the “experts” are compromised. They make a living by selling stocks and you don’t sell stocks by telling people that stocks offer a horrible long-term value proposition at current prices.

“This needs to change if we are to get out of this economic crisis. The internet is not owned by The Stock Selling Industry. If personal finance bloggers would come to see it as their job to report the realities of stock investing, all this crazy volatility would come to an end. People would learn to only invest in stocks when prices are reasonable and therefore prices could never rise to unreasonable levels again.

“It’s all so easy and so hard both at the same time. It would be the greatest advance in investing ever achieved. But it would also be the greatest upset to the status quo we have ever seen. It would be a tiny step forward in logic  and a huge step forward in terms of the results that we all could obtain from our investing dollars.”

The owner of the blog responded with a comment saying:

“Rob Bennett – I have deleted your comment and my patience has finally run out on allowing you to post your opinions about conspiracy in the markets on my blog.

“Your comments are misleading and dangerous, and I don’t spend 3-4 hours writing articles to have you append your mantra at the end of every post.

“There is no conspiracy about valuation in the stock market. This very article mentions valuation….  Everyone knows about valuation. It is discussed non-stop….Read The Intelligent Investor by Benjamin Graham, which also discusses over and undervalued markets, and the dangers of the former, and thus why it is desirable to invest in the latter…. Enough is enough.”

I responded with a comment saying:

“Then read The Intelligent Investor by Benjamin Graham, which also discusses over and undervalued markets, and the dangers of the former, and thus why it is desirable to invest in the latter.

“And yet there are many who advocate Buy-and-Hold Investing (failing to adjust your stock allocation in response to big price swings) to this day, Monevator. Why? For what purpose?”

This comment was deleted within minutes of the time I posted it.

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Juicy Excerpt: Many stock investors who lost money in the stock crash of September 2008 are taking comfort in the fact that prices have traveled upward since then. This is a mistake. We are still in a long-term bear (often referred to as “a secular bear market”). Thus, the effect of any temporary move upward is likely to be canceled out by larger downward price movements that will be taking place in future days. In fact, the more that prices go up, the greater will be the pressure created for stronger and deeper price drops. Today’s stock investors are hurting themselves by cheering on upward price movements and should instead be seeking a stabilization in prices or even modest price drops, which would diminish the risks of further crashes.

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The first article for the new section is entitled “Safe Investing — What the “Experts” Won’t Tell You.”

Juicy Excerpt: The incredible reality is that, at a time when most middle-class investors are desperately seeking to learn about safe investing strategies (this article was posted in March 2010), a Social Taboo has developed blocking reasoned discussion of the wonderful things we have learned from the academic research of recent decades. This article describes both the research findings and the Social Taboo that has thus far blocked you from learning about them.

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Juicy Excerpt: The conventional investing wisdom is that the money you don’t put into stocks you should put into corporate bonds and the money you don’t put into corporate bonds you should put into stocks. But why? This wisdom was developed at a time when Treasury Inflation Protected Securities did not exist. We need to rethink it. When we do, I think we will see that TIPS do the better job of serving as the alternative to stocks.

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Pop:

This is Rob Bennett, author of the “A Rich Life” blog.

Rajiv Sethi linked yesterday to your blog entry defending the Buy-and-Hold model from my criticisms of it. In my comment (at the bottom of the long comments section), I said that I would contact you to see if you have an interest in hosting a Guest Blog Entry by me responding to the points you made in the “Rob Bait” piece.  I think you have taken a potentially breakthrough step in moving this discussion to a more elevated and warm and civil and learning-oriented level. My aim in writing a Guest Blog Entry would be to continue moving things in that direction while also of course arguing the anti-Buy-and-Hold case.

I would be grateful if you would let me know if you have an interest.

I greatly admire your work and would love to be working together with you in this way to take things to a more productive and constructive and life-affirming place.

 Rob

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Mel:

My name is Rob Bennett. I am the owner of the PassionSaving.com web site and the “A Rich Life” blog. I am a big Sarah Palin fan; I recently recorded a podcast about her, which will be posted at my site in a few weeks. I am also a big fan of the “Conservatives4Palin” site. It is giving lots of people hope during a troubling time.

I don’t write about politics. I write about personal finance. I am writing to ask if you have interest in me writing a blog post about the root cause of today’s economic troubles. This is a story that has not been told properly anywhere else, in my assessment. I believe that this topic strongly relates to the Palin phenomenon.

You have seen how much hate Palin inspires in those who see her emergence as a threat to their status as “experts.” There is a very similar phenomenon going on in the personal finance field. The academic research has shown for 28 years that the Efficient Market Theory, the theoretical support for today’s conventional investing advice, is entirely wrong-headed. I can quote many big-name experts who are aware of this; for example, Rob Arnott, former editor of the Financial Analysts Journal, has said that we are on the verge of a “revolution” in our understanding of how investing works and that the current advice is rooted in “myth and urban legend.” I have studied the problems in great depth and have worked with hundreds of people on the internet to develop more realistic and effective advice.

I have run into a big problem. The same sorts of smear and intimidation tactics that have been employed to stop people from hearing Palin’s message have been used to stop people all across the internet from learning about the realities of stock investing. Many, many people have expressed great enthusiasm for learning about the new ideas, but a good number have also insisted that fruitful discussion be banned at all personal finance sites and blogs (and have been largely successful doing so). I have come to the conclusion that it is going to be impossible to get the word out dealing only with sites and blogs that have an institutional interest in preserving the status quo. I need to reach out to political blogs run by people who may come to this with more of an open mind. The bad advice that we have been given on investing for many years now is the primary cause of the economic crisis and the economic crisis clearly has a political dimension to it.

I don’t view myself as being either a Republican or a Democrat (although I have been leaning more to the conservative side in recent years). I would prefer not to be associated with intensely partisan blogs. Part of the interest in Palin is that she appears to be someone interested in working around the partisan logjams to get sensible things done for ordinary people. Ordinary people have a crying need today to learn how investing works and it has become impossible for them to learn that from conventional sources of personal finance information. I hope to be able to interest you in a blog post that would tell a little bit of the story of what is going on in the economy and the stock market today.

I do not have anything to sell (I offer a book on saving, and am working on one on investing, but I do not currently have anything for sale in the investing area). I am not aiming to talk about some complicated strategy. My aim is to explain the BASIC investing realities, the ABCs. The primary reason why the basics are rarely addressed is that The Stock-Selling Industry sees it as being to its benefit for the average investor not to know that there are some times when it is a horrible idea to buy stocks and many media outlets need the advertising support they get from The Stock-Selling Industry too much to question the conventional advice too strongly.

If you have any interest, my thought is that I would write a blog entry hitting only the highlights and you would review it for suitability. The title might be something like ”The True Cause of the Economic Crisis — The Biased Investing Advice We Hear from The Stock-Selling Industry.”  The root problem is that we all have been told to invest in wildly risky ways and this has caused such a huge loss of wealth that most of us are now properly cutting back on spending (which causes businesses to fail).

We could turn this around and restore faith in the economic and political system if we could get realistic advice out to ordinary people as to how to manage their personal wealth. This shouldn’t be so hard! If there were interest among your readers in me getting into more detail at a later date, I would of course be happy to write any follow-up pieces in which there were an interest.

I want to provide a few links to give you some idea of the background of the story:

1) The link below is to the home page of my blog. If you look down the left side of the page, you will see a section marked “People Are Talking.” That contains links to a sample of the many kind comments that have been offered re the work I have done over the past nine years both in the saving and investing area.

People Are Talking

2) The link below is to a calculator called “The Stock-Return Predictor.” This is the tool that every middle-class investor should be using to determine whether to put his or her retirement money into stocks. The thing that The Stock-Selling Industry fails to tell us is that stocks offer a very poor long-term value proposition when purchased at the sorts of price levels that applied from 1996 through 2008.

 The Stock-Return Predictor

3) The link below is to the text of an e-mail that I sent to my congressman (Rep. Frank Wolf) regarding the long-running smear and intimidation campaigns that have been used to block me from educating the thousands of middle-class investors who have expressed an interest in learning about the realities of stock investing:

 Hocus Goes to Washington

4) The link below is to an article containing snippets of posts by 101 community member who expressed a desire that discussions of the investing realities be permitted on the internet. I think that if you read a few of these snippets you will see why I see similarities between the Palin phenomenon and the efforts to block ordinary people from learning about the investing realities:

Honest Posting Is a Good Thing! 

I am grateful for any effort you can devote to considering this idea. I am of course happy to respond to any questions. Thanks for all your good work at the “Conservatives4Palin” site.

Rob

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