Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently posted to the discussion thread for another blog entry at this site:
“ If you truly believed in Buy-and-Hold on a deep level, you would be okay with taking a look at what the peer-reviewed research says.”
I did. Research told me that but and hold has always worked, while timing schemes have never worked. Thus, I have enough money to comfortably retire. Do you?
You don’t know how much you have, Anonymous, You don’t subtract for irrational exuberance. How could you possibly know?
Rob
You have been repeating this nonsense for the last 2 decades and have been wrong on every single prediction. You blame in on short term timing, yet 2 decades in long term in everyone’s book. The big problem for you is that you did not correct course when you found out you were off track in your 2005 update to your retirement plan and now, 18 years later, you are broke and can no longer fix your broken retirement as you don’t have enough working years left and you don’t have a spouse generating income like you did before the divorce.
I agree that two decades is a long time. But please recall that we experienced a Buy-and-Hold Crisis in 2008. In the event that Shiller’s Nobel-prize-winning research is legitimate research, the relentless promotion of the pure Get Rich Quick/Buy-and-Hold strategy (no market timing/price discipline whatsoever) played a big role in bringing on that crisis. There was a lot of suffering in that crisis and there was a big increase in political frictions as a result of it (Occupy Wall Street, Tea Party). I think it would have been better if we had been permitting discussion of Shiller’s Nobel-prize-winning research all along.
The social norm that we follow in every field of human endeavor other than the investment advice field is to permit the discussion of new research so that we can learn about any mistsakes that we have made in the past and get them corrected. I don’t feel comfortable casting aside that otherwise universal social norm. Wade Pfau concluded after 16 months of research into these matters that: “Yes, Virginia, Valuation-Informed Indexing works!” I think that we all need to know what caused him to reach that conclusion. I don’t think he should have been threatened. I think that we need to open every site to honest posting re the research and learn from each other whatever we are able to learn from each other.
I see huge leverage in that. I see it as a win/win/win/win/win, with zero possible downside.
Rob
No, we did not have a buy and hold crisis. We had a market timing crisis that was brought on by the sub prime mortgage issue. The buy and holders were glad to buy up shares from the market timers and look at how much money the buy and holders made. Wade Pfau has also agreed with a recent podcast. The internet has always been open to honest (truthful) posting, but board owners draw the line with behavior issues and liars try and take over.
I wish you the best of luck in all your life endeavors, Anonymous.
I would not be able to live with myself if I agreed to say that the Greaney retirement study contains an adjustment for the valuation level that applies on the day the retirement begins. I had become friends with a number of the people who posted with me at the old Motley Fool board. A number of those people used the Greaney study to plan their retirement. I know, I was there.
Rob
But you are okay with making up a story about Greaney in order to avoid working a job and forcing your ex-wife to work 6 jobs to support the family. Got it.
Right. That’s what going on.
I care about my ex-wife and family and I care about the friends I made at the Motley Fool board and about the people of the United States in general. I shouldn’t have to choose. if we permitted honest posting re the last 42 years of peer-reviewed research at every site, no one would ever have to make that choice. We would all be enjoying an amazing learning experience together and our economy would be far more productive than it is today. That’s the world that I want to live in. So that’s the world that I advocate for.
My best wishes.
Rob
You can still play your silly games on the internet and work a job. There is no choice needed.
When I have completed the book, I am open to seeking employment that would provide regular financial earnings. It’s important that I complete the book before the onset of the next Buy-and-Hold Crisis. That’s when it will be most needed and most desired. So I have zero willingness to give up a number of the hours of my week to any employment other than working on the book, which I consider the most important work being done in the United States today.
I spend a certain amount of time writing my weekly column for the Value Walk site and responding to comments from you Goons here at the blog. Both of those activities help me to think through issues that I need to address in the book. So I make time for them.
But paid employment is going to need to wait until the book has been sent to a print. Completing the book is the higher priority in my mind by a factor of 50. It is the most important job that I have taken on in this lifetime.
I would be grateful if you would wish me luck with the project. That would be a positive step.
Rob
If you really thought your book was so important to saving the world, you would have finished it a decade ago. It is just another excuse for not getting a job.
It’s a hard job, Anonymous. Shiller’s research has been out there for 42 years. If this were an easy job, someone would have done it a long time ago.
I believe that I will be the first to deliver a detailed and in-depth examination of the far-reaching how-to implications of Shiller’s amazing, Nobel-prize-winning research findings. I’m very proud of that. There’s no paid emlployment that I could take on that would come with 10 country miles of adding as much value to the worls as that. So I soldier on.
My best wishes.
Rob
Hard job? All you are doing is repeating the same crap you put on this website. You have admitted as such. Further, there is no evidence to support your statements on the value of this book or anything else that you have done as you have no following.
All of the ideas are precisely the same. The hard part is telling the story in a convicing, balanced and complete way, Given the realities of human nature (we all have a Get Rich Quick/Buy-and-Hold urge residing within us and we have not been able to develop our rational/research-based side in the context of the stock investing project because of the ban on honest posting), it’s a very tricky business. But I am happy to say that I am getting there inch by precious inch.
We both know that I would have a folliowing in the millions if it had not been for the abusive and in some cases criminal behavior of you Goons. If the internet is never opened to honest posting re the research, it would be fair to say that I am doomed. But I don’t believe that. I believe that we are fundamentally a good people and I have seen lots of evidence of that during the first 21 years. I believe that we will see a large site opened to honest posting in the days and years following the onset of the next Buy-and-Hold Crisis and at that point we will all be on our way to living better and richer and fuller and freer lives than we ever imagined possible during the Buy-and-Hold days.
Once again — Wish us luck!
Rob
“The hard part is telling the story in a convincing, balanced and complete way”
You are correct, that is the hard part.
We have a 20+ year public record of your writing to judge you on.
I will leave it as an exercise for the reader to decide if you have ever demonstrated the ability to write about investing in a convincing, balanced and complete way.
Fair enough.
Rob
“ I will leave it as an exercise for the reader to decide if you have ever demonstrated the ability to write about investing in a convincing, balanced and complete way.”
Usually, you can trick a few crackpots into believing anything on the internet. Yet, after 20 years of voluminous posts, there is no visible support. I never seen anyone waste this much time, without anything to show for it.
Okay, Anonymous.
I do wish you all the best that this life has to offer a person, in any event.
Rob
Everyone else has to work, but not Rob Bennett since he is busy saving the world from those mysterious goons.
Do you think it would have been better if I had kept it zipped re the error in the Greaney retirement study?
There were people at the Motley Fool board talking about it on almost a daily basis.
Rob
You could have continued to make all the nonsensical posts you wanted to make about Greaney AND still work a job to support the family and you know that. Do you think everyone posting on the boards has to choose between posting on boards and working? How stupid do you think we are?
On most questions that come up on a discussion board, you don’t have to write a book to explain to people what is going on. This issue is different. Leave the Goon stuff aside for a minute. You Goons don’t have the power to ban anyone. You can demand it. But you don’t have access to the button that makes someone go away. How is it that there are site administrators who agreed to ban me because I pointed out an error in a study that people were using to plan their retirements?
That’s an issue of huge public policy significance, Anonymous. As a nation of people, we have to have some means of getting the word out about what the last 42 years of peer-reviewed research teaches us all about how stock investing works out to millions of people. That’s the job. That’s absolutely imperative. We should all be united on that one. If we were all thinking clearly, there would not be one person who did not see why that is so important.
I would peefer not to be writing the book. I would prefer that there had never been a single abusive post. I was still a Buy-and-Holder on the morning of May 13, 2002. I would prefer to still be a Buy-and-Holder. That’s not the way it played out. My job is to play the cards that are dealt to me. I don’t control what cards are dealt. Perhaps you’ve noticed.
Rob
Rob
Twitter is about open as anything gets. Post there for a while – if your ideas are all you say they are, you will have million followers in no time. Sparring here with random “goons” has gotten you no where.
-Interested Observer
I’m not “sparring” with you Goons. I am trying to learn from you. We obviously would all learn 20 times more and 20 times faster if you participated in the discussions on good faith. You obviously are not open to that we are all in this together, you need to know how stock investing works as much as anyone else does. So understanding how you have come to believe that the last 42 years of peer-reviewed research should be ignored has value.
And as a nation of people we have given you veto power over what is said about stock investing on the internet. It was a mistake to give you that power. But you have been given it. Your power is a reality of the stock investing world in the year 2023. So we need to understand why we have done that. I believe that a big part of the explanation is that we all have goonishness within us. We LIKE high CAPE values. We were pushing stock prices up to crazy levels long before you Goons came on the scene. So there’s a sense in which we all carry a big of the Goon spirity within us. That’s the spirit that we all need to come to understand if we are going to invest more effectively in the future.
I’ve put things on Twitter. I had a bunch of twitter posts after the Wade Pfau flip Investing is a serious business. It needs to be explored in places where serious people meet and where interested observers can feel safe asking questions. All of the bans have been put in place in such venues. Those are the right venues for these discussions. We just need to lift the bans and permit and encourage honest posting re the peer-reviewed research. There’s nothing wrong with the venues that we have tried. The problem is that we have not had enough people speaking up for the need to permit honest posting re the research at those venues. I believe that that may change in the days and years following the onset of the next Buy-and-Hold Crisis. We’ll see.
Rob
You posted: “You obviously are not open to that we are all in this together, you need to know how stock investing works as much as anyone else does. So understanding how you have come to believe that the last 42 years of peer-reviewed research should be ignored has value.”
In reading this, we can only conclude that you think you should be educating all of us, yet you are not interested in things being a discussion around opinions relating to investing. This gives the perception that you are telling people that they ultimately have to give you a format to post what you want, that the reader needs to agree that your position is right and that you really aren’t interested in what anyone else has to say that is not in agreement with your position.
This same theme goes with your comments about “honest posting” where are left to conclude that you think you are the only one telling the truth and, by default, comments from others are merely lies.
Your first line says you want to “learn” but then the rest of the explanation is that you are trying to learn why everyone else is wrong and won’t believe you. Often, this is referred to talking down on people.
With this style, you will never have success regardless of the format and venue you choose.
There are millions of smart and good people who believe that Buy-and-Hold is a sound strategy. I do not agree with them. But I very much believe that they should be permitted and encouraged to participate in all discussions. They have important things to contribute and we all need to hear what they have to say.
I believe that the contributions of Valuation-Informed Indexers are also valuable and that they too should be permitted and encouraged to participate in all discussions.
That’s where I’m coming from re this one, Observer.
Rob
If you were open to what buy and holders had to say, you wouldn’t block their posts on this website. You caveat everything with the words “honest posting” which is your own subjective determination as to what you think is right. At no time have we ever seen you have a real discussion here. Instead, each response is how you think the other person is wrong and how you think you are right.
If I say that I believe that the retirement study posted at John Greaney’s web site contains an adjustment for the valuation level that applies on the day the retirement begins, I am engaging in fraud. Fraud is a crime in the United States. It is a felony. That means jail time. Thanks but no thanks, you know?
I’m not going there. I believe that the Buy-and-Holders made many valuable contributions. That’s why I incorporated everything that the Buy-and-Holders advanced into the Valuation-Informed Indexing concept, with one exception. The one exception is the idea that long-term timing/price discipline is not required when buying stocks. I agree with the Buy-and-Holders that short-term timing, which is just a guessing game, doesn’t work. But I believe that Robert Shiller’s Nobel-prize-winning research showing that valuations affect long-term returns is legitimate research. So I believe that investors seeking to keep their risk profile constant over time are REQUIRED to adjust their stock allocation in response to big shifts in valuations. That’s long-term timing, the kind that always works.
I hope that that helps at least a tiny bit, Anonymous.
My best and warmest wishes to you and yours.
Rob
And your response proves my point. It is no wonder that you can’t get traction, regardless of the forum. People are not interested in an approach similar to a dictator.
Okay. I’m a dictator because I won’t say that I believe that the Greaney retirement study contains a valuation adjustment. What a mean, mean man I am!
I can wish you all the best that this life has to offer a person, Anonymous. That much I can do in good conscience.
Please hang in there, old friend.
Rob
Only Rob Bennett is right. Everyone else is wrong. Everything is a conspiracy to try and keep Rob Bennett from winning. If not for the mass conspiracy, Rob would be the foremost investing expert alive today. Rob would have $500 million in his bank account. Rob’s name would be on the front page of The New York Times. Rob would have a Nobel prize. Congress would create a national holiday in Rob’s name since Rob would be saving the entire world from financial disaster.
It’s not just Rob Bennett, Anonymous.
Thousands of our fellow community members put up posts expressing a desire that honest posting re the research be permitted.
John Bogle taught me (through his book) that there is zero chance that the safe withdrawal rate is always the same number years before I read Shiller’s book.
Bill Bernstein publushed a book the day after I advanced my famous post of May 13, 2002, saying that the safe withdrawal rate at the top of the bubble was 2 percent.
Wade Pfau spent 16 months trying to find any support in the literature for the idea that long-term timing doesn’t work and came up empy-handed.
John Walter Russell devoted eight years of his life to investigating my investing ideas without receiving a dime of compensation because he found them so excited.
And on and on and on and on.
The people who developed the Buy-and-Hold concepot did not start out with the idea of bringing on yet another economic crisis. THEY MADE A FREAKIN’ MISTAKE. Shjiller’s Nobel-prize-winning research had not yet been published at the time. So they took a shot in the dark in thinking that, since short-term timing doesn’t work, perhaps long-term timing isn’t always 100 percent required either. People make mistake. It’s something that has been known to happen in this world. If this particular mistakes has not already caused so much misery, they would have corrected it years ago. The Buy-and-Holders want to help people, not destroy their lives. Would you consider giving them a break and letting them do that.
We are all in this together. We all want the same thing. We all need to know how stock ijnvesting works in the real world. Every last one of us is on the same side and there’s plenty of credit to go around to everybody. We just need to acknowledge that and let all the good stuff happen.
Rob
All these thousands of supporters, yet you can seem to get even one person to comment in support of you here and you are ignored on major sites like Twitter and YouTube.
Try working with me to get every investment site on the internet opened to honest posting re the peer-reviewed research and see what happens. I double-dog dare you!
Rob
If you can’t get traction on Twitter, YouTube, ValueWalk, your own website, or any other board, what makes you think it would be any different getting access to a few more websites?
You should get a job like normal people. I double-dog dare you!
I’m going by the reaction that we both saw to my stuff in the time before the bans were imposed. There is significant interest in knowing what the recent research says. It certainly wasn’t a majority that showed interest. It was 10 percent of the various communities. But 10 percent of the investing population is millions of people. Let this stuff be heard and Valuation-Informed Indexing will grow and grow and grow. To the benefit of all of us.
My sincere take.
Rob
Where is the interest, Rob. It is not here. It is not on ValueWalk. It is not on Twitter and YouTube that have massive viewership. The sites that banned you are minuscule compared to Twitter and YouTube. Name even one person today that is currently posting in support of you.
The entire idea is to get that ball rolling, Anonymous. A new idea starts with one person. Then it is two. Then it is 200. Then it is 2 million, If there were already millions talking about Valuation-Informed Indexing, the value proposition wouldn’t be what it is. The leverage here is off the charts because there are so many people who want to know how stock investing works and yet access to discussions of the peer-reviewed research has been denied them so ruthlessly and for so long. I want to bring an end to that.
Rob
You have 20 years to get the ball rolling. You are some of the largest sites on the internet and you still have gotten no traction. You can’t even get one single person right now to say that they are supporting you and VII. You burned your bridge at a handful of small sites. Giving you access again to where you had behavior issues won’t make a difference. It is like advertising on all the big networks on not getting any business and then expecting a few ads in a small town local newspaper will generate millions in business.
People have plenty of opportunity to read your opinions, but your opinion is no more important than the next guy. In fact, given your track record of failure, a board owner takes on greater risk of harming the value they built in their website by allowing someone like you to potentially mislead their audience. People that you have called goons have actually performed a valuable service by warning others of the potential financial harm by following your example. I don’t know a single person that wants to be broke and divorced in retirement.
I’d be grateful if, once the next Buy-and-Hold Crisis hits, you would tell people that I began advocating that we open every investing site to honest posting re the last 42 years of peer-reviewed research in this field on the afternoon of May 13, 2002, and have stuck to my guns on that one right through the current day.
Fair enough?
Rob