Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently posted to the discussion thread for another blog entry at this site:
Here you are, over the age of 60, living in the land of make believe with the silly stories on death threat, etc. Meanwhile, you are run through savings and have destroyed your social security benefits by avoiding work. You have no relevant work experience as you haven’t had a job in about 2 decades, so any job your could possibly land would pay a very minimum income. To provide for retirement, your plan revolves around some fantasy of a $500 million windfall.
Yet here you are preaching to everyone about investing for retirement. Really????
I believe that we need to open every discussion board and blog on the internet to honest posting re the last 40 years of peer-reviewed research in this field. The fact that I have been denied an income for 19 years because I “crossed” the Buy-and-Holders by posting honestly re the error in the Greaney retirement study shows how important it is that we all insist on our right to post honestly. If Buy-and-Hold were a real thing, the Buy-and-Holders would WELCOME challenges to their ideas.
The fact that someone could be denied an income for 19 years solely for posting honestly re an error in a Buy-and-Hold retirement study is very scary stuff. If Buy-and-Hold were a real thing, there never would have been any “controversy” re any of this. The Greaney study would have been corrected IMMEDIATELY.
That is my sincere take re these terribly important matters, in any event.
My best wishes to you.
Rob
Anonymous says
You claim that you have been denied an income. You claim to be a writer, yet you have missed deadline after deadline on a book that you say you have to get done before you search for a job. How are your statements consistent?
Rob says
The book is extremely hard to write. Intellectually, it is not difficult. Emotionally, writing it is like climbing mount Everest.
Say that an angel were to come down from heaven and make my stuff available to every investor on the planet this afternoon. What would happen? People would sell stocks. We would see a price crash. We would see an economic crisis. We would see an ocean of human misery. We would see political unrest.
That is a core reality of all this. My job as a journalist is to make my statements as clear as I can possibly make them. But the clearer they are, the more distress they are going to cause. There is something inside us humans that signals to us that we should hold back on doing something like that. That something has been slowing my progress for a long time.
The other side of the story is that no one else has written this book in the 40 years since Shiller published his Nobel–prize-winning research showing that market timing is always 100 percent required for every investor. So I am not the only one feeling the power of this something inside that is holding me back. The job has to be done and I appear to have taken things closer to completion than anyone else. So I try not to beat on myself too much for how long it has taken.
But it has taken an awfully long time. That aspect of the thing is frustrating. I believe that the difficulty that I have experienced writing the book shows how important a project this is. If someone had overcome all these struggles years ago, we would all be in a better place today.
That’s my sincere take, Anonymous.
My best and warmest wishes to you and yours.
Rob
Anonymous says
“The book is extremely hard to write. Intellectually, it is not difficult. Emotionally, writing it is like climbing mount Everest.”
So it is your emotions that have kept you from finishing the book and then looking for a job. That is a much different story versus what you posted about buy and holders denying you an income for 19 years.
Rob says
We are going to have to figure out as a society how to move on, Anonymous. The Buy-and-Holders did a lot of amazing things. I have demonstrated my respect for them by carrying all of their powerful insights into the Valuation-Informed Indexing strategy. Valuation-Informed Indexing is just Buy-and-Hold with the thing about market timing not always being 100 percent required removed.
If you want to praise the Buy-and-Holders to the skies, you won;t get any argument from me. But please remember that it was the Buy-and-Holders who said that we should all look to the peer-reviewed research for guidance on how to invest in stocks. That’s why I dropped the market-timing-is-not-always-100-percent-required garbage when I was developing the Valuation-Informed Indexing concept. You can’t be a follower of this key Buy-and-Hold insight and also prohibit discussion of the last 40 years of peer-reviewed research in this field. So I feel that I do honor to my Buy-and-Hold friends by insisting that my right to post honestly re the research be recognized.
It will be interesting to see how it all plays out.
My best and warmest wishes to you and yours.
Rob
Anonymous says
“If you want to praise the Buy-and-Holders to the skies, you won;t get any argument from me.”
The topic really has nothing to do with praising buy and holders. The topic referred to your lack of income over the last 19+ years. You first stated that buy and holders kept you from earning an income, but then you stated that your emotions have hampered your completion of your book and you have stated many times that you are not looking for a job until your book is done. Those two comments are in direct conflict with each other.
Rob says
There’s no conflict whatsoever.
We need as a society to make an advance in our understanding of how stock investing works. Shiller provided us with the research we needed to make that advance. I love my country. So I have done what I can to help spread the word re the far-reaching implications of that amazing research. Thousands of investors have told me that they love my stuff and that they would like to see every site on the internet opened to honest posting re the last 40 years of peer-reviewed research. That includes a good number of Buy-and-Holders.
But it doesn’t include you Goons. You Goons feel that it will make you “look bad” if people learn what the research says. And a lot of Buy-and-Holders agree with you. If we had launched a national debate on these matters on the afternoon of May 13, 2002, as I proposed at the time, we all would today be living better lives than we ever imagined possible back in the days when we believed that Buy-and-Hold was the answer. It is always Buy-and-Holders who demand board bannings. It is the Buy-and-Holders who have been holding us back.
There will be no more emotional angst re this stuff once ever site is opened to honest posting. At that point, we will all be tripping over ourselves to share the latest insights we developed as a result of learning about the last 40 years of research. There will be all kinds of books coming out then, one more exciting and enriching than the other.
The Buy-and-Holders did a lot of good things. But their unwillingness to permit the world to learn about new research teaching us all how stock investing works in the real world has hurt us all in very, very serious ways. What we need is for everybody to join together in an effort to learn as much about this important subject as we possibly can in as short a time as possible. That’s the answer. I am 100 percent sure. There is no place for death threats in discussions of stock investing. There is no place for demands for unjustified board bannings. There is no place for thousands of acts of defamation. There is no place for acts of extortion aimed at silencing academic researchers who “crossed” the Buy-and-Holders by doing honest work in this field.
That’s my sincere take, Anonymous.
My best wishes to you.
Rob
Anonymous says
“ There’s no conflict whatsoever.”
What???
They are two totally different explanations as to your lack of income. The rest of your post has nothing to do with the topic or the truth.
Rob says
Once every discussion board and blog on the internet has been opened to honest posting re the last 40 years of peer-reviewed research in this field, the Bennett family is not going to have any income problems for many, many generations to come.
And, once those who advocate Valuation-Informed Indexing are earning huge sums of money from their efforts, no one will experience any feelings of anxiousness as a result of posting honestly. Once we get to the other side of The Big Black Mountain, we will be seeing honest posting left, right and center and we will all be living better lives as a result. We just need to break this spell that we are living under today where we live in fear that posting honestly will hurt the feelings of the Buy-and-Holders.
I run into this sort of thing all the time. Remember when I was engaging in e-mail correspondence with Rob Arnott. He said that my investing work is spot on. But he said that I should not refer to you Goons as “Goons.” Huh? What the f? When we fail to refer to Goon behavior as goonish, we encourage you Goons to engage in more of it. It is by using the word “Goons” that we break the spell. Lots of people who believe that Buy-and-Hold sounds reasonable would see through it if everyone comments all the time about how the Buy-and-Holders see a need to engage in goonish behavior to “defend” it. It is not the people who call out the Goons who are the problem. It is the freakin’ Goons who are the problem. We should all be calling them out every time we see goonish behavior.
We have social norms that prohibit goonish behavior. But in this one area we act like goonish behavior is not a big deal. It’s a big deal. The goonish behavior scares away good and smart people. So it affects the conversations in a huge way. It makes them less productive. If Motley Fool had banned Greany back in June 2002, as I proposed at the time, we would be 19 years ahead of where in fact area today. The Goon stuff is killing us. We should all be 100 percent united in seeking to bring it to a full and complete stop by the close of business today
My sincere take.
Rob
Anonymous says
“ Once every discussion board and blog on the internet has been opened to honest posting re the last 40 years of peer-reviewed research in this field, the Bennett family is not going to have any income problems for many, many generations to come.”
That still doesn’t make sense. You stated your emotions have delayed your completion of a book and that you are not seeking a job until the book is done. That is the direct cause of your lack of income. Posting on other boards doesn’t change that.
Anonymous says
“ And, once those who advocate Valuation-Informed Indexing are earning huge sums of money from their efforts, no one will experience any feelings of anxiousness as a result of posting honestly.”
How would anyone earn a dime promoting VII? You have talked to tens of thousands of people about VII and have yet earned a dime from that.
Rob says
That still doesn’t make sense. You stated your emotions have delayed your completion of a book and that you are not seeking a job until the book is done. That is the direct cause of your lack of income. Posting on other boards doesn’t change that.
I have had hundreds of people praise my investing work to the skies over the past 19 years. If every site on the internet permitted and invited honest posting re the past 40 years of peer-reviewed research, it wouldn’t be hundreds, it would be thousands and then tens of thousands and then hundreds of thousands. With hundreds of thousands of people cheering me on on a daily basis, I would not be feeling anxious that I am violating a social taboo by telling people the truth about how stock investing works.
We don’t know this stuff because we don’t talk about the stuff. And we don’t talk about this stuff because it hurts to see that we today understand this stuff so poorly. The only way out of the trap is for a few people to insist that we must talk about it and just do that to get the ball rolling. It hurts to be one of the pioneers. It hurts a lot. Hence the delay in the completion of the book. But there is no other way for us all to get to the place where we all deep in our hearts want to be other than for a few of us to work through that pain and thereby get the ball in motion. So I continue to cut through the emotional underbrush and get the words of the book down on paper little by little, bit by emotionally painful bit.
It’s a hard book to write. That tells me that it is an important book to write. If if were an easy book to write, someone else would have written it a long time ago.
Rob
Rob says
How would anyone earn a dime promoting VII? You have talked to tens of thousands of people about VII and have yet earned a dime from that.
People will learn about Valuation-Informed Indexing in the same manner that they have learned about every other subject that people have ever learned about going back to the beginning of time. Once you Goons have been placed in prison cells, the rest of us won’t have to worry about death threats and demands for unjustified board bannings and thousands of acts of defamation and acts of extortion being used to silence academic researchers who dared to “cross” Buy-and-Holders by doing honest work in this field. Then the amazing learning experiences take off.
We have to as a society care enough about learning about stock investing to take action re you Goons. We are not there today. I believe that the ocean of human misery we will see in the days following the next price crash will get us there. Then it’s all downhill sledding. It will be interesting to see how it all plats out.
My best wishes.
Rob
Anonymous says
“ I have had hundreds of people praise my investing work to the skies over the past 19 years.”
Really??? Then why haven’t you earned a dime from it?
Rob says
Because it needs to be built into something bigger.
Hundreds isn’t enough. You want the hundreds to become thousands and then tens of thousands and then hundreds of thousands.
Hundreds should be enough for the Buy-and-Holders to permit honest discussions. But that’s not how the Buy-and-Holders feel. They feel very, very, very threatened by the last 40 years of peer-reviewed research. So we are going to need to work up the courage to stand up to them. It hasn’t happened yet, You know when I think it will happen.
Wish me luck!
Rob
Anonymous says
Funny how stock market drops are never blamed on buy and hold.
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/09/19/stock-market-futures-open-to-close-news.html
Bad news for those expecting a $500 million windfall payment.
Rob says
It’s not funny. It’s tragic.
If everyone possessed a clear understanding of the dangers of Buy-and-Hold, we wouldn’t have a CAPE value of 38 today. We wouldn’t be at risk of suffering another economic crisis that will bring an ocean of misery to millions of people.
The reason why Shiller was awarded a Nobel prize is because he added to the world’s understanding of stock investing in a very important way. But we don’t obtain the benefits of his amazing research findings if we don’t give ourselves permission to talk about them. So those of us who believe that Shiller’s Nobel-prize-winning research is legitimate research (it’s about 10 percent of the population) need to work up the courage to do just what you are pointing out most of us fail to do — blame Buy-and-Hold for the situation we are in.
I do that, Anonymous. I blame Buy-and-Hold for today’s CAPE value. I think this bull market would have ended a long time ago if it hadn’t been for Buy-and-Hold. Your stock portfolio would have a much smaller value assigned to it if not for Buy-and-Hold. That’s my contribution. I say it. And I say it clearly and directly. Shiller tells enough of the story that anyone who wants to know what is going on can figure things out. But he shies away from saying a lot of things clearly and directly. He does not say “the Buy-and-Hold retirement studies are in error and should be promptly corrected.” I do. That’s me. That’s where I come into the story. I realized back in 2002 that someone had to get about the business of speaking clearly and directly about the far-reaching implications of Shiller’s Nobel-prize-winning research findings and so I started doing that.
For good or for ill, that’s what you get with Rob Bennett. Like Van Morrison said, it’s too late to stop now!
My best and warmest wishes to you and yours.
Rob
Anonymous says
“It’s not funny. It’s tragic.”
I agree with this comment, but for a different reason. It is tragic that your wife has to worry about the fact that you don’t have any prospects for an income.
Rob says
There are millions of good people who are not my wife whose futures have been placed at risk by that CAPE value of 38, Anonymous. Those people matter. When those people’s lives are destroyed, the future of our economic system and the future of our political system will be called into question. None of us can escape the effects of this by tending to our own garden. We all should be doing everything in our power to see that every discussion board and blog on the internet is opened to honest posting re the last 40 years of peer-reviewed research in this field by the close of business today.
That’s my sincere take, in any event.
My best wishes to you.
Rob
Anonymous says
“There are millions of good people who are not my wife whose futures have been placed at risk by that CAPE value of 38, Anonymous. Those people matter. ”
Those millions of people have been earning an income at a job, which pays there bills. With no income, there is nothing to invest for retirement.
Rob says
They will be hurt in a very serious way if the value of their retirement account is reduced by more than 50 percent.
People should have access to honest and accurate reports of how stock investing works, as informed by the last 40 years of peer-reviewed research in this field.
My sincere take.
Rob
Anonymous says
When has the market never recovered? How can a retirement account survive without an income driving contributions?
Rob says
The market will recover. But the irrational exuberance will never come back. The irrational exuberance was never there in the first place. Irrational exuberance gains are not real gains.
Greaney counts irrational exuberance as real. That’s the problem. To calculate the safe withdrawal rate accurately and honestly, you need to consider how much irrational exuberance is present in the stock price at the time.
That’s the entire dispute, Anonymous. I am saying that we should do the calculations honestly and accurately. Greaney does not want to correct his study. We are working at cross purposes.
Rob
Anonymous says
“The market will recover”
That’s what buy and holders have been trying to teach you. Sorry you missed out on the last 2 decades. Just think if you kept working and kept putting money away. You would have millions by now.
Rob says
How much if it would be irrational exuberance?
Rob
Anonymous says
Irrational jealousy seems to be your problem.
Rob says
Okay, Anonymous.
Rob