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>Scott Burns told you that he was posting dishonestly and wanted to post honestly? Really?</i>
Sure. He didn’t say those words directly. But read between the lines of the words he said and that is the message that is delivered.
That’s true of just about everyone. It’s true of freakin’ Greaney! How many times have you heard Greaney say “I absolutely included a valuation adjustment in my study!” I don’t ever recall hearing him say that. That’s one tiny way in which he has been honest. He hasn’t corrected the study. That’s dishonest. He advanced death threats and engaged in acts of extortion. That’s dishonest. But he has never directly claimed that he included a valuation adjustment in the study. At its root, that’s the same game that Scott Burns and thousands of others have been playing.
People want to be honest. They understand that that is the norm and they endorse the norm. But they have a problem. Post honestly about the last 40 years of peer-reviewed research and you end up concluding that more than 50 percent of today’s stock market value is just irrational exuberance, cotton-candy nothingness that will be blown away in the wind with the next price crash. Greaney does not want to say that and Burns does not want to say that and thousands of others do not want to say that. Say that and the bull market collapses.
So they fib a little. Then, in time, they end up fibbing a lot. What would you have them do, cause stock prices to collapse?
I would have them cause stock prices to collapse. I think that the best way out of this mess is just to acknowledge the mistake that was made back in the 1960s, accept the consequences that follow from doing that and begin a rebuilding process rooted in what the peer-reviewed research teaches us about how stock investing works. But lots of people cannot bear the thought of going there. So for the time-being we are stuck in this twilight zone where we know how stock investing works but dare not say what we know out loud.
But many of us hint at the truth. You see that all the time. That shows that we want to be honest. It’s just that the 40-year cover-up has put us in such a fix that we cannot bear to go there at this point. It’s like someone who is 200 pounds overweight being afraid to go to the doctor. He knows what the doctor is going to tell him and he cannot stand the thought of doing what the doctor is going to tell him. So he doesn’t go. It doesn’t follow that he is so dumb that he does’t think he needs to go. He knows perfectly well that he needs to go, He just cannot bear to do so at this point in time.
When he has a heart attack, he will go. When prices crash and we experience another economic crisis, we will open up the internet to honest posting re the past 40 years of peer-reviewed research.
Or so this Rob Bennett individual sincerely believes, you know?
Rob
You’ve never actually met Scott Burns. Or Greaney. Or Wade. Certainly not Shiller. And any online contact with them ended at least a decade ago. Yet here you are, still dropping their names, as if you talked to them just yesterday.
This is quite possibly the oddest blog still in operation.
Shiller published his Nobel-prize-winning research showing that there is precisely zero chance that a pure Get Rich Quick/Buy-and-Hold strategy could ever work for a single long-term investor in 1981. The normal thing would have been for a national debate to be launched at that time. It wouldn’t be reasonable for every investor to switch from Buy-and-Hold to Valuation-Informed Indexing in one day. So the normal thing would have been for there to be a transition period. Some people would write in support of Buy-and-Hold, some people would write in support of Valuation-Informed Indexing, some would take a position in the middle. In time, we would all work it out together.
That debate has not been launched to this day. The Buy-and-Holders still act as if their strategy is the only game in town. They still move to silence those who challenge their dogmas by making reference to the last 40 years of peer-reviewed research. That’s the odd thing, not that I craft articles from the perspective of someone who believes that Shiller’s Nobel-prize-winning research is legitimate research. We should have thousands of people doing that on a daily basis. The odd thing is that there is any controversy about it.
No one knows everything. We all are capable of making mistakes. The Buy-and-Holders made a mistake when they came to believe that market timing does not always work and is not always required. Once they are able to acknowledge the POSSIBILITY of a mistake, we can as a nation launch the debate that should have been launched 40 years ago and have everything in this field return to normal procedure. Buy-and-Holders will advocate Buy-and-Hold, Valuation-Informed Indexers will advocate Valuation-Informed Indexing and those who believe in middle positions will advocate middle positions. No death threats. No extortion. No criminal stuff of any kind. In fact, no non-criminal intimidation stuff. Just an amazing learning experience that helps us all to live better lives from that point forward.
It is the Ban on Honest Posting that is as odd as all get-out. It is 100 percent at odds with both our laws and with our cultural norms. Nobody should have lost their head when I pointed out that the retirement study posted at John Greaney’s web site lacks an adjustment for the valuation level that applies on the day the retirement begins. People planning retirements and being exposed to the claims made in that study (Greaney said that a 4 percent withdrawal rate was “100 percent safe” even at the time when the safe withdrawal rate was 1.6 percent and a retirement plan calling for a 4 percent withdrawal had only a 30 percent chance of surviving for 30 years) needed to know that. I offer no apologies for working up the courage to post honestly re that matter, regardless of how odd it seemed to sdo o in a context in which a Ban on Honest Posting re the peer-reviewed research had come to be accepted as the norm in this particular field.
My best and warmest wishes to you and yours.
Rob
There are many websites that tell us how people became millionaires. Here is just one example:
https://esimoney.com/category/millionaires/
Further, there are books, like “The Millionaire Next Door” that also tell us about how people became millionaires.
Consistently, we see that these people are either into real estate, business owners and/or buy and hold investors. We never see a single VII investor. Why, then, would anyone follow your investment scheme.
There was a day when you could have said “not one person has ever become a millionaire by selling computers or smart phones” because those things didn’t exist. If at that time we gave the manufacturers of typewriters the power to destroy any company that tried to manufacture a computer, we would not have computers or cell phones today. We achieve huge advances as a society step by step. You cannot see the final amazing steps when the first tentative steps are achieved. You have no idea how much richer we all would be today if we had been permitting honest work to be done in the investment advice field going back to 1981 because you are too afraid to test the idea.
I say that we need to test the idea. I believe that Shiller’s Nobel-prize-winning research is legitimate research. After we have as a society made the transition from Buy-and-Hold to Valuation-Informed Indexing, I am willing to bet that there will not be one person who will vote for going back to the Buy-and-Hold years. That includes you Goons. I believe that you Goons will be glad that we finally elected to move forward after we have done so. We’ll see.
Rob
“I say that we need to test the idea. ”
Test it with your own money, but telling others that they should be doing it, without any successful outcome is irresponsible at best.
I couldn’t possibly disagree more.
I believe that I should say what I believe. If I sincerely believe that the retirement study posted at John Greaney’s site lacks an adjustment for the valuation level that applies on the day the retirement begins, I should say that. I should not hesitate and I should not apologize. I should permit and encourage those who have other views to state their sincere views as well. But I should insist on my right to post honestly.
The Bennett/Pfau peer-reviewed research shows that Valuation-Informed Indexing has been far outperforming Buy-and-Hold for as far back as we have good records of stock prices. That’s enough outcomes data for me. And of course there has never been one iota of outcomes data indicating that there might ever be circumstances in which long-term timing is not required for every investor. Given that precisely 100 percent of the evidence available to us supports Valuation-Informed Indexing and precisely 0 percent of the evidence available to us supports Buy-and-Hold, I am going to continue to advocate the first true research-backed strategy and urge that every discussion board and blog on the internet be opened to honest posting re the last 40 years of peer-reviewed research in this field.
All that said, I naturally wish you and all of my Goon friends the best of luck in all of your future life endeavors.
My best wishes to you.
Rob
“I should not hesitate and I should not apologize. I should permit and encourage those who have other views to state their sincere views as well. But I should insist on my right to post honestly.”
But you don’t. You want everyone else to open up their website for you to say whatever you want to say, yet you don’t allow that here for other people. I has posted this comment consistently, yet you ban just the comment itself, let alone the subject matter. You go out and write two pages worth of comments for every one line someone else writes on other websites and on this website, it is even worse. You are unable to have a normal conversation. For you, there is just one side that is filled with a bunch of talking points that are a repeat of everything you have said for the last two decades.
I sincerely believe that Robert Shiller’s Nobel-prize-winning research is legitimate research. So every thing that I say is 100 percent in conflict with what the Buy-and-Holders believe. The two models (Buy-and-Hold and Valuation-Informed Indexing) start from opposite premises (the idea that investors are rational vs. the idea that investors are at times highly emotional). And the Buy-and-Holders have been suppressing open discussion of the far-reaching implications of Shiller’s research for 40 years now. So, when I speak, it shakes people up. I am making a strong, research-based case for things that they have never heard before and that would mean that they have been doing a bad job of planning for their retirement for many years now. Many conclude that the best thing to do is to shut me up, even if it take criminal behavior to pull that off.
I do not agree. It is the silencing of challenges to Buy-and-Hold that got us into this mess in the first place. If we had been hearing claims that Greaney got the numbers wildly wrong in his retirement study for years before I put up my May 13, 2002, post, it would not have caused such a stir. People would have just said: “Oh, here’s one more post saying something that we all have heard many times.” It was the long cover-up that made that post stand out. The cover-up had continued for so long that you had people like Scott Burns saying that it was “catastrophically unproductive” for me to point out the error in the Greany study. Huh? What the f? I would say that it was catastrophically PRODUCTIVE for me to do that. How the heck are we ever going to get the study corrected if we are afraid to point out the error in it?
That’s where I am coming from, Anonymous.
I naturally wish you all good things.
Rob
It doesn’t matter what the question is. The answer is always the same. Which is what makes this odd site so pointless.
What color is the sky?
Shiller! Greaney! Honest posting!
If irrational exuberance is a real thing, you need to take it into consideration in every decision that you make about stock investing.
Shiller changed our understanding of how stock investing works in a fundamental way. That’s the story.
Once enough of us insist that honest posting be permitted (and encouraged!) at every internet site, we will all be living better and richer lives from that point forward. Good for us, you know?
Rob
Is there anyone in the investment world that is considered to be a thought leader or expert that will even speak with you anymore?
There’s no one who speaks with me, Anonymous.
That’s the problem. Say that everyone who believes that Shiller’s Nobel-prize-winning research is legitimate research posted honestly every day all over the internet. If that were the case, Wade Pfau would not have been intimidated by the acts of extortion that you Goons employed to shut him up. So there were people who censored themselves before Wade came on the scene that made him feel unsafe to stand up to you Goons. And now that he capitulated to your criminal tactics, there have been people who came after him who kept THEIR mouths shuts. The longer the cover-up continues, the harder it becomes to overcome it. The longer the cover-up continues, the more people there are who would be upset to see it exposed.
It’s been 40 years. So we have gotten ourselves into quite the pickle. But it’s not as if this is going to get easier by having the cover-up extended to 41 years. If each of us had insisted on our right to post honestly going back to the first day, things would have gone better for every single person affected by these matters. The answer is not to throw your hands up in the air and go along with the cover-up. The answer is to insist on your right to post honestly, as we all should have been doing all along.
Do you see?
Rob
“ There’s no one who speaks with me, Anonymous.”
Yet you don’t spend even one minute thinking that the problem you versus the rest of the world.
There is either a massive conspiracy where the entire world has plotted against you, or you are wrong. Which is more likely?
Yet you don’t spend even one minute thinking that the problem you versus the rest of the world.
The rest of the world is just fine. That is why I am always saying that we should open every internet site to honest posting re the last 40 years of peer-reviewed research in this field. The thing that I object to is the criminal behavior of you Goons. There are reasons why as a society we made it against the law to advance death threats and to engage in extortion and so on. That sort of thing holds us all back.
Let people post honestly and you will see thousands of people talking to me on a daily basis within a few months. That’s what we saw in the days before you got so frightened by what you were seeing that you turned to the criminal stuff. Death threats and acts of extortion are desperation tactics. Or so Rob Bennett sincerely believes, in any event.
Rob
There is either a massive conspiracy where the entire world has plotted against you, or you are wrong. Which is more likely?
It’s obviously neither of those.
If I was wrong, Greaney would sometime during the past 19 years have pointed to the section of his retirement study that contains the valuation adjustment. The obvious reality is that I was right in what I said in my famous post of the morning of May 13, 2002 — the Greaney study really does lack a valuation adjustment and should have been corrected within 24 hours of the moment he became aware of the error.
If there were a conspiracy, Shiller’s research would not have been published in a peer-reviewed journal. And his book would not have been a best-seller. And he would not have been awarded a Nobel prize. And Wade Pfau wouldn’t have spent 16 months of his life working with me to co-author research showing that “Yes, Virginia, Valuation-Informed Indexing works!” And we wouldn’t have seen hundreds of our fellow community members telling me that I started the most exciting and helpful discussion in the history of the Retire Early movement with my May 13, 2002, post.
There was a time when as a people we did not know everything there was to know about how stock investing works. Some people came to a belief that market timing is not required. Later, research was published discrediting that idea. Many people want to tell the truth about these matters. But the cover-up of the mistake has gone on for so long that there are millions of retirements that will fail if word gets out. So there are huge institutional pressures holding us back. People want this bull market to continue, and, if we permit people to hear about the far-reaching implications of Shiller’s amazing research, it will collapse.
Still, it is going to collapse eventually, in any event. We are far better off knowing why it is happening than just letting it take us by surprise. We are as a people in the process of getting to a very, very, very good place. We will all be living far richer and better lives once we put the unfortunate Buy-and-Hold stuff behind us once and for all. Deep in our hearts, we all want the same things. Everyone wants to know how stock investing works. What possible benefit could there be to not knowing something so important? I mean, come on.
Rob
There is obviously a big issue when all these people won’t talk to you. As said before, i5 is a mass conspiracy or it is you. There is no in-between.
I completely agree that there is a big issue. I have devoted 19 years of my life to solving the puzzle. So I clearly see it as being an important matter.
It can’t be me. Because I was right in what I said on May 13, 2002. It is as obvious as obvious can be that errors in retirement studies need to be corrected promptly. If we all were thinking clearly, there would not be one person who disagreed with that. There should not be any “controversy” re that question,
If you want to say that there is a conspiracy of ignorance, I could go along with that. We all are worried that we have not saved enough for retirement and, if Shiller’s Nobel-prize-winning research is legitimate research, it turns out that the true and lasting value of our stock portfolios is 60 percent less than what we have been led to believe is the case. That’s scary. The difficulty that we all have coming to terms with that reality is the biggest thing going on. That’s not exactly a conspiracy in the way the word is usually used. But the vast majority of us have a strong emotional desire that this stuff be hushed up. And people who work in the field have to take that strong emotional desire into account when offering advice or they won’t be able to make a living in this field for long. So they are part of the “conspiracy” as well.
There was a day when we did not have a vaccine for polio. Would you say that there was a “conspiracy” in favor of polio at that time? I think that that would be an odd way to look at things. Well, until Shiller published his Nobel-prize-winning research showing the dangers of Buy-and-Hold, we did not know how important it was to encourage all investors to practice market timing. Now we know. At least intellectually. But our intellectual knowledge has not been able to help us much because we have such a strong emotional desire to tune out what the recent research says. Is the Get Rich Quick impulse that resides within all of us part of the “conspiracy”? I would sat that it is just part of being human. We certainly need to work harder to protect ourselves from it. But I do not see what is added by using the word “conspiracy.”?
Is it a conspiracy when people drive too fast? Is it a conspiracy when people smoke? Is it a conspiracy when people gamble money they cannot afford to lose? Humans are self-destructive in many ways. Thinking that stock returns that were generated by irrational exuberance are real is just one more way. Following Buy-and-Hold investment strategies is no more or less a “conspiracy” than any of the other self-destructive behaviors to which humans are prone.
My sincere take.
Rob
If Robert Shiller, Wade Pfau, Michael Kitces and Scott Burns all called you right now and told you that you are wrong, would you finally admit you are wrong?
No.
But I would report here at the blog that they said that. I think that people should be able to hear both sides and make up their own minds.
The only thing that could persuade me that Greaney included a valuation adjustment in his retirement study would be a link to the section of the study containing the adjustment. If those people said that they believe that there is a valuation adjustment in the study even though Greaney has not pointed to the section of the study containing it for 19 years, I would take that as evidence that there is some sort of funny business going on.
Rob
“ No”
And THAT is the reason that the community has rejected you. You are incapable of having any normal conversation. You would never tolerate it, yet you somehow think it is okay for you to do so.
The community has not rejected me. Hundreds of community members have praised my work in the most effusive manner imaginable. I have been humbled by their comments.
You Goons are not the community. You make up about 10 percent of the community. Many community members are afraid of you and censor themselves when they see the price that they will be made to pay if they participate in discussion in an honest and helpful and constructive way. That only shows why we have adopted laws prohibiting the types of tactics that you have employed. Once we begin enforcing those laws in a reasonable manner, the Goon stuff will be a thing of the past and we will all be on our way to living richer and better and fuller lives in the future.
The community LOVES this stuff, Anonymous. That has been true going back to the first day. It is the community’s love for this stuff that caused the Goon freak-out. Most community members don’t fully understand it. That’s why they need to be able to ask questions and learn over time. And most community members follow some form of Buy-and-Hold strategy today. So that is where their sympathies lie. But the majority of community members believe that honest posting should be permitted. And that is what matters. Once the possibility of honest posting is opened up, we are on our way to a very, very good place.
My best wishes to you.
Rob
“ The community has not rejected me. “
Yes they have. As you have admitted, no one talk to you. They can post anonymously, call you or email you, yet they don’t. You are banned at every major board. Name on other person in the investment community that is ignored like you.
“ The community has not rejected me. “
Yes they have. As you have admitted, no one talks to you. They can post anonymously, call you or email you, yet they don’t. You are banned at every major board. Name on other person in the investment community that is ignored like you.
Name one other person in the investment community that pointed out the error in the Buy-and-Hold retirement studies 19 year ago.
Say that there is a 1-in-100 chance that I was right that the Greaney study lacks an adjustment for the valuation level that applies on the day the retirement begins. If that is so, then we should be discussing that question at every discussion board and blog on the internet on a daily basis. It wasn’t just Greaney who made that mistake. The 4 percent rule was everywhere. There were thousands of newspaper articles that cited it. Millions of people used in in putting together their retirement plans. If that number is in error, that’s the worst mistake that was ever made in the history of personal finance. The primary purpose of financial planning is putting together a retirement plan. When we permit honest posting on the question, Buy-and-Hold goes down. There is an entire industry centered around the promotion of Buy-and-Hold strategies today.
That’s why I am ignored, Anonymous. People love talking with me, People love learning about this stuff. But they don’t want to be involved in something so big. It is scary. Say that the Ban on Honest Posting was lifted tomorrow. Do you know what would happen? Stock prices would drop hard. We would experience an economic crisis. Would you want to be responsible for that? That’s the problem. People do not want to get involved, They want to see someone else step forward to take care of this one.
Unfortunately, there is no one here but us chickens!
Rob
It’s not what you say about yourself. It is what others say. You have to learn to deal with that reality.
http://www.passionsaving.com/investing-discussion-boards.html
Rob