“Shiller Wouldn’t Have Been Awarded a Nobel Prize If There Weren’t a Lot of People Who Suspect That He Is Onto Something Very Important. We Are Moving From the Dark Ages of Investing Analysis to a Much Better Place and There Are Some Outlier Personalities (You!) Who Can’t Stand Accepting That There Was a Time When They Didn’t Know It All.”

Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently posted to the discussion thread for another blog entry at this site:

Only Rob Bennett (the broke guy) knows how investing really works.  Not Shiller, Not Pfau, not Bernstein, not Bogle, not Buffett, etc.

Everyone knows on some level of consciousness, Anonynous. You know. If you didn;t know in your heart that the safe withdrawal rate cannot possibly be the same number at all valuation levels, you wouldn’t work so hard to keep the ban on honest posting re Shiller’s research in place.

You know but you don’t want to know. Having to hear about what the research says is upsetting because what Shiller showed makes so much sense. All that he showed is that we need to buy stocks in the same way we buy everything else, by taking price into conideration at all times.

That’s it. I say that we must consider price, you don’t want to. Because taking price into consideration would mean that your portfolio is only worth about half of what you have been led to believe it is worth and very, very much want to believe it is worth.

Shiller wouldn’t have been awarded a Nobel prize if there weren’t a lot of people who suspect that he is onto something very important. I wouldn’t have have had thousands of my fellow community members praise my stuff to the skies if there weren’t great demand for hearing about the last 42 years of research. You wouldn’t fight so hard if you hadn’t seen how much interest there is in knowing the realities.

No one is dumb. That’s not the issue. We are moving from the dark ages of investing analysis to a much better place and there are some outlier personalities (You!) who can’t stand accepting that there was a time when they didn’t know it all. I think that we all will make the journey that we need to make in the days following the onset of the next Buy-and-Hold Crisis.

We all want the same thing. We are all in this together. We all are smart and good people. The stuff that we have seen during the first 21 years is 20 times more good than it is bad. I think that I know a thing or two about stock investing at this point. If I didn’t know a thing or two, I wouldn’t presume to write a book about the subject. But I didn’t learn those things by sitting in a room thinking great thoughts. I learned what I know by listening to lots of others, including the people you mentioned. If I am the only one who knows anything, how is it that I learned so much from those people?

Heaven help us all but I have even learned some things from you Goons. Scary, I know. But I believe that that’s the full reality here.

That’s my sincere take, in any event.

Rob