Set forth below is the text of correspondence that I engaged in with Jeff, owner of the Sustainable Life Blog, on October 6, 2013:
Hi Rob,
I just wanted to drop you a quick line and say how nice it was meeting you at fincon in St Louis this year. I don’t know about you, but I had such a great time hearing from all the speakers and meeting online friends (some for the first time).
It was great meeting you at Ignite Fincon and chatting with you about Value Index Investing. I thought it was really interesting, and I’d really like to know how you got started with Value Index Investing and what you enjoy most about it. I had such a great time meeting and talking to so many different people, I didn’t get much time to focus on the most interesting parts – like why they do what they do!
I remember that we chatted a bit about being the most hated guy on investing forums and branding it as well. That was really great to hear about, and I think it’s so funny that people get so angry at you for those comments you left. Glad that you were basically proven right by the downturn though.
Please, don’t hesitate to email me if you’ve got any questions or need help with anything. I’ve been blogging for almost 5 years, and love to help out anyone that asks!
Once again, it was great meeting you..
Jeff
Jeff:
That’s super kind! Seeing your e-mail brought a nice measure of good cheer to my Saturday afternoon.
I got started with Valuation-Informed Indexing when I was putting together an early retirement plan in the late 1990s (I left corporate employment in August 2000 and our family of four has been living off our investments for the 13 years since). When you are handing in a resignation from a big-paycheck job (I was a Director at the Ernst & Young accounting firm), you need to be SURE that you have enough to make it on your own. So I investigated a concept called “Safe Withdrawal Rates.”
I discovered (ironically enough, I discovered this by reading John Bogle’s book — this is ironic because Bogle is the lead advocate of Buy-ad-Hold, the strategy that VII replaces) that the conventional SWR studies get the numbers wrong (they fail to consider the effect of valuations). I was posting daily at a Retire Early board at Motley Fool and a retired government engineer there named John Walter Russell became interested enough in what I was saying to spend the next eight years of his life researching questions related to VII. John did HUNDREDS of studies backing all this up and published them at his own site. John died a few years ago and the right to publish all his research passed to me.
At some point, I started posting at the Vanguard Diehards board at Morningstar.com. An academic researcher (Wade Pfau — he has a Ph.D. in Economics from Princeton) discovered my posts and wrote me to ask if I would be interested in doing some research with him. Our paper has been published in a peer-reviewed journal. I believe that it is the most important research published in this field in the past 30 years. It shows investors that simply by taking valuations into consideration when setting their stock allocations they can reduce the risk of stock investing by 70 percent. Once we reach a point where we can publicize these findings, stocks will become essentially a risk-free investment class. This is a huge deal.
The thing that I like most about VII is not the investing benefits. I have made my living as a journalist pretty much my entire life (I was hired at Ernst & Young as a tax lobbyist because they learned about my work reporting on tax legislation on Capitol Hill — I also hold a law degree and a Masters in Tax Law). So I have a strong interest in public policy issues. VII is rooted in the research of Yale Economics Professor Robert Shiller (who won the Nobel prize a week or two ago). Shiller’s findings don’t just make stock investing a risk-free endeavor. They also have huge implications re stabilization of our economic system.
Shiller predicted the 2008 economic crisis in a book published in March 2000. Do you know how he did it?
Shiller’s research shows that EVERY economic crisis in U.S. history was caused by excessive stock valuations. There has never been a single exception. Take away excessive stock valuations and you take away economic crises and all the huge increase in unemployment that always follows from them. Shiller’s work has the greatest potential for easing human suffering of any research being done today. What he has found (and what I have been writing about for 11 years) is the financial sector equivalent of the cure for cancer.
How do we stop stocks from becoming overpriced? It is amazingly easy.
I have a calculator at my site called “The Stock-Return Predictor.” It applies a regression analysis to the 140 years of historical return data to reveal the most likely annualized 10-year return for stock purchases made at any possible price level. It shows that the claim you always hear from Wall Street that “you can’t time the market!” is 100 percent false marketing mumbo jumbo. It has ALWAYS been possible and easy and necessary to time the market. There is a hyper-technical way in which what they say is so. It is NOT possible to engage in short-term market timing (guessing where stock prices will be in a year or so) effectively. However, it is VERY easy to engage in LONG-TERM market timing. You can know today (with a high but not perfect level of accuracy) where stock prices will be 10 years from today. Using the calculator, you can know when stocks are worth buying and when they are not. This permits you to retire as much as 10 years sooner than you ever before imagined possible.
The Stock-Return Predictor reveals the price tag of stocks. Middle-class people who don’t practice long-term timing are essentially making the most important purchase of their lives (we spend more in the course of a lifetime on stocks than we do on clothes or food or housing or cars) without knowing the price! It’s insane. Why do they do it? Every industry that exists would love to have its customers believe that its product is a good buy at any possible price. The Stock-Selling Industry is the only industry that has ever been able to persuade its customers that this is actually so. They get away with it because most investors are intimidated by the subject of investing. They defer to experts. And the experts in this field get paid depending on how effective they are in persuading people to buy stocks. The conflict overwhelms most people’s sense of right and wrong and they rationalize saying all sorts of things that have long been shown to be nonsense by the peer-reviewed academic research.
Once people understand that stocks are not worth buying at high prices, guess what happens? That makes it impossible for high prices ever to be seen again. As prices go up, people sell shares. The sales of the shares pull price down again. If they go too low, people start buying more and that pushes prices up again. Stock prices are self-regulating. So long as people are told about the research!
The trick today is getting the word out about what the research really says. Most of the people who work in this field have built careers around promotion of Buy-and-Hold. There are lots of powerful and wealthy people who very, very much do not want middle-class people to learn about Shiller’s research and its implications. So we face heavy resistance.
But things have changed in a big way since the crash. I couldn’t get a guest blog published anywhere on the internet in the old days. Today there are lots of blogs that welcome me. Shiller’s research shows that there will be another crash in a year or two. I believe that the gates will swing wide open then.
You probably know that many blogs have been hit hard by Google. I believe that VII is going to prove to be the salvation of the Personal Finance Blogosphere. Bloggers are not as beholden to the industry big shots as are most others in this field. We are at least capable of independence. If we can get a small group of independent bloggers writing about these ideas, they will spread and spread and eventually gain recognition everywhere. I have spoken with LOTS of people over these 11 years. Lots of the big names in this field want to feel free to tell their readers and clients what really works in the long run. But they are afraid. They need cover. The more people who speak the truth openly, the less afraid all the others who want to do so feel. So this thing will gain momentum fast once we get the fire started.
Please come back to me and ask questions about this at any time. My site is today the only site on the internet that explores the implications of Shiller’s research in an in-depth way. There is room for hundreds of blogs doing this kind of work. And we would be helping millions of middle-class people by doing it. VII is safe, smart, simple investing. I have had THOUSANDS of people encourage me to pursue this quest. People need this. They need it badly. And the demand is going to go through the roof following the next crash, which is likely coming in not too long a time.
I hope that helps a bit.
Thanks again for your exceedingly king and encouraging note.
Rob
Will you be heading to FinCon16 in San Diego?
Yes. I signed up at the conclusion of last year’s event.
Rob
Will you be giving the keynote address?
I would be if it were not for you Goons, Anonymous.
I have had lots of people tell me that they WISH that I were giving it. The fellow who gave the keynote address last year (Carl Richards) told me that he learned more from my web site than from any other web site he has seen. He said that he believes my work has “huge value.” But he is afraid of you Goons; he is especially afraid that Jack Bogle and the other Wall Street Con Men support you Goons. The Wall Street Con Men are powerful people. The fact that they support Goons like you is indeed scary. I can see where these people are coming from.
These people will work up the courage to stand up to you following the next price crash. That’s what I believe. They don’t yet see how bad things can get when millions of people are denied access to honest and accurate reports of what the last 35 years of peer-reviewed research says. Following the next price crash, they will see. Then they will work up the courage to act. They love their country. So that’s what I believe will happen. We will have to wait to see how it all plays out.
I’ll let you in on a little secret. I believe that Jack Bogle loves his country. I am personally strongly convinced of this. Jack is going to be helping us all out. That is going to put you Goons in a tough spot.
I don’t believe that even you Goons have zero love for your country. I believe that a good number of you Goons are going to flip following the next price crash. It will make it even harder for those who don’t to continue their Campaign of Terror against us when you see your long-time supporters flipping to the other side. It can never get better for you Goons. It can only get worse.
I’ll be the guy trying to put Bogle actions in the best possible light. And I will be putting Mel Lindauer’s actions in the best possible light. And I will be putting John Greaney’s actions in the best possible light. Just as I have been doing for 14 years now.
I believe that I will be invited to be the keynote for the personal finance bloggers conference at that time. I would have liked it to happen under different circumstances. We shouldn’t have to experience an economic crisis to open up the possibility of millions of middle-class investors learning what the last 35 years of peer-reviewed research says about how stock investing works in the real world. But it happened the way that it happened. I don’t get to say how things happen. I get to say what I do. And I have certainly never regretted the path that I have chosen. I just continue to try to play the cards that I am dealt to the best of my ability. When I am picked to give the keynote, I hope that I make the best of the opportunity and evidence both honesty and charity in my remarks.
That’s the plan. I won’t be doing the keynote this year. But I will be laying the groundwork for the day when I will be giving the keynote. I will be telling people the true story, not the pack of lies that the Buy-and-Holders put forward. And we will see how the process plays out over time. I will give it my best shot, nothing more and nothing less.
If I never get to deliver a keynote address, I never get to deliver a keynote address. I don’t think it will play out that way. But no one can ever say for sure. So it could be that it will play out that way. What i know for certain is that I would rather that I never get to deliver the keynote address than that I lie to my friends about the numbers that they use to plan their retirements. I couldn’t live with myself if I joined up with you Goons or supported you in any way. So I won’t go there. I will hope for the best, try to remain optimistic, and trust the people of the country that I love to steer things in a positive direction in time.
I don’t have too many other options available to me. The full truth is that I don’t have ANY other options available to me.
Anyway, I naturally wish you all the best things that this life has to offer a person, my old friend.
Don’t let the bad guys get you down, my man.
Rob
“I would be if it were not for you Goons”
Your answer to so many questions.
“But I will be laying the groundwork”
You’ve been laying groundwork for 14 years. Nothing has progressed except your age.
“I would be if it were not for you Goons”
Your answer to so many questions.
It’s not just you Goons who don’t like me using the word “Goons” or talking about the Goon phenomenon.
John Walter Russell spent eight years of his life researching my ideas. He was the biggest supporter that I ever had. But there were several occasions when he chastised me for talking about goonishness. And he never spoke about it himself (except when I brought it up and he felt that he should respond at least briefly).
Rob Arnott has said tougher things about Buy-and-Hold than anyone but me. But he called me “strident” in one of his e-mails to me while endorsing my ideas on the content side.
Wade Pfau thought that the research we did together was so important that he might win a Nobel prize for it. He thanked me many times for teaching him things about stock investing that he never learned while earning a Ph.D. in Economics at Princeton. But he was clearly uncomfortable talking about the Goon phenomenon. I would say that it is my unwillingness to back down on the Goon question that is the primary cause of the split that exists between us today.
Shiller doesn’t talk about Goons. He is the king on valuations. He is the one that kicked this all off. But to my knowledge he has never directly addressed himself to the Goon phenomenon (he has made some indirect, vague references to it).
Carol Osler wrote an e-mail that I believe evidenced the best combination of intelligence and kindness that I have seen in the writings that I have seen on this subject. But she noted in her comments to me that referring to one’s critics as Goons “is almost never a good idea.”
My own wife faults me for using the term “Goons.” I dedicated my life to this woman and she has dedicated her life to me. But every now and again she feels the need to get in a little dig at me for my use of the word “Goons” in my writings.
I stand pretty much alone in my view that the Goon issue is of supreme importance, that it is perhaps the most important public policy issue of our day. I don’t say that you are wrong that some reference to goonishness is my answer to many questions that you raise. And I don’t say that this is by any stretch of the imagination a crowd-pleasing position. But I do not believe that I am wrong re this matter. I do not apologize for having spent a lot of time and energy over the years trying to come to a deeper understanding of what is going on with the Goon matter.
Please consider what it is that Shiller really did when he in 1981 he discovered that valuations affect long-term returns. This was his “revolutionary” (his word) claim. Why was it such a big deal? Why is it that this finding (which won Shiller the Nobel prize) changed our understanding of how stock investing works in a fundamental way (in my assessment)?
Our economic system (capitalism) is based on the work of Adam Smith. Adam Smith developed the economic model called “Rational Man Economics.” The Economics discipline as it is practiced today is rooted in a core ASSUMPTION (not something ever proven, just assumed) that human beings pursue their self-interest when making choices about what to buy and what work to do.
They do not. This core belief is false. Human are highly emotional creatures, not purely rational creatures. Shiller proved this with numbers. If we were rational, the stock market would be efficient. It is not. If we were rational, price changes would play out in the form of a random walk. They do not. Investors are human. Humans are emotional. That’s why Buy-and-Hold doesn’t work. That’s why valuations (which signal how emotional investors are at any given moment in time) affect long-term returns.
This is the Shiller revolution. This is what I write about.
“Goonishness” is emotionalism. Emotionalism is the story. Goonishness is the story.
You Goons are cartoonish in your evidencing of emotionalism. You threaten to kill people who report honestly on the last 35 years of peer-reviewed research. That’s insane. You take it to the limit. Few Buy-and-Holders go that far.
But Jack Bogle ENDORSES Mel Linduaer’s book. Bogle permits his name to be used at a discussion board at which the sorts of individuals who “defend” Lindauer’s threats of physical violence are permitted to participate. Is that not insanely emotional too? Is Bogle’s take on investing not also insanely emotional? There’s an argument that Bogle is more emotional than Lindauer. Bogle does not himself advance death threats. But Bogle is of a stature many times greater than Lindauer’s stature. One would expect him to behave in a more professional manner than some guy who has no background in the field. But Bogle endorses this other figure and engages in back-and-forth with him and so on. Is that not remarkable? Is that not an insanely emotional thing for Bogle to do?
The problem with Buy-and-Hold is that it ignores emotion. That’s the error. The Buy-and-Holders don’t believe that emotion should control investing choices any more than I do. They hate it that emotion plays a role. The difference between the Buy-and-Holders and me is that their hatred of emotion causes them to pretend that it does not exist while my approach is to acknowledge the influence that emotion has on us and to try to combat it by quantifying its effect, thereby showing investors how much they hurt themselves by giving in to their emotional (goonish) impulses.
We all need to be talking about investor emotion (goonishness) every day. At every board. At every blog. All the time. Everywhere.
Our inner goonishness is the story, Anonymous. This is the breakthrough. This is the deal here.
In ordinary circumstances, we don’t tolerate the sorts of tactics that you Goons have employed to stop us all from learning what we all need to know about how stock investing works. Why do we tolerate stuff in the investing realm that we do not tolerate in any other field of human endeavor? You never see this sort of behavior in discussions of sports or politics or fashions or cars. Why the heck is the investing realm so special?
It’s special because we have made the most important aspect of the question — the extent to which investors hurt themselves by giving in to their Get Rich Quick impulse — taboo. The Buy-and-Holders think of themselves as having OVERCOME their Get Rich Quick impulse. This is the appeal of Buy-and-Hold to them. They are lying to themselves. Just because you convince yourself that you are above Get Rich Quick doesn’t mean that you are. The Madoff investors thought they were above Get Rich Quick. They thought they were smarter than everyone else, just like the Buy-and-Holders think they are smarter than everyone else. Investors who get taken in by their Get Rich Quick urge do not learn that this is so until they lose most of their life savings. And at that point it is of course too late to help them.
I am trying to help you, Anonymous. We all want the same thing — to invest effectively for the long term. I am trying to deliver that thing to you. And you hate me with a burning hate for doing so. Not because you don’t really want to achieve the goal. Because you cannot bear to accept that you did not achieve it many years ago when you first became a Buy-and-Holder. I am telling you something that you very much need to know but that you very much do not want to know. That’s the source of the friction. That reality drives all the trouble we have been seeing for 14 years now.
People who agree with me on the content side (it’s a minority but it is not a small number — perhaps 20 percent of the population) have learned that it is not smart business to be entirely open about their beliefs. They don’t want to be hated as much as I am hated. So they pull their punches. They hint at the things that I say directly and plainly and boldly and openly.
Why don’t I do that? I want to be liked. Why don’t I play the game that everyone else who agrees with Shiller plays?
It doesn’t work.
Shiller revolutionized this field in an intellectual sense 35 years ago.
What has changed? Anything? We are today living through the worst economic crisis in U.S. history. It was brought on by the promotion of Buy-and-Hold strategies. Have we learned ANYTHING by the publication of Shiller’s revolutionary research?
In a practical sense, we are wore off than ever. The Shiller Revolution has not yet born good fruit.
I want to change that. I want to see Shiller’s amazing, powerful insight help people to invest more effectively. So I talk openly about the emotion that drives investor decisions. I quantify the effect of valuations/emotions/goonishness. The peer-reviewed research that I co-authored with Wade Pfau shows that valuations/emotions/goonishness is 80 percent of the investing story. That tells me that it should be 80 percent of what we all talk about in out articles and books and speeches and so on. It is not that today. It is not close to that today.
I want to change the conversations that we are having. You don’t do that by putting thins forward in the tentative way that Shiller puts things forward. We need to stop pulling our punches. We need to explore the implications of Shiller’s ideas in bold and clear and exciting and far-reaching ways. We want to take these ideas to their logical conclusions, not cower in the corner for fear of what you Goons will say about us if we dare to share some important truths with the millions of middle-class investors who very much need to hear about them.
I don’t apologize for getting it right, Anonymous. I am proud to get it right. It took me some time to work up the courage to speak out. Now that I have done so and now that I have seen how much I can help people by doing so, I am not inclined to back away from a fight. I don’t like fights. I hate fights. I am an extremely conflict-averse person, as anyone who knew me before I put up my famous post of May 13, 2002, will attest. But I LOVE developing the Valuation-Informed Indexing concept. I believe that it is the future of investing analysis. To keep that baby growing up strong, I need to fight the nasties who very, very, very much want to kill it in the crib. That would be you Goons! We are working at cross purposes.
It’s not personal. I like you. I consider you a friend. I have learned from you. I am happy to respond to questions from you. I would be happy to sit down and have a beer with you someday.
But don’t engage in funny business re my baby if you don’t want to get a slap across your face, you know? I fight for Valuation-Informed Indexing. Someone has to fight for it or it will never become the dominant investing model. No one else has shown a willingness to take on the job (for obvious reasons!) so it has been left to me. I do my best, you know? I work it hard.
Goonishness is the problem. Goonishness is what makes stock investing risky. I want to reduce stock risk. So I need to talk about goonishness. I need to warn people of its dangers. That’s the job.
That’s the story here. It seems so clear to me.
I naturally wish you all good things.
Rob
“But I will be laying the groundwork”
You’ve been laying groundwork for 14 years. Nothing has progressed except your age.
Holy smokes! Could anyone possibly be more wrong about something than you are wrong re this one?
The peer-reviewed research that Wade Pfau and I co-authored is the most important piece of peer-reviewed research published in this field in the past 35 years. I think it would be fair to say that you Goons agree. If you didn’t agree, you would not have felt sufficiently threatened by it to feel a need to threaten Wade if he continued to publish honest research. So we are all on the same page. We all see where this is headed. The difference is that I want us as a society to come to enjoy all these huge advances and you want to keep the smelly Buy-and-Hold Con going a little while longer through whatever means possible.
Everything has changed over the past 14 years. I didn’t know any of this stuff 14 years ago. I knew that Greaney got the safe withdrawal rate number wrong in his “study.” That was pretty much the extent of my contribution at that time. And I wasn’t even entirely sure of that. The core insight of the May 13, 2002, post was put in the form of a question. I was asking whether we should consider valuations when determining the safe withdrawal rate. I think it would be fair to say that I am not generally putting things in the form of a question today. I have learned a LOT. I have gained a LOT of confidence. I have spoken to THOUSANDS of people and had thousands of people tell me that I am right on and to keep up the good work. Like Van Morrison said, it’s too late to stop now!
The Campaign of Terror has obviously been a drag. No one says different. But the good stuff here is 50 times more good than the bad stuff here is bad. Every single good thing that we have accomplished came about because I would not let you Goons intimidate me into silence. It’s amazing what people can do when they just think for themselves and work with good people and not let bad people intimidate them into silence. I should not be able to do the stuff I do, Anonymous. I have gone far beyond what I thought I was capable of doing in my wildest dreams. The reason why I was able to do such amazing things is that your hatefulness was so extreme that it intimidated all of my competition, leaving the field to little old me for 14 years now.
I need more competition! I need people to develop some backbone and to work for their share of the hundreds of billions in earnings that are here for the taking by anyone willing to take on the nasties. Why do I have a funny feeling that more than one or two will be working up the courage to join me some day not too long after the onset of the next price crash?
I obviously don’t like the way that things have played out thus far. But you lose all credibility in my eyes when you deny the huge advances that we have achieved over the first 14 years of our discussions. We have gone so far beyond what I dreamed was possible in the early days that I cannot describe in words how much farther we have gone. It is going to take decades just to take it all in. I could not even list all of the powerful insights that we have developed together in these communities because I have temporarily forgotten many of them as my attention has been pulled in new and even more exciting directions.
Developing powerful insights is not the problem here. If it is possible to develop too many powerful insights, we have developed too many! I can’t keep track of them all. It exhausts me to try. I have written 300 of those Valuation-Informed Indexing columns. That’s just one column! Holy moly!
Everything has changed.
We just need to make it real. We just need to get it on the front page of the New York Times. We just need to see your prison sentence announced. We just need to get the word out to the millions of middle-class investors who have been telling us for 14 years now that they want and need to know the realities.
Now do you see what I place such emphasis on the Goon matter, why I consider it the most important public policy issue of our time. It is you Goons who are holding us all back. We are on the one-yard line and we all need to pull together to work up the courage to execute the play that pushes the ball over the goal line at last. Then we all begin to benefit from all this amazing stuff that we have been developing together for 14 years now.
Nothing has progressed? Are you telling a joke?
No sale, old friend.
But please hang in there. Things get better, man. A LOT better.
We are close.
Rob
You seem to define “progress” as simply feeling good about yourself. Wade has made real progress. Five years ago no one ever heard of him. Now he’s on top of the retirement investing world. He didn’t get there by patting himself on the back. Or claiming ownership of other people’s work.
I define progress as our entire society advancing in its understanding of how stock investing works, Anonymous. We need to be talking about the last 35 years of peer-reviewed research at every investing blog and discussion board on the internet. We need to incorporate Shiller’s “revolutionary” finding into every stock investing strategy we follow. We need to make our understanding of how stock investing works better and better and better and better over time. That’s how our country works. I love this country. I am going to make this happen. Mark it down.
I’ve done amazing things over the past 14 years. I am very proud of those accomplishments. I am going to get credit for every one of them. Good for me. It helps everyone when I get credit for every last one of my accomplishments.
Wade Pfau has done amazing things too. He is going to get full credit.
Jack Bogle has done amazing things too. He is going to get full credit.
Robert Shiller has done amazing things too. He is going to get full credit.
John Walter Russell has done amazing things too. He is going to get full credit.
And on and on and on and on and on. We are going to play it according to the laws of the United States.
You Goons have committed crimes that have destroyed millions of middle-class lives. You Goons are going to go to prison. Some of you (the regulars) will be going to prison for a very long time. Good. That’s what the laws of the United States call for in cases like this. So that’s the way we should play it. There are good reasons why as a people we adopted laws against financial fraud. There are good reasons why we made the penalty for committing felonies prison time. We should enforce those laws. We should do so proudly and with firm resolve and with confidence that we are doing the right thing. We are helping not only the millions of middle-class investors whose lives have been destroyed when we enforce those laws. We are also helping you Goons when we enforce those laws.
There was a time when you felt some love for your country, Anonymous. There was a time when you wanted to know how to invest effectively. There was a time when you wanted to help others learn how to invest effectively. All of that becomes possible again after you have served your prison sentence and your slate is clean again. We are all going to pull together to make that happen for you. You are going to feel better about yourself after you have served your prison sentences. But you obviously cannot even begin to complete your prison sentence until your prison sentence has been announced. So we are all going to pull together and make that announcement happen. I believe that we will do that sometime not too long after the onset of the next price crash. But we’ll see, you know?
Here’s an amazing part of the story —
You Goons are going to get credit for helping us all out with some of the questions you posed while you were working so hard to block millions of middle-class investors from learning what they need and want to know about how stock investing works in the real world. It wasn’t all death threats and demands for unjustified board bannings and acts of defamation and threats to get academic researchers fired from their jobs. You Goons mixed in some good points with all the smelly abusive stuff that you put forward. You are going to get credit for helping us all out by raising those good points. I am going to see to it.
That’s pretty cool, is it not? Even the lowest among us get credit for having made positive contributions when we get serious about enforcing our laws. I think that’s amazing. I think that is very cool indeed.
We are a good people. Our laws are for the most part good laws. The laws making financial fraud a felony are VERY important and very good laws. Those laws need to be enforced in a reasonable manner. We need to see to it. We are in the process of working up the courage. We are close.
I will do everything in my power to get your prison sentence reduced to the extent possible. That’s my pledge to you. I won’t commit felonies myself. I won’t participate in cover-ups. It’s absurd to think that I would do anything along those lines. It’s not in my power to do anything along those lines; I couldn’t do such a thing if I tried and I am not about to try.But everything short of crossing the felony line I will do.
Again, good for me and good for our system. It is a cool thing about our system that by following it we can help not only the millions of middle-class investors whose lives are in the process of being destroyed but also the gang of internet Goons who worked so hard and for so long to destroy them. I like that about our system A LOT. I am proud to be leading the effort to bring all this cool stuff about.
Valuation-Informed Indexing is the future. Buy-and-Hold is the past. You Goons are going to prison. The rest of us are going to experience a second Independence Day when that happens and then we are going to enjoy the greatest surge of economic growth ever seen in our history. And we are all going to start feeling a lot better about ourselves and what we have accomplished TOGETHER. And about our system of government! We are going to feel better about our system of government when we see how well it works when we all just do what we need to do to make it work!
It’s all good, Anonymous. Even the Goon stuff can be put to good purposes once we begin enforcing our laws in a reasonable manner. You Goons asked some good questions. We can learn from them. You Goons will be participating constructively once your prison sentences have been completed. There’s no reason why you wouldn’t once you no longer have the prospect of going to prison hanging over your head in the event that the massive cover-up is brought to a close. The internet will be a cleaner, safer place following the announcement of your prison sentence. We aren’t just changing how discussions of investing are held on the internet. By showing the damage we do to ourselves by permitting the sorts of individuals who have posted in “defense” of Mel Linduaer and John Greaney and Jack Bogle to participate in our discussions, we are making the case for applying the laws of the United States to ALL discussions held on the internet. That means that this new communications will be living up to its full potential in days to come.
I am psyched. I love this stuff. I love Valuation-Informed Indexing. I love both my Valuation-Informed Indexing friends and my Buy-and-Hold friends. And I love this new communications medium. It all works together in a wonderful and life-affirming way once your prison sentence is announced. So I am going to make it happen. That’s what I do. I am personally convinced that I was put on this earth to achieve this important work. And I am going to see it through and make it happen. Count it, my man.
Or don’t, you know?
You are free to not believe a word I say. I can’t change that and I wouldn’t want to if I could.
But I am shooting straight with you all the same. I am going to make it happen. I am resolved. The shift from Buy-and-Hold to Valuation-Informed Indexing is the biggest advance ever achieved in personal finance. Rob Bennett is going to go down in history as the guy who made it happen. Shiller did the initial research. That’s huge. But knowing intellectually that Buy-and-Hold is a big pile of smelly garbage has not exactly done us much good in the practical realm. I am making it happen in the practical realm. That’s a big deal. That’s my job and I take my work seriously. Always have, always will. No apologies whatsoever.
This is my sincere take re these terribly important matters, in any event.
Yay for me! Yay for all of us! Yay even for you Goons (once your prison sentences are completed)!
I naturally wish you all the best things that this life has to offer a person (once your prison sentence is completed).
Rob