“Today, the Buy-and-Holders Scare People Into Thinking That They Will Pay a Financial Penalty for Exploring Shiller’s Research. That’s a Desperation Tactic. It’s What We Would See If Someone Came Up With a Cure for Cancer and the People Who Earn Big Incomes at Cancer Treatment Centers Put All Their Energies Into Destroying the Careers of the People With the New and Better Approach. That Sort of Thing Makes the People Involved Feel Sick Inside. It’s Not a Good Long-Term Plan. Eventually, a Good People Finds a Way to Make the Transition to the New and Better Approach.”

Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently posted to the discussion thread for one of my columns at the Value Walk site:

Your portfolio did not do what you said it would do. VII did not work. We can all read what you wrote. Your plan failed. You do not make up risk adjustments. Nor do you even risk adjust for results that have already occurred. You should have learned that in your basic finance classes.

I disagree.

I have learned amazing things over the past 17 years. My work has been endorsed by thousands of ordinary people and by dozens of big names and the work is unique work (meaning that I have few competitors) in a highly lucrative field. That sounds real,real, real, real good to me.

If the work that I have done brings in even a small fraction of the value that it has added to the world, the Bennett family will be taken care of financially for many generations to come. If you would have asked me what the odds were that I would be able to produce this kind of value on the day when I began investigating the VII concept, I would have put it at one million to one. I guess I will just have to struggle on somehow now that the one in a million shot has come through for me.

Oh, woe is me!

I think you WANT me to have not succeeded. I think that is how you hope you will be able to block people from learning what they need to know — you don’t feel that you can defeat the ideas, so you put all your effort into defeating the person carrying the ideas to others. I see that as deeply, deeply, deeply sad stuff. If I ever get to the point where I feel that way about ideas that I am trying to defend, I hope that I just give up on those ideas rather than try to defend them that way.

I think that lots of others will be making big money from these ideas down the road a piece, by the way. Today, the Buy-and-Holders scare people into thinking that they will pay a financial penalty for exploring Shiller’s research. That’s a desperation tactic. It’s what we would see if someone came up with a cure for cancer and the people who earn big incomes at cancer treatment centers put all their energies into destroying the careers of the people with the new and better approach. That sort of thing makes the people involved feel sick inside. It’s not a good long-term plan. Eventually, a good people finds a way to make the transition to the new and better approach. That’s what I think we will see here. Probably not until we see all the human misery that we will see with the next price crash. But eventually. And better late than never, right?

Wade Pfau said after 16 months of researching this stuff: “Yes, Virginia, Valuation-Informed Indexing works!” You are standing in the path of the history train, Sammy. That’s not a good place to be standing. This is a nation committed to progress. The investment advice field cannot long remain the one big exception.

We’ll see.

My best wishes.

Rob