Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently posted to the discussion thread for another blog entry at this site:
“But I don’t see that I have ever had any alternative courses of action available to me. ”
You should have kept working instead of quitting at such an early age.
Clearly, I don’t buy this whole conspiracy thing, but let’s set that aside for now. Even if there was some credibility to you claims, you didn’t have to quit working. You can still hold a job and do your whole internet thing in your spare time, just like everyone else.
I don’t agree.
My plan was very carefully thought out. When I left my job at Ernst & Young, I had no intention of not working again. The entire purpose of my plan was to shift to a form of work that I would find more fulfilling and that would in the long run produce more income than the corporate employment that I left behind. I obviously would have earned amounts far in excess of what I needed had it not been for the criminal acts of you Goons. I did absolutely nothing wrong. My plan worked like a dream. No one can anticipate criminal acts, whether they are employed in the corporate realm or in the self-employed realm.
I will pursue litigation to have all of the damages paid to me in the days after your criminal acts are exposed on the front page of the New York Times. I made a few calls to lawyers a long time ago. I experienced the same problem talking with the lawyers re my lawsuits as I have experienced trying to get the errors in the Buy-and-Hold retirement studies corrected. People have a hard time believing in what you refer to as “this whole conspiracy thing.” There has never in U.S. history been a time when a matter of this importance has been covered up for so long. Most people have never experienced or even heard about an act of financial fraud of this magnitude. So they have a hard time appreciating what went on and are reluctant to get personally involved.
I believe that that will change in the days following the next price crash. Millions of people will be experiencing very serious losses in the event that Shiller’s Nobel-prize-winning research is on the mark (I believe that it is). All lawyers will hear about the problems and will be looking for people who were harmed to bring lawsuits on their behalf. I don’t believe that I will have any problem finding a lawyer to take on my case at that time. All lawyers want to take on cases where the damages are in excess of $500 million. So it won’t be an issue at that time.
The issue today with the lawyers is the same as the issue with the site owners today. The thing that you refer to as “this whole conspiracy thing” is the fact that there is now 38 years of peer-reviewed research showing that there is precisely zero chance that a Buy-and-Hold strategy could ever work for a single long-term investor. Everyone alive on the planet needs to know that. But it is a scary thing to point out when you know that most people’s lives are riding on the validity of Buy-and-Hold and they are thus highly reluctant to listen to the message. Things will not improve until there are enough of us posting honestly that you Goons will no longer dare to commit criminal acts. But how will there ever be sufficient numbers posting honestly until a few of us are willing to take on whatever heat you direct at us to win recognition of the right of everyone in the field to post honestly? There is a reason why the work that I have been doing is worth a very big multiple of $500 million. This work frees everyone. Our society’s understanding of how stock investing works will never be the same again after we have freed everyone in the field to do honest work. We are on the threshold of a huge advance but it can only be achieved by a few of us being willing to take on some very, very, very hard and nasty hits. That’s just where things stand today.
I could not have done what i have done had I been doing this in my spare time. I made the right call. I expect to finish writing my book on these matters by the end of this year. Once I have the manuscript in hand, I could imagine taking corporate employment and going part-time with the investing work. I have not made a decision to do that. But, once I have written the book, i will feel that i have in hand what I need to tell the story in a powerful and complete way. Combining the book with the materials already residing at this site, I would feel highly confident that the Valuation-Informed Indexing story will prevail in the days following the crash. So I could see easing up on the time that I devote to this at that time. I do want to get the book written first. My understanding of the matters involved has not until recent months been deep enough to complete the book. But the book is coming well now. So I think that I am close.
There’s nothing wrong with doing these sorts of things part-time. But there is nothing wrong with doing these sorts of things full-time either. You can get more good work completed and have a bigger impact working it full time. But there are obviously income implications to doing it that way. I have suffered negative income implications solely because of your criminal acts. And on the content side I have achieved things 500 times more important than what I thought was possible when I first started walking this path. So I am hardly going to express regret for playing it the way that I did. My efforts have paid off in amazing ways both for myself and for my family and for the entire world except for the effect of the criminal acts, which I expect to be compensated for down the line a bit.
It all comes down to what happens in the days following the next price crash. If millions of people want to know at that time what happened to their retirement money, I will be able to tell them and this site will be the hottest site on the internet and no one in the Bennett family line will have to be concerned with financial constraints for many generations to come. Good for the Bennett family line, you know? I love my boys (and I hope and believe that I will love their children) and I am happy to have been able to have helped out in the way that I have. While of course being unhappy about the thousands and thousands of thousands of hits that I have had to endure getting the job done. This has been hard work. I think it is the hardest and most important work that anyone in the United States has done over the past 17 years and I hope and expect to be compensated accordingly.
It will be interesting to see how it all plays out, that much is for sure.
My best and warmest wishes to you, dear Goon friend.
Highly Compensated (Not Yet But Soon, Let Us Pray!) Rob
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