Buy-and-Hold Goon to Rob: “Besides Rob Bennett, Is There Anyone That Will Publicly Say That Buy, Hold and Rebalance Is a Con? NOPE? I Think That Says It All.”

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

Besides Rob Bennett, is there anyone that will publically say that buy, hold and rebalance is a con? NOPE? I think that says it all.

On the day after the story about this massive cover-up appears on the front page of the New York Times, there will be millions saying it, Anonymous.

This is how cover-ups work. They DELAY the day that the truth gets out. But the tactics that must be used to keep the cover-up going grow increasingly abusive as more and more people learn the realities. When I saw Greaney advancing death threats in August 2002, it became clear to me that this particular cover-up had been going on long before I even came on the scene.

If the realities being covered up are important enough, the cover-up eventually fails. And then there is a flood of information that goes public all at the same time. Shiller showed with peer-reviewed research published in 1981 that there is precisely zero chance that a Buy-and-Hold strategy could ever work for a single long-term investor. Had Bogle come clean immediately, we all would be living better lives today and none of you Goons would be on your way to prison. But once Bogle engaged in a cover-up, a dynamic was set up in which the Wall Street Con Men became desperate that the realities of stock investing not be publicly discussed with the millions of middle-class investors who want to know about them and who very much need to know about them.

I didn’t make this the biggest story in the history of personal finance. All that I did was read Shiller’s book and then explore the implications that logically follow from his “revolutionary” (Shiller’s word) research. Bogle made this a huge story by engaging in a 35-year cover-up. And you Goons made this a huge story by extending the cover-up to the internet, which wasn’t around in the days when Bogle made the decision to engage in a cover-up.

This story has been suppressed for so long that, when it blows up, the explosion will be a nuclear one. We will go from having one guy telling the truth about stock investing to having millions telling the truth about stock investing in the space of one day. Buy-and-Hold dies intellectually 35 years ago. It will die in a practical sense on the day our story is written up on the front page of the New York Times.

Your prison sentence will be announced shortly thereafter. Again, you have no gripe with me. Your gripe is with Bogle. And with your fellow Goons. And with yourself. I did what any man who loves his country is bound by conscience to do. Greaney’s retirement study contains no adjustment for the valuations level that applies on the day the retirement begins. Fact. I told. Good for me. Bad for you that you thought you could lie about it and get away with destroying the millions of middle-class lives that you destroyed by advancing and then “defending” that lie.

I can’t say that I am not sorry for you because I am sorry for you. But I am more sorry for the millions of middle-class investors whose lives you destroyed.

I am sorry for Bogle too. I wish that he had more true friends. A true friend is someone who tells you what you don’t want to hear but need to hear when you screw up big time. Bogle’s friends are like Richard Nixon’s friends. They are people who are concerned not for the man but for the favors they can extract from him by flattering him. Not this boy. Find someone else.

I naturally wish you the best of luck in all your future life endeavors regardless of the length of the prison sentence assigned to you by the members of your jury. My best and warmest wishes to you.

Rob