Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently posted to the discussion thread for another blog entry at this site:
Liar. Here’s an old email to me in which Wade explains your hoax about his “academic career being threatened by anonymous internet posters” to an unfortunate fellow who bit on your 30k email jihad you waged against him in an effort to impugn his integrity and besmirch his good name. The only person who threatened Wade was Rob “hocus” Bennett.
“Dear Vivek, [the reference is to Business Week Columnist Vivek Wadhwa, who posted a tweet relating to the safe withdrawal rate saga]
I understand that Rob Bennett has sucked you into his drama. I’m Wade Pfau, the academic researcher who has allegedly been threatened. In writing about your tweet at his blog today, Rob even wrote, “(A number of Buy-and-Holders threatened to send defamatory e-mails to Wade’s employer in an effort to get him fired from his job for the “crime” of having published research showing the dangers of Buy-and-Hold investing strategies and several big names in the field [including Vanguard Founder John Bogle] failed to take action against those advancing the threats, thereby implicitly encouraging them [I have
sent Bogle four e-mails asking for his help with the matter])”
I can assure you that this is all part of Rob’s vast mythology in which he seeks to make himself into a super hero fighting the evils of Wall Street. It isn’t true. Rob magnified a very minor situation by 10,000x. The entire story he developed is based on the one minor comment found here at the start of this discussion board thread:
http://boards.fool.com/hocus-gets-college-prof-to-question-swr-studies-29265775.aspx?sort=whole
“I hope this doesn’t ruin that guy’s chances for tenure.”
That’s it. He imagined all of the subsequent details.
At any rate, I did indeed publish the studies which Rob claims I am afraid to publish. There is no issue. The main study is this one:
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09603107.2011.648317
Rob lives in an imaginary world of death threats and threatened academic researchers and so on, as you would discover if you waste time reading what he writes. Just thought I’d let you know, straight
from the horse’s mouth.
Best wishes, Wade”
In ordinary circumstances, I would not post this comment, Long Time. Since you are a Goon, there is obviously a good chance that Wade never sent this e-mail and that you just made it up. If that’s the case, I shouldn’t post the comment.
However, the full reality here is that Wade has cooperated with you Goons on several occasions. I don’t personally believe that the chances that your report is accurate are zero. That’s a shocking statement. But it is the behavior that we have all seen from Wade in the days following the threats that were made against him that makes it seem at least somewhat possible that your report is an accurate one. So I believe that your comment should be posted and added to the record that your jury will review when your trial date arrives.
As always, I wish you all good things.
Rob
That post goes way back to April. So you’ve finally jumped the shark. Reruns of reruns.
It will be interesting to see how it all plays out following the next price crash, Anonymous.
I wish you the best of luck with it, in any event.
Rob
“It will be interesting to see how it all plays out following the next price crash, Anonymous.”
How long will you keep repeating that line? 5 years? 10 years? 30 years?
Don’t you think that at some point, you have just waiting too long for a crash? Do you think at some point you waited too long for your plan to have your face plastered on the front page of The New York Times? Do you think at some point you waited to long for the Wall Street con-men to hand you $500 million?
It takes what it takes, Anonymous.
The entire difference between Buy-and-Hold and Valuation-Informed Indexing is that Buy-and-Hold has a short-term focus while Valuation-Informed Indexing has a long-term focus. I acknowledge that prices have remained high for longer than ever before in U.S. history. I think that’s because the Buy-and-Hold concept has been pushed harder than ever before. We’ve always had people pushing Get Rich Quick strategies. But never before have we had people claiming that there is support in the peer-reviewed research for Get Rich Quick strategies. The Buy-and-Holders of today claim that. I think that’s why things are more messed up now than they ever have been before.
I don’t have a time-period in mind. I love my country. That was true in 2002 and it is true today and it will be true 15 million years from today if I am still around. For me to support Buy-and-Hold, I would need to see some peer-reviewed research supporting it. That would have done the trick on May 13, 2002, or on any of the days from that day until today. But, without peer-reviewed research, I do not see how I can support a strategy that defies common sense and that is promoted through claims that the peer-reviewed research supports it. That goes too far for me. I don’t feel comfortable having my name associated with something like that.
I naturally wish you all good things.
Rob
“It takes what it takes, Anonymous.”
How is that an option for you and anyone else? You still have to have enough financial resources for retirement. At some point, time runs out.
I know my financial circumstances, Anonymous. I would say that the odds are very long against the possibility that time is going to run out for me.
But say that worst came to worst and than that happened. I would get a job to cover the bills and would update the site on the weekend. So everything that people need to understand what brought on the economic crisis would still be available to them. Problem solved.
The genuine problem that I face is the possibility that continuation of the Campaign of Terror against our board and blog communities is going to bring on the Second Great Depression. That is a possibility that worries me a great deal and that should worry each and every one of us (including you Goons!) a great deal. All of my energies are directed to doing something about that worry, the worry that matters. I have a funny feeling that my personal financial circumstances are going to play out just fine so long as we all pull together in time to do something about the real worry that we all face.
But we’ll see, you know?
I wish you all good things.
Rob
“I know my financial circumstances”
It’s a shame that you won’t share them. A few facts would be a welcome change here in Delusionville.
“I would get a job to cover the bills”
You are probably the most unemployable person in the world. Better stick to your original plan for getting paid $500 million for sitting on your butt. It’s more realistic.
I obviously think you are as wrong as wrong can be, Anonymous. But of course we are as different as different can be in our perspectives. I have one of those darn Normal brains and you have one of the Super Goon varieties. So we come at things from different sorts of starting points.
I will be sharing everything in the days following the next crash, when we will have lots of good and smart people participating in our Goon-free discussions at hundreds of different discussion boards and blogs. I have a funny feeling that things will proceed a lot more quickly then and that the millions of middle-class people whose lives have been all but destroyed by you Goons will get the general idea of what has been going in a lot less time than it has taken for things to click with you Goon types. We’ll see, you know?
I naturally wish you all the best that this life has to offer a person.
Rob
So people will seek you out and send you money after the next crash. We had a crash not so long ago. And what happened to you? More bans.
“I don’t have a time-period in mind.”
A plan with no time period or action items is not a plan. It’s a daydream. Which for you is about to begin year 16. Your daydream can apply for its own driver’s license.
“I have one of those darn Normal brains and you have one of the Super Goon varieties.”
I am not sure what that means when you explain that to an employer. What he is pointing out is that you no longer have a work history. Why would anyone want to hire you without having any recent experience?
“I know my financial circumstances, Anonymous. I would say that the odds are very long against the possibility that time is going to run out for me.”
This is not consistent with your previous comments as you said that you were planning on getting settlement payments and that without those payments, you would have a problem. Further, we all saw your original plans. What changed?
So people will seek you out and send you money after the next crash. We had a crash not so long ago. And what happened to you? More bans.
After the last crash, we had people at the Bogleheads Forum calling Taylor Larimore a liar. That had never happened before. That was a big change. Prices recovered after a few months. So we only got a small taste of what we will see in the days following the next crash, when prices will probably stay down for years. People will be saying all kinds of things then that they don’t say now. Get Rich Quick schemes are a whole bunch less popular after they cost people their life savings. Ask Bernie Madoff. People go to prison after Get Rich Quick schemes are exposed.
A plan with no time period or action items is not a plan. It’s a daydream. Which for you is about to begin year 16. Your daydream can apply for its own driver’s license.
I am physically incapable of posting dishonestly re the numbers that my friends are using to plan their retirements, Anonymous. Call it a plan or call it a conviction or call it a general principle of living or call it a trait of someone who loves his country. I cannot go there. Everything follows from that. I don’t post dishonestly re safe withdrawal rates. Not in 15 years, not in 15 billion years. It doesn’t happen.
But we’ll see how the “plan” works out, you know. My “plan” is to stay or the right side of the felony line. I have a funny feeling that my “plan” is going to work out a lot better than yours in the long run. I won’t be going to prison. But we are going to have to wait a bit to find out for certain.
My best and warmest wishes to you and yours.
Rob
I am not sure what that means when you explain that to an employer. What he is pointing out is that you no longer have a work history. Why would anyone want to hire you without having any recent experience?
Valuation-Informed Indexing is the future of investing analysis, Anonymous. I am 15 years ahead of everyone else in the field in development of the concept. I have a funny feeling that I will be highly employable in the days following the next crash. But we’ll see, you know?
This is not consistent with your previous comments as you said that you were planning on getting settlement payments and that without those payments, you would have a problem. Further, we all saw your original plans. What changed?
Things change every day for every person alive, Anonymous. Once you Goons are placed inside prison cells, where you belong, I will share everything about my circumstances with all the good and smart people who will feel comfortable engaging in honest discussions of stock investing once you Goons have been removed from all of the boards and blogs.
I certainly expect to receive a $500 million settlement payment. And then I expect to use a good portion of that money to market my site and thereby make even more. But we will have to wait a bit to see how it all plays out.
The one concern I have is that we could go into a Second Great Depression following the next price crash. If that happens, I am cooked along with everybody else. So my first priority is going what I can to open every investing discussion board and blog to honest posting on the last 36 years of peer-reviewed research in this field. I would be a darn fool to play it any other way. Posting honestly keeps me out of prison, makes me one of the richest men on the planet and helps us all avoid the Second Great Depression and enter the strongest period of economic growth in our nation’s history. Gee, I wonder why I see appeal in the idea?
Rob
The only thing that has changed for you is that in the past, with great effort, you could hide your dementia for a little while before being banned. Now you don’t even try. It’s all insanity all the time. Which obviously doesn’t have much of an audience.
“Valuation-Informed Indexing is the future of investing analysis, Anonymous. I am 15 years ahead of everyone else in the field in development of the concept. I have a funny feeling that I will be highly employable in the days following the next crash. But we’ll see, you know?”
You seem to have all your eggs in one basket. You need the crash to get the $500 million settlement and you need the crash to get a job. As it currently stands, you have no recent experience and are, therefore, unemployable…….unless you take a minimum wage job that doesn’t require experience.
The only thing that has changed for you is that in the past, with great effort, you could hide your dementia for a little while before being banned. Now you don’t even try. It’s all insanity all the time. Which obviously doesn’t have much of an audience.
Okay. Well, in my insanity I believe that the last 36 years of peer-reviewed research in this field is legitimate research. I believe that valuations affect long-term returns. It is my intent to continue to post in accord with that belief in my posting re safe withdrawal rates and in my posting re scores of other critically important investment-related topics.
It will be interesting to see how things play out in the days following the next price crash.
I do wish you all good things, my good friend.
Rob
I am a bit of a newby here, so please help me out. Let’s say a crash comes and we see the market drop by 50-65%. How do people come to the conclusion that the drop was caused by people following a strategy of buy and hold? How does the a story of buy and hold end up on the front page of The New York Times? How does the New York Times or anyone else come to the conclusion that VII is the solution? How does anyone come to the conclusion that some unnamed goons have blocked any information, despite the fact that there is plenty of information on the internet to a myriad of sstrategies, including VII?
Just one other item for clarification. If the crash never occurs in your lifetime and you don’t get the settlement payment, do you have enough money to sustain your retirement or will you have to seek some other source of income?
You seem to have all your eggs in one basket. You need the crash to get the $500 million settlement and you need the crash to get a job. As it currently stands, you have no recent experience and are, therefore, unemployable…….unless you take a minimum wage job that doesn’t require experience.
I love my country, Anonymous. That’s the basic in which I have placed all my eggs, the love-of-one’s country basket.
I believe that we will survive this economic crisis. I believe that we will see every investing discussion board and blog on the internet opened to honest posting and scores of other critically important investment-related topics. I believe that all the good people of this country will pull together in the days following the next price crash to be demand that you Goons be placed in prison cells, where you belong, at which point the rest of us will henceforth feel 100 percent free to post with 100 percent honesty re all investment-related topics. I believe that our best days are ahead of us. I believe that we will in not too long a time be living better lives than we ever before imagined as a result of what we learn from exploring and sharing the lessons of the last 36 years of peer-reviewd research in this field.
I wish you the best of luck in your pursuit of the considerably darker vision of the internet that you have elected to follow.
Hang in there, man.
Rob
If the crash never occurs in your lifetime and you don’t get the settlement payment, do you have enough money to sustain your retirement or will you have to seek some other source of income?
It depends. At some point in the distant future, I would require some new source of money. But of course at that point I would be eligible for Social Security. So things would probably work out. Perhaps not ideally. But I will end up at least okay no matter how things go.
The one big scary thing is the deepening of the economic crisis that we will see if we do not all pull together to open every investing site on the internet to honest posting re safe withdrawal rates and scores of other critically important investment-related topics. That one is the focus of 95 percent of the worries that I have re my future. Everything else adds up to about 5 percent, which makes these other matters trivial in comparison.
I hope that helps a small bit. my long-time Goon friend.
Rob
I am a bit of a newby here, so please help me out. Let’s say a crash comes and we see the market drop by 50-65%. How do people come to the conclusion that the drop was caused by people following a strategy of buy and hold? How does the a story of buy and hold end up on the front page of The New York Times? How does the New York Times or anyone else come to the conclusion that VII is the solution? How does anyone come to the conclusion that some unnamed goons have blocked any information, despite the fact that there is plenty of information on the internet to a myriad of sstrategies, including VII?
Take a look at the history of the Madoff fund if you really want to know the answer to these questions, Anonymous.
People love, love, love Get Rich Quick schemes so long as they are ahead in dollar times. That’s the entire appeal of them. People hate. hate, hate Get Rich Quick schemes after they cause them to lose most of their life savings.
In the event that the last 36 years of peer-reviewed research in this field is legitimate research, the next crash will be causing millions of middle-class people to lose large portions of their life savings. When that happens, they will be pissed off and will go looking for explanations of what happened to them. The behavior of you Goons over the past 15 years tells the story that needs to be told. The entire story is documented in great detail and depth at this site.
I wish you the best of luck with it, if that helps at all.
Rob
“But of course at that point I would be eligible for Social Security. So things would probably work out. ”
You stopped working around 46, right? Social security takes the highest earnings over a 35 year period, so you will have a large number of years with zero’s. That means your social security benefits will be very low.
“Take a look at the history of the Madoff fund if you really want to know the answer to these questions, Anonymous.”
Madoff wasn’t buying stock, so everything was worth $0.
Let’s say stock drops, 50%. I still own the stock, bonds, etc. I still get my dividends and interest, plus the growth that is still coming.
I don’t see the connection between the two.
Instead, it is more like owning a house. It might go up or down in value, but it is still something I own of value and it will likely increase in value as time goes on. With Madoff, you didn’t own anything.
“It depends. At some point in the distant future, I would require some new source of money. But of course at that point I would be eligible for Social Security. So things would probably work out. Perhaps not ideally. But I will end up at least okay no matter how things go.”
Getting by on a pittance from social security doesn’t sound like a good option. I would hate to feel that squeezed.
You stopped working around 46, right? Social security takes the highest earnings over a 35 year period, so you will have a large number of years with zero’s. That means your social security benefits will be very low.
There’s nothing that you can say that can compare to living through the Second Great Depression, Anonymous. My parents lived through the First Great Depression. They told me stories. It’s not for me. If I have it my ability to stop those scenes from playing out a second time, I want to do everything in my power.
I’ll let you in on a little secret. I believe that, if you Goons were capable of thinking clearly about these things, you would feel the same way. You have fallen victim to all sorts of emotional cross-currents that keep you from thinking clearly about these matters. So you cannot bring yourself to saying that the most important thing is to open every investing site to honest posting re the last 36 years of peer-reviewed research. But I am 100 percent confident that that is the choice you would make if you did not have a personal emotional stake in these matters.
I don’t suffer from the emotional cross-currents that sway you. So I come to different conclusions as to where to direct my energies.
Rob
Madoff wasn’t buying stock, so everything was worth $0.
I would rather invest $10,000 in shares that are worth zero than invest $500,000 in shares that are worth $250,000. Yes, the scope of the fraud committed by Madoff was in a sense bigger because his shares were worth zero. But the size of the Buy-and-Hold fraud is much, much bigger because millions of people have been taken in by it and millions of people have committed large portions of their life savings to it. In an ultimate sense, the Buy-and-Hold Con is the worse con. And it is not an even remotely close call.
With Madoff, you didn’t own anything.
With Buy-and-Hold, you own half of what you think you own. It’s not possible to engage in effective financial planning when your numbers are off by that much.
Rob
Getting by on a pittance from social security doesn’t sound like a good option. I would hate to feel that squeezed.
Spending the remaining years of your life in a prison cell doesn’t sound like a good option to me, Anonymous. I would hate to feel THAT squeezed.
I wouldn’t trade places with you for all the money in the world.
Plus you have to live with yourself knowing that you have destroyed millions of middle-class lives. Not this boy. Not now or any other time.
Rob
“Spending the remaining years of your life in a prison cell doesn’t sound like a good option to me, Anonymous. I would hate to feel THAT squeezed.”
I was having lunch with a friend of mine who happens to be a securities lawyer. I was telling him about your theories on fraud and prison. At first he thought it was a joke. After reading your posts, he couldn’t stop laughing.
Your securities lawyer friend is not at risk of going to prison himself, Anonymous. If I agree to say that Greaney’s study contains an adjustment for valuations, I am. If I was on a jury and I was asked to say whether that is fraud, I would look at the thousands and thousands of posts in which I have stated quite confidently and quite correctly that there is no valuations adjustment in the study and conclude that fraud was permitted. I wonder how carefully your security lawyer friend thought things through. And I wonder whether he will still be laughing when we are living through the Second Great Depression and his personal financial circumstances and nothing close to being as appealing as they are today.
We all have to play the cards we are dealt to the best of our ability. I do not feel even a tiny bit comfortable committing acts that constitutes felonies under the laws of the United States. So I am just not going to go there. If you don’t go to prison, you don’t go to prison. It’s not for me to say. It is for me to say whether I personally stay on the right side of the felony line or not and that is what I am going to do. And there is never going to be any negotiation over the point. There is never going to be any debate re that point. There is never going to be any consideration of any other possible options in that area. I offer precisely zero give re that one.
I hope that works for you, old friend.
Rob
“Your securities lawyer friend is not at risk of going to prison himself, Anonymous. “
And he said that no one else is either as your whole premise is a joke.
I have yet to see a single person who thinks there is any rationale behind your felony/prison schtick. You might want to get some new material.
Bernie Madoff laughed at the possibility that he would ever go to prison too, Anonymous.
Get Rich Quick schemes are so much more appealing prior to when they crash.
I wish you the best of luck with it, in any event.
Rob
“Bernie Madoff laughed at the possibility that he would ever go to prison too”
And Robert Shiller said this on the floor of the UN General Assembly in Geneva:
“Rob Bennett is a delusional, paranoid, narcissistic crank. He is wrong about literally everything he has ever said, or will ever say.”
This is great! It’s so easy to win an argument when you just make shit up.
Et tu, Robert?
Please take good care, old friend.
Rob