Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently posted to the discussion thread for another blog entry at this site:
Rob says “ Of course we need to as a nation of people give ourselves permission to discuss the amazing how-to implications of the last 41 years of peer-reviewed research. ”
And then Rob says: “ I ignored Scott Burns because I think he was wrong re that one.”
In short, you want people to let you on their boards and listen to your opinions, yet you should be able to ignore everyone else. You get to decide which opinions are valid. Got it.
I get to decide what opinions are valid FOR ME. I have no problem with someone saying that they relate to what Scott Burns has to say. But I have a very big problem with those who say that Scott Burns can be heard but those finding fault with what Scott Burns says cannot be heard.
And I certainly have not ignored Scott in any general sense. I have devoted thousands and thousands of words to analysis of his comments. I paid attention to him. But, no, I did not find everything that he said entirely persuasive (there were some things that he said that I thought were pure gold and I of course said so).
And I think that Scott would change some of what he says if every site were opened to honest posting and the Buy-and-Hold intimidation stuff became a thing of the past. That’s true of every single person who has participated in the discussions. The intimidation stuff is poison. It hinders learning experiences. Scott suppresses some of his own thoughts. We can never know to what extent he has done this until we open every site to honest posting.
Rob
So Scott Burns, Wade Pfau, Robert Shiller, William Bernstein, etc., are all not telling the truth because you say they were all intimidated or threatened………yet no one has seen any of the threats and intimidation but you……..and we should all take your word for it.
Meanwhile, you are broke, divorced and without friends, but still say you are right and that we just need to take your word for it that everything will someday turn out like you say it will. K
Got it.
Include Rob Bennett in that list, Anonymous. I learned about the error in the Greaney retirement study before I ever saw the Greaney retirement study. I read John Bogle’s book and was struck by a passage saying that Reversion to the Mean is an “iron law” of stock prices. It doesn’t take an I.Q. of 140 to figures out that, if stock prices always return to their mean value (a CAPE of 17), stocks are a lot less appealing when the CAPE is 44 than they are when it is 17. So the investor who wants to Stay the Course in a meaningful way (keep his risk profile constant) must engage in market timing to do so. There is no other way to get the job done. So the first thing I did when I heard about Greaney’s study was to look for the valuation adjustment in it. When I learned that there was none, I knew that it was in error (according to John Bogle, my investment hero at the time as I was a confirmed Buy-and-Holder).
We’re all in the same boat, Anonymous. We all want the same things. We all want to invest effectively. We all would benefit from taking the last 41 years of peer-reviewed research into consideration when making stock investment decisions. In ordinary circumstances, there would not be a single advocate of the Ban on Honest Posting. There’s only one rub. The people who developed Buy-and-Hold did not have Shiller’s Nobel-prize-winning research available to them at the time they were developing it. So they made a fatal mistake. They did have Fama’s Nobel-prize-winning research showing that short-term timing doesn’t work. No research had been done on long-term timing until Shiller came along. So they jumped to a hasty and unfortunate conclusion that perhaps no form of market timing was required. And here we are.
This is a highly lucrative field. And it is one in which expertise is highly prized. So people who have gained a reputation for expertise do not like the idea of acknowledging mistakes. So people continue to suggest today that market timing might not always be 100 percent required despite what the last 41 years of peer-reviewed research shows to be the reality. All of the people you mentioned want to be able to tell the truth about these matters. Bernstein went so far as to point out in his book that studies like the Greaney retirement study were off on their calculations of the safe withdrawal rate by two full percentage points at the top of the bubble. But Bernstein knew better than to say on the Bogleheads Forum that Greaney should immediately correct the error in his study before it hurts more people. He had seen with his own eyes what happen to people who “cross” the Buy-and-Holders re these matters. So he kept it zipped.
Things are never going to change for so long as people like Bernstein keep it zipped. We all have a Get Rich Quick/Buy-and-Hold urge residing within us. We very, very, very much want to believe that the safe withdrawal rate remains 4 percent no matter how high we push stock prices. It’s a preposterous idea, but a preposterous idea that we very much enjoy, much like the equally preposterous idea that drinking alcohol can make all of our troubles go away. If we are going to resist the lute of this loony tunes idea that there might be some alternate universe where things work the opposite of how they have always worked here on good old Planet Earth and market timing/price discipline is not 100 percent required for every investor, we need to have our confidence in what the research teaches us reaffirmed ona daily basis through communication with our friends and neighbors and fellow community members. There is no other way to resist the lure of Get Rich Quick/Buy-and-Hold “strategies”, which always cause an ocean of human misery in the end.
We all need to work togethert to open every internet site to honest posting re the peer-reviewed research. The people you named are already on board. They have shown that with their statements on the subject. But they do not want to be exposed to death threats and to acts of extortion and to acts of defamation. You are going to have to rein in the abusive and criminal stuff of you want to hear them post with complete honesty. I have been saying consistently that we should take it that way going back to the morning of May 13, 2002. That’s the answer. I’m sure of it. We need to apply the same laws that apply in every field of human endeavor other than the investment advive filed in the investment advice field as well.
My sincere take.
Rob
Rob,
Is Boo a Goon? I just read her comments regarding the Planning Commission needing to be allowed to get down to work on it’s Zoning mission…. and other comments she has made in the press. To me, she seems to have sound reasoning, good cognition, excellent communication ability, and other attributes consistent with a high-functioning, reasonably well-adjusted adult. When you were married, did you convince her to follow your tenents of VII investing? Does she believe in your work at all? I know you regrettably are now divorced, but heck, I feel I listen more to a few of my exe’s now, than I did when we were together — sometimes distance gives perspective. So, what is her take on your life’s work? No one could possibly have seen it closer, and with a natural bias to accept it, than she would have. And yet…. if you could not convince the one person, closest to you, to become an adherent…… would that not give you (or any man!)pause to consider maybe you went down the wrong path 30 years ago or so, spiraled into madness, and are now just too stubborn to get on with a normal life?
She told me that she is confident that I am onto something important. Her concerns were not with my idea of following what the last 41 years of peer-reviewed research teaches us all about how stock investing works in the real world. Her concerns were with the lack of money coming in.
That’s everyone. Bogle wanted to tell the truth. You could see that in his post in which he acknowledged that he could imagine circumstances in which market timing could work (a position that contradicted comments he had made at earlier times. Bernsten wanted to tell the truth. You could see that when he wrote in his book that the Buy-and-Hold retirement studies got the numbers wildly wrong at the top of the bubble. Pfau wanted to tell the truth. You could see that when he declared at the end of 16 months of research that: “Yes, Virginia, Valuation-Informed Indexing works!”
What people don’t like is the crininal behavior of the Buy-and-Hold Goon squads. In the days following the next Buy-and-Hold Crisis, we are going to need to pull together as a people and give ourselves permission to discuss the last 41 years of peer-reviewed research at every dscussion board and blog on the internet, without a single exception.
My sincere take.
Rob
Gee, it looks like your ex-wife had to work a number of jobs over the years to pay the bills since you have been sitting on your a$$ the whole time:
https://www.loudounnow.com/on-the-ballot-purcellville-mayor-town-council/article_148720a0-553c-11ed-ad90-23fc8f57e212.html
If Buy-and-Hold/Get Rich Quick were a real thing, we never would have seen a single abusive post, much less any of the criminal stuff. If Buy-and-Hold/Get Rich Quick were a real thing, the Buy-and-Holders/Get Rich Quickers would encourage challenges to their beliefs because addressing the challenges would shapen their thinking andf make them better investors.
Rob
“ If Buy-and-Hold/Get Rich Quick were a real thing, we never would have seen a single abusive post, much less any of the criminal stuff. ”
If VII was a real thing, you wouldn’t be broke, divorced and friendless and you wouldn’t need to make up stories about criminal stuff. Your wife realized this and dumped you.
Okay, Anonymous.
Please take good care.
Rob
Mary F. “Boo” Bennett
Occupation: Abernethy and Spencer Green House and Garden Center, custodial work, pet-sitting, office help, and advertising sales.
As noted above by Rob, Mary asked Rob to get some kind of job to help bring in some money, yet he refused. How is this not sickening?
I think that the sickening thing is the death threats and the acts of extortion and the acts of defamation aimed at blocking millions of middle-class investors from learning what they need to know to avoid the next Buy-and-Hold Crisis.
Say that there is just a 1-in-100 chance that I was right in what I said in my famous post from the morning of May 13, 2002 — that the Greaney retirement study truly does lack an adjustment for the valuation level that applies on the day the retirement begins. If that’s so, then that should be the #1 focus at every internet site. People use retirement studies to plan retirements. If the studies that people are using get the numbers wildly wrong, people need to know that. And this has been going on for 20 years now. How could a retirement study remain uncorrected for that length of time if there were not serious problems affecting everyone who works in the field?
What happened to my ex is horrible. I certainly do not say different. But what is in the process of happening for millions and millions of others is also horrible, only the horror there is multipled by a factor of a number in the many millions. Those of us who believe that Shiller’s Nobel-prize-winning research is legitimate research have a responsibikity to speak out regardless of the intimdation tactics employed to silence us. That’s my sincere take re these terribly important matters, in any event.
The American people will prevail in the end, Anonymous. I am sure.
I think!
Rob
Your story is a bunch of B.S. You are not helping anyone. Instead, it is just more of the same crap that you spin in order to avoid work.
Okay, Anonymous. I do wish you all the best that this life has to offer a person regardless of what investment strategy you elect to follow, in any event.
Rob
“Say that there is just a 1-in-100 chance that I was right in what I said in my famous post from the morning of May 13, 2002 — that the Greaney retirement study truly does lack an adjustment for the valuation level that applies on the day the retirement begins. If that’s so, then that should be the #1 focus at every internet site.”
1. 2002 was about twenty years ago. No one except those studying Rob Bennett as a case study remembers a single post from a single crank about an obtuse retiree’s personal retirement blog from that era. Greaney wasn’t famous, and neither were you. Greaney’s impact on the entire scene was a rain drop in a sea of opinions. Therefore, your single post wondering if he could improve his method with a fudge factor was a wayward dust mote on a rain drop in an ocean. Nothing more. It’s the grandiose thinking that’s holding you down you, Rob.
2. The focus of every internet site (not just the investing ones)? Good old Rob — not content to let your psychosis be human sized like other internet cranks, you always have to swing for the fences and try to get to cosmic-levels of self-importance.
3. Rob, you are broke. The wife left you. You lost the house. I don’t even want to consider what Rodd and Todd think of you, now that they are young adults. Maybe it’s time to put down the blogging, and internet, and just focus on a simple job, a simple place to stay, and a way to not be a complete ongoing failure for the rest of your life. A lot of people have thrown away a lot of years, and still managed to pull it out at the end. I’m personally rooting for you, Rob. Always have been. At what point do you refocus your attention to what a shamble your life has become, falling in all around you, solely due to your own bad decisions, and try a fresh start? If you are breathing, then it’s still not too late.
If Greaney were the only one who ever advanced the 4 percent rule, I would agree with you. But he wasn’t, not by a long shot. That rule has been advanced by thoudsands of people in lots of different contexts. And it is not just a little bit off. The properly calcualted safe withdrawal rate was 1.6 percent in January 2000. It was 9.0 percent in 1982. That huge swing shows why it is so important to take valuations into consideration when making investing decisions. It is BY FAR the most important factor affecting long-term investing success.
The primary reason why people invest in stocks is to provide for their retirement. There is no site on the internet other than my own giving the accurate numbers. That is a scary reality. If we can’t get the numbers that people use to plan their retirements right, we are in a very bad place. And it’s been 20 years since the error was pointed out! We are in a very, very bad place. The Buy-and-Holders made a mistake and they should have corrected as soon as the peer-reviewed research exposing it was published. That was in 1981! The longer the error remains uncorrecred, the worse things get for every single person who wants to do honest work in this field (and that group of course includes the vast majority of Buy-and-Holders. We need to open every site to honest posting re the peer-reviewed research.
Greaney was famous on the Motley Fool board at which I posted. Some of the people who posted there became friends of mine over the years. I did the right thing by pointing out the error. I offer zero apologies. And the error could not have remained uncorrects for as long as it did if this were not a wideapread problem. If there were daily discussions at every site about the dangers of strategies do not encourage all investors to practice market timing (price discipline!) regularly, someone else would have called Greaney out on the error long before I did so. The problem is that the “idea” that market timing/price discipline is not always 100 percent required is still pushed at lots of places in the year 2022, 41 years after the peer-reviewed research was publushing discrediting that “idea.” Again, we need to open every site to honest posting re the peer-reviewed research.
My sincere take.
Rob