“I Expect the Laws of the United States To Be Followed When I Post on Boards Where People Meet To Learn About Retirement Planning and I Point Out To Them That a Study That Many of Them Are Using To Plan Their Retirement Lacks an Adjustment for the Valuation Level That Applies on the Day That the Retirement Begins. It Hasn’t Happened. But Those Laws Remain in Place. Those Laws Are Every Bit as Much a Reflection of Our National Will As Is the Popularity of Buy-and-Hold.”

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

“Is there anything else that I can do for you?”

I am not asking you for anything. You are the one asking. You want Shiller, Wade and a host of other people to say things. You want people to let you have an unfettered soap box on their forums to say and do whatever you want. You seem to be hoping that we will all just go along with your unverified claims of death threats, job threats, etc. You want the The New York Times to write articles about you. You want people to pay you $500 million. Read your board. You are the one making all the demands.

I expect the laws of the United States to be followed when I post on boards where people meet to learn about retirement planning and I point out to them that a study that many of them are using to plan their retirement lacks an adjustment for the valuation level that applies on the day that the retirement begins. That much would be fair to say.

It hasn’t happened. But those laws remain in place. Those laws are every bit as much a reflection of our national will as is the popularity of Buy-and-Hold. We are as a nation acting in a conflicted way for the time being. Will we resolve the conflict in the days following the next price crash, when we see with our own eyes how much following Buy-and-Hold strategies has hurt us, just as the last 38 years of peer-reviewed research in this field told us it would?

I believe that we will. I believe that our best days are ahead of us. I believe that Buy-and-Hold is the past and that Valuation-Informed Indexing is the future. So I am waiting for that big advance.

I want Shiller to do things, I want Wade Pfau to do things, I want everyone living in the United States to do things. Why wouldn’t I? I love my country. I love the people who reside in it. Naturally, I wish the best for them. Naturally I want to see them do the things that they need to do to advance into a very bright future in which the risk of stock investing has been reduced by nearly 70 percent (according to the peer-reviewed research that I co-authored with my good friend Wade Pfau).

I want lots of things. But I don’t think that it would be quite right to say that I am asking for those things today. I would of course like to have those things today. But I no longer believe that it is possible for me to have them today. I need help to make all these things happen. And I do not believe that I am going to get that help until we see another price crash and it causes people to open up to the idea of giving the last 38 years of peer-reviewed research in this field a serious look.

I want lots of things. But I am not asking for anything at this moment in time. I am just waiting. I am always trying to understand better what is going on. And I am writing a book that tells the story. And that’s pretty much it.

I respond to your questions because I want to help you cope with any pain that you are feeling and because I don’t want to pass up on any learning experiences that might be made available to me by people who are skeptical of my beliefs about how stock investing works and who have from time to time asked me questions that helped me think about aspects of the story that I had not considered enough before hearing those questions.

There is nothing that I am asking you for at this point in time, Anonymous. I have offered to help you and you have demonstrated a lack of interest in my offers. So be it, you know? You are obviously not required to accept my offers. You have other plans. I wish you the best of luck with those plans. Go in peace, grasshopper, you know?

Hang in there, dear friend.

Rob the Demanding One