Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently posted to the discussion thread for another blog entry at this site:
When you look at people like Bernstein, Pfau and Shiller, very little of their income comes from their publications.
I am not an investment expert. I never had any interest in being one and I never made any effort to become one. I am a journalist. Every dime that I earn will come from journalist-type endeavors.
This is the biggest journalism story of my lifetime. We have millions of people with a great desire to know how stock investing works and and an investment advice field that made a mistake in the 1960s that has caused so much human misery that everyone who works in the field is afraid to talk about it because they feel that it would make the Buy-and-Holders — who are wealthy and powerful and well-connected people — feel bad. The only reason why we are not today talking about Valuation-Informed Indexing at every site is that it is such a huge advance over Buy-and-Hold that it makes the Buy-and-Holders feel bad for people to learn about it. Had Shiller published his amazing research in 1961 rather than in 1981, there never would have been a Buy-and-Hold.
We all want the same thing. we all want to know how to invest effectively for the long-term. But the Buy-and-Holders came up with this “idea” in the 1960s that market timing/price discipline might not always be 100 percent required and now they feel that they are stuck defending it. What kind of “experts” would they be if they had been telling people the opposite of what works for 42 years now. That’s the entire deal. It’s about a mistake that was made by a group of good and smart people who made many important contributions to the field but got one item horribly wrong — instead of saying that price discipline is 100 percent required as it is in every market that has ever existed, they came up with this loony tunes thought (I don’t say that they knew it was loony tunes, just that they did not have the research avaialble to them at the time showing that it was looney tunes) that maybe the stock market was the only market that ever existed in which price discipline was not 100 percent required for every participant for the market to function properly.
Telling the story of how that all happened is a JOURNALISM function. That’s what I am. That’s what I do. This story shows the importance of journalism, why it is such a noble profession. We need journalists to discover this sort of thing and help the entire nation by doing so. You hear about the Washington Post all the time nowadays, The Post is considered the second most influential newspaper, next to the New York Times. That wasn’t always the case. That happened because the Washington Post broke the Watergate story. That story made a difference in millions of lives. The Valuation-Informed Indexing story is bigger than Watergate. This allows millions of people to retire many years earlier while taking on only a fraction of the risk that they thought they needed to take on during the Buy-and-Hold Era. And it stabilzes our entire economic system, as well as our political system to a considerable extent.
There is no way that this story could be broken without a journalist getting involved. There are many people who work in the field who very much want to tell it. But they live in fear that their careers will be destroyed if they “cross” the Buy-and-Holders by talking about the far-reaching how-to implications of Shiller’s Nobel-prize-winning resarch. A journalist is needed to clear the field and then all of the good people who work in this field will be able to do the good work that they got in this field to do. All of those people will be freed to HELP investors once this story is written up on the front page of the New York Times. That’s where all this is leading. It changes the investment advice field in a profound way. But the journalism has to come first, it is the journalism work that I am doing and that I will be compensated for that is the driver here.
No one would have voluntarily signed up for what I have been put through. You would have to be a crazy person to do that. But someone had to do it. The future of our nation depends on someone working up the courage to stand up to you Goons and tell the world why price discipline is every bit as important in the stock market as it is in every other market that has ever existed. I was the one that the universe chose to do this work. So I have given it my best shot. That’s pretty much it.
My best and warmest wishes.
Rob
“I am a journalist. Every dime that I earn will come from journalist-type endeavors.”
https://arichlife.passionsaving.com/2012/03/25/rob-bennett/
“Rob covered the IRS and Capitol Hill beats for The Daily Tax Report, a newsletter published by The Bureau of National Affairs, Inc., in the 1980s. He then wrote the Tax Politics column and managed the Tax Notes Today database for Tax Analysts. After two years at Tax Analysts, he was employed at the National Tax Department of the Ernst & Young accounting and consulting firm for nine years. He rose to the level of Director. He resigned on August 1, 2000, with enough money saved for his family of four to live off of the earnings from his investments while he built his internet writing business.”
If you had kept your E&Y job, maxed out your 401k(k), and invested in a diverse portfolio of index funds you would have been much better off financially and most likely still be married.
And where would today’s CAPE value be? Probably precisely where it is.
Are we as a nation of people going to take steps to ensure that the CAPE never again reaches “30”? It sure seems to me that we should. How do you think that the ball is going to get rolling on that one if those of us who believe that Shiller’s Nobel-prize-winning research is legitimate research all live in fear of what you Goons will do to us if we post honestly?
In the days and years following the onset of the next Buy-and-Hold Crisis, I will be able to say that I did everything I could think of to spare us all that human misery? Will you be able to say that, Evidence? I think that’s what it comes down to. Did you stand up for your friends when they needed you. I was AOL from May 1999 through May 2000. But I faced the music on the morning of May 13, 2002, There’s nothing that yoi can do or say that can take that away from me. It means something to me to be able to sleep at night?
I don’t regret pushing the “Send” button on that post. I regret some of the behavior we saw in its wake. But I don’t regret working up the courage to share with my fellow community members my sincere take re whether or not the Greaney retirement study contains a valuation adjustment. I did my part and the community responsed in the way in which the community responded (there were some amazingly positive responses as well as some amazingly neagative responses). I believe that we will see more amazingly positive responses and fewer amazingly negative responses in the days and years following the onset of the next Buy-and-Hold Crisis. But we’ll see, you know?
My best wishes to you.
Rob
“ And where would today’s CAPE value be? Probably precisely where it is.”
Which means you wasted your time.
What was that phrase that President Carter had when the helicopters went down in the desert? It’s been “an incomplete success.”
One person can only do so much, Anonymous. A year from now, I will have a printed book in my hands with my name on it that describes everything going on in great depth and detail. I didn’t know that anything was going on on the morning of May 13, 2002. So everthing written in the book will be things that I LEARNED by having the courage to say what I believe and then watch the reactions.
I think there’s great value in learning. We’ll see, you know? But that’s what I believe. I wouldn’t have made a decision as a young man to devote my life to journalism if I didn’t see value in it.
My best wishes to you.
Rob
“A year from now, I will have a printed book in my hands with my name on it that describes everything going on in great depth and detail.”
You are zero for a whole lot in your predictions
If your track record is anything to go by on 29th September 2024 there will be no book. There will be lots of comments about the book being completed at some point in the future.
I believe that I will have printed copies of the book in hand by September 2024. But the proof is in the pudding, you know? We will all just have to wait and see.
Wish me luck!
You won’t. But I think you should and I would be grateful if you did.
Rob
And then you will get a job, right? At least that is what you said in the past.
Once the next Buy-and-Hold Crisis begins, my job is going to be helping people to understand how we got ourselves into the huge mess and what we need to do to make sure that nothing like that ever happens again. If there is a gap between the time that my book is sent to the printer and the onset of the next Buy-and-Hold Crisis, my expectation is that I will take on some form of paid employment during that gap time.
Rob
I won’t wish you luck because you don’t need luck.
You need a proper work ethic.
You have a work ethic but it revolves around unproductive stuff.
200 podcasts that no one listens to. Tens of thousands of emails to people on some list that you acquired and who mostly never replied. Endless circular arguments on this blog with a few people whose advice you ignore.
What you need to do is actually type words for your book.
Set yourself a target say 500-700 words per day.
You should be able to finish it in less than a year.
Try to find a publisher to print it (spoiler alert no one will print it)
Self publish (I recommend a small print run so as not to dig yourself any further into a financial hole)
Get a job to provide yourself with some financial stability.
Restrict the internet rambling to about an hour per day.
Do something physical to improve your health.
You can thank me later.
Okay, Anonymous.
I do wish you all good things, in any event.
Rob
Something tells me that you will ignore the advice given by Evidence, just like you ignore everything else.
I won’t ignore 42 yearss of peer-reviewed research, you can count on that much.
Rob
In other words, you will ignore Evidence and everyone else.
No. I listen to it all. You never know where you are going to pick up something you hadnt thought about before.
But it would certainly be fair to say that anyone who ignores the last 42 years of peer-reviewed research loses credibility points in my eyes. I am a research guy. So that sort of thing concerns me.
Rob
There are hundreds, if not thousand of people out there that claim that they know what the research says. Not one single bit of that matters. It is all just noise and opinions. Outcomes are what matters. No one has ever demonstrated a successful outcome with a market timing scheme, yet we have never seen one failure with buy and hold. You and your opinions are nothing special and there is no justification for your inflated ego.
Okay, Anonymous.
I wish you the best of luck in all your life endeavors.
Rob