“I Have Attended Numerous Financial Blogger Conferences and At Each One That I Have Attended I Have Spoken to Financially Successful Bloggers Who Have Told Me That They Regretted the Abusiveness That Has Held Me Back and That They Hoped That Things Would Soon Change.”

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:

My plan has been a huge success, presuming that Shiller’s Nobel-prize-winning research is legitimate research, Sammy.

I definitely have spent down my nest egg. That part of your comment is accurate. But that of course has nothing to do with the merit of the Valuation-Informed Indexing strategy. Had it not been for your abusiveness and the abusiveness of other Buy-and-Hold Goons, I would be a multi-millionaire today. I have attended numerous Financial Blogger Conferences and at each one that I have attended I have spoken to financially successful bloggers who have told me that they regretted the abusiveness that has held me back and that they hoped that things would soon change.

I believe that things will change in the days following the next price crash. I believe that at that time millions of people will be looking for something that works better in the long run than Buy-and-Hold and I will be there with 17 years of solid material to share with them. I will be able to invest all of the money that I earn at that time in stocks selling at prices at which stocks offer amazing long-term returns. So I will be far, far ahead of where I would have been had I never worked up the courage to advance my famous post asking whether it makes sense to take valuations into consideration when calculating the safe withdrawal rate.

I couldn’t be happier than I am with Valuation-Informed Indexing today. I didn’t have all this stuff figured out on the day that I put forward The Post Heard ‘Round the World. I learn new things every week. My knowledge base is now deep enough for me to write a book on the subject (“Investing for Humans: How to Get What Works on Paper to Work in Real Life”), which I expect to finish by the end of the year. If I had ever had any doubts, I would not have spent so many years of my life going deeper and deeper and deeper. Each new thing I learn deepens my conviction that Shiller’s Nobel-prize-winning research is important stuff. Valuation-Informed Indexing is the future of investment analysis. I am sure. I want to share it with every investor alive on Planet Earth. I am not just satisfied with the strategy. I am passionately in love with it.

And of course it is not just me. I have a slider that runs across the top of every page of my web site that lists over 200 comments from both experts and ordinary investors praising my work in the most effusive ways possible. Wade Pfau’s conclusion after 16 months of research into the merits of the VII strategy compared to Buy-and-Hold was: “Yes, Virginia, Valuation-Informed Indexing works!” He wouldn’t have said that if he thought that the strategy was a failure. I mean, come on.

YOU say that it is a failure, that’s all. And I think it would be fair to say that you are not exactly the most open-minded person on the planet re this particular subject.

I do wish you all good things, in any event.

Nest-Egg Diminished Rob