Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently posted to the discussion thread for another blog entry at this site:
Movies are make believe. Being broke is a hard reality.
Grapes of Wrath told the story of a Buy-and-Hold Crisis that really happened. My parents lived through it. They told me stories of what it was like. I don’t like the idea of my boys (and millions and millions of others) having to live through something like that.
Buy-and-Hold Crises have been optional since 1981. All that we need to do is to open up every site to honest posting and we can use the peer-reviewed research to persuade stock investors to keep the irrational exuberance garbage under control.
I can live with that. I think that a 6.5 percent real annual return is just fine. Permitting irrational exuberance to get out of control hurts all of us.
Rob
Buy and hold crisis is just made up, but that is beside the point. What you are saying is that you don’t want your family to suffer from any kind of financial disaster. Meanwhile, that is exactly what happened to your family due to the fact that you decided not to get a job, resulting in you going broke. It seems to be somewhat Karma when you make up stories about other people, telling them that they will go broke and then it happens to you.
I don’t want any families to suffer financial disaster. There are millions of families in the United States who have money invested in stocks.
My best wishes to you.
Rob
Those are just words. You let your family suffer financial disaster.
There’s no question that my actions caused harm to my family. There’s also no question but that your actions caused harm to millions and millions of families. Someone has to make an effort to help those millions and millions of families. If not me, then who?
I wouldn’t be able to live with myself if I didn’t at least try to get the internet opened to honest posting re the peer-reviewed research. I wish that I had never been placed in the circumstances in which I have been placed. But none of us gets to determine the circumstances in which we are placed. We have to play the cards we are dealt to the best of our ability. That’s what I have tried to do. I am not able to just act as if I believe that the Greaney study contains a valuation adjustment. For good or for ill, it’s not in me to do that.
Rob
You admit to harming your family, yet think you can excuse that with your made up stories. Nope. That’s just despicable.
There is nothing keeping you from posting your buy and hold crisis nonsense while still working a job. Most board owners hold down jobs.
Okay, Anonymous.
I do wish you all good things, in any event.
My best wishes.
Rob
Since you don’t really spend much time on your book each day and your posts only take a few minutes each day, what do you do with the vast majority of your time?
I spend it overcoming the feelings of angst that follow from the social ostracism that has been visited on me.
I don’t want anyone else ever to experience something like this. So I need to come to a deep understanding of what’s going on. I could state it simply and say “Greaney doesn’t want to correct the error in his study and there are people who are friendly to him who are willing to help him supress the discussions that thousands of people have indicated they want to have (and those thousands of course stand for millions in the larger community of investors)”. That would be a true statement so far as it goes. But it doesn’t tell the full story.
Why do site owners go along? Why don’t researchers want to make a name for themselves by showing the realities? Why don’t journalists expose the massive act of financial fraud?
That’s the conspiracy theory that you Goons often refer to. There was not a group of people who met in a room and decided to pull off this fraud. That way of thinking about it is just not believable. But people ARE acting in concert. It’s not just Greaney and Lindauer. Not by a long shot.
It’s something inherent in human nature. We have had bull markets since the first stock market opened for business. And they have always hurt us. Why have we not as a nation of people worked up the will to stop them from forming? That’s what Shiller’s research is about. That’s what my journalism is about. It’s about changing the nature of the stock investing project in a fundamental way. In the past it’s always been about pushing prices up to crazier and crazier levels and celebrating the act of doing so. Valuation-Informed Indexing is very different. It’s about reining in the Get Rich Quick urge so that prices reflect the economic realities to the greatest extent possible.
So I am taking on something fundamental to human nature with every word I write. It’s scary to do that. It’s not intellectually all that hard. It’s common sense. But it is scary emotionally to go against the crowd in a way that makes the crowd so angry. The vast majority of Buy-and-Holders are not as angry as you Goons, of course. But the majority is synpathetic to the Goon position while not approving of the Goon tactics. You Goons never could have pulled off what you have pulled off if that were not so.
It’s painful, difficult work to go against the crowd in this way. I of course believe that it is necessay work, that someone has to do it so that we never have to live through something like thus again. But it ain’t away being the one who is the target of all the hostility.
Most of my time is devoted to overcoming the anxious feelings that result from that. I might try to write about an important point and then experience some feelings of angst because I am being critical of an aspect of human nature that millions of people do not want to see esposed. Maybe I would go on a walk to quiet those feelings. Or look at a baseball game for a bit. Or surf the interest. Or talk to a friend. Anything to ease the feelings of angst that need to be quieted if I am going to get to the heart of this problem and put the words down on paper that need to be put down to solve it.
It’s not physical labor and it’s not intellectual labor. It’s primarily EMOTIONAL labor. It’s an emotioanl problem. The Buy-and-Holders are smart. There’s no lack of intelligence holding us back It’s a desire to avoid facing these painful feelings of angst at stnading up to the crowd that is holding us back. My job is to do that. I do what I can to hang in there. Someone has to do it. All of us need to see this problem solved. We are all in the same board and we all want the same thing. So I hang in there. The hanging-in-there part requires some calming activities that unfortunately tend to soak up a good bit of time.
It frustrates me that that is so. But I have been shown again and again that it is so. I sometimes feel a temptation to get down on myself for not having finished the book sooner. But then I recall that no one else has written the book that I am writing (including Shiller!) in the 42 years since he published his amazing research and I realize that no one has done it because it is such a darn hard thing to pull off. And I grant myself some relief in the form of taking a walk or whatever so that I can continue drilling down on all the stuff that I need to drill down on and not let that pain associated with doing that cause me to stop doing so.
I hope that that helps, at least a tiny bit. It’s highly fulfilling work. But it’s not fun work. Not by the longest of long shots. No sane person would choose to do with this work unless he had seen with his own eyes how many people there are out there who long to know how stock investing works in the real world and who have seen their hopes for coming to learn that smaskee to the ground in such horrible ways as we have seen them smashed to the ground during the first 21 years of our discussions.
My best and warmest wishes to you and yours.
Rob
Rob,
You can post this or not. Maybe you post it because it might help a reader. But if not, I hope at a minimum it helps you. You really need to get some help. What you describe is not normal. You need someone that can help you deal with your emotions and irrational behavior. What makes it harder is you don’t have anyone ti help you and you don’t have the money to pay someone. I would start with a local church. The Catholic church system is not as well equipped in this area and you may need to see if a local Christian church might be of help.
Believing that errors in retirement studies should be corrected when discovered is a mental disease.
Makes sense!
Rob
What you are trying to do is elevate yourself. You do this by playing three roles. The roll is that of a messianic savior. You portray yourself as someone that is here to save the world from doom. Second, you cast yourself as the leader. You talk about how Bogle, Pfau and Shiller only did their little bit and then how you have taken things to a much higher level by giving the world your “insights” and that your “work” has taken things much further than each of those three. Third, you play the victim. You use the victim card to seek revenge on those that offer up any critic of your words. You use the victim card to cover up your failures (divorce, going broke, etc.). You play the victim card as a cover to the real reasons you are banned. You use the victim card as a cover for the real reasons people avoid you. In this thread, you are the victim of “emotions”.
Avoiding change and avoiding help merely reinforces these points.
I’m just a guy who believes that the American system of government is a good system. Our system permits progress over time. There are of course all kinds of cases where people get things wrong at some moment in time. None of the humans are perfect and so mistakes are always possible. So long as our laws protect us from the sortts of tactics that have been employed by you Goons to supress discussion of the error in the Greaney retirement study (it lacks an adjustment for the valuation level that applies on the day the retirement begins), mistakes can be corrected and progress is possible.
We have elected as a nation of people not to apply the laws that apply in every other realm of human endeavor in the investment advice realm because the mistake that was made there (the claim that market timing/price discipline is not always 100 percent required for all investors) was so terrible that it is hard to face up to it. I think we need to face up to it. I think we all need to move forward together. I think we will all enjoy living better lives once we do so and that we will never look back in regret at having left the dark ages of Buy-and-Hold thinking (no market timing now!) behind.
I’m not elevating myself. I say that we are all in this together. I believe that all of the people who are afraid to stand up to you Goons would love to be able to do so. I’ve seen that in hundreds of interactions with other people in this field. The most obvious case was Wade Pfau. The 16 months in which he was working closely with me on our peer-reviewed research were the happiest days of his life. He only buckled because he did not see other leaders in the field stand up to Mel Lindauer and his Goon Squad. Had Bogle taken effective action re the Lindauer matter, we would still have Wade advocating Valuation-Infiormed Indexing today and we would all be living better lives as a result. What’s the downside?
I am playing a journalist role. I am getting things out before people so that they can make better informed choices. There will be thousands of people who will help to develop the Valuation-Informed Indexing concept once I have been successful in getting one large site opened to honest posting re the research. I will be thrilled to see them adance hundreds of amazing insights. But, yes, I think it is important to get the ball rolling. We will not see those amazing inisghts until we have opened at least one site to honest posting re the research. Everything follows from, that. So I solider on with work that I view as extremely important because of the insights that will be advanced by hundreds of people not named Rob Bennett.
I hope that works for you, Anonymous.
If you sincerely believed that the Greaney retirement study contained a valuation adjustment, you never would have advanced a single abusive post. You would just show us all where the valuation adjustment is in the study. I mean, come on.
Rob
Fix you own problems. Get help from a mental health professional.
Will do, Anonymous.
Please take good care, old friend.
Rob