Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently posted to the discussion thread for another blog entry at this site:
“I always come to the same conclusion.”
Which is that everyone else is wrong and only Rob Bennett is right. Got it.
My conclusion is that everyone else is human and Rob Bennett is human too.
I was a Buy-and-Holder once. I don’t say that I do not possess a Get Rich Quick urge within me.
And I kept my mouth shut re the error in Greaney’s study for three years. I engaged in the same sorts of rationalizations that Wade evidenced in those words of his that you quoted above.
But do the rationalizations get us anyplace good? It seems to me that they do not. Wade says in those words that you quote that he is a big critic of the 4 percent rule. That’s good. Has he gotten the Trinity study corrected with his approach? Has he gotten the Greaney study corrected? It seems to me that all that he has accomplished is to insure that Wade Pfau’s career is not destroyed by you Goons, that he can continue to turn a buck. That’s nice for Wade Pfau. It’s not so nice for the rest of the people living in the United States.
We all want the same things, Anonymous. Every single investor on the planet will be a Valuation-Informed Indexer sometime after we open the internet to honest posting. Not because we will force it. Not because we will silence those posting in support of Buy-and-Hold. Because the case is so strong. And people will look back then and ask “why did we think it was a good idea to ban honest posting even for a single day?” We all believe that the earth revolves around the sun now, do we not? That never would have happened had we never permitted honest posting by those who had taken a scientific approach to the problem and determined that those who insisted that the sun revolved around the earth were in error.
Everybody supports the laws against financial fraud and against extortion and against threats of physical violence. So it’s not just me. The only thing that is different about me is that I say that the laws that apply in all other fields of human endeavor should apply in the investment advice field as well. And, yes, I truly do believe that that is the way to play it. Why do I have a funny feeling that there is going to be universal agreement re that one in the days following the next price crash?
If no one agrees with me, why not just permit honest posting? How could it hurt you? The question answers itself. We only see criminal behavior used in defense of Buy-and-Hold because Buy-and-Hold is the only strategy that cannot be defended any other way. Buy-and-Hold purports to be research-based and yet Buy-and-Holders ignore the last 39 years of peer-reviewed research in all of their calculations. Huh?
It’s you who are saying that the laws of the United States should not apply in the investing realm. Those laws reflect our common beliefs as a people. It’s you who is saying that everyone else is wrong. You say that every time you engage in another criminal act. I am saying that we should uphold our social norms by enforcing our laws in the investing advice realm. I am saying that we should not abandon our social norms just because our Get Rich Quick urge is calling out to us. Get Rich Quick strategies are a snare and a delusion, in my sincere assessment.
Man-of-the-People Rob
How do you support these comments when you lack any supporting data/information. VII does not have a track record of successful implementation. I can go look at a number of portofolios, such as the Permanent Portfolio or Coffehouse Portfolio and actually track historical performance. No such data exists for VII. Same goes for the so called death threats and job threats. There is nothing to back that up either. All we have is your complaints. Why do you expect anyone to believe what you say without specific proof?
You are just flat-out wrong, Anonymous. There is a lot more evidence supporting Valuation-Informed Indexing than there is supporting the Coffeehouse Portfolio. The author of the Coffeehouse Portfolio wrote to me and told me that he was AMAZED by the material at this site. Now, you Goons threatened to destroy his career if he continued saying things like that and he shut up. But I think it would be fair to say that he was expressing his sincere views in the days before he was threatened.
The Bennett/Pfau research shows that Valuation-Informed Indexing has been FAR superior to Buy-and-Hold for as far back as we have records of stock prices. We went back to 1870. It would be pretty hard to go back any further than that. And VII didn’t prevail by a little bit. Our research showed that investors who are willing to abandon the pure Get Rich Quick/Buy-and-Hold approach can thereby reduce risk by as much as 70 percent. That’s not nothing.
There never would have been a single death threat if VII were just a little bit superior. I mean, come on. And, there OBVIOUSLY have been death threats and other criminal acts. I pointed out the error in the Greaney retirement study (it lacks a valuation adjustment) on May 13, 2002. It hasn’t been corrected to this day. Are you going to try to tell me that Greaney has gotten away with not correcting his retirement study for 18 years without engaging in criminal behavior? How precisely would someone pull that off? The idea is absurd. People want the calculations in their retirement studies to be done properly. A failed retirement is a serious life setback.
And of course there have been thousands of people who have expressed a desire in seeing honest posting permitted. If I didn’t have anyone showing interest in my work, you Goons would never have engaged in a single criminal act. People don’t do that for fun. People do that when they feel very, very, very threatened. Your criminal behavior is itself a good reason for believing that Valuation-Informed Indexing must be far superior to Buy-and-Hold. My entire problem is that I have offered so much proof that you Goons can’t stand it. So be it, you know?
I wish you all good things. But please give me a freakin’ break.
Proof-Offering (But Too, Too Much of It!) Rob