Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently posted to the discussion thread for one of my columns at the Value Walk site:

That is a flat out lie, Rob.

It is funny you mention Wade Pfau. He is the person that said you have caused him more harm than those you refer to as goons. In fact, he told you to stop talking about him. He also pointed out how you are wrong on the SWR issue. He is the actual author of the paper that you claim to be an author. When you have been confronted on Wade Pfau, you claim he is lying.

As for Shiller, he says not to use CAPE for timing, PERIOD. Your “short term” comment is also a lie. In fact, when you have been asked this before, you say that Shiller is merely lying.

You have also misrepresented Jack Bogle. When confronted on what you have said about Jack, you claim that he is lying. The same goes for others like William Bernstein, Larry Swedroe, Rick Ferri and a long list of others. You claim they are all lying.

So are to believe that each and every one of these well respected people are all lying and that only Rob Bennett is the one telling the truth…..or is Rob Bennett the liar. A simple Google search shows us that Rob Bennett is the obvious liar. This track record of poor behavior has led to your banning of virtually every popular investment board on the internet.

Before the Civil Rights revolution, we had laws in many states saying that people with black skin could not drink from the same water fountains as people with white skin. Were all the people who lived in those states lying when they said that they believed that the laws of their states were good and should be followed?
The companies that make cigarettes used to argue that smoking is good for your health. Were the people who knew about the research showing that smoking causes cancer lying by failing to speak out?
Lance Armstrong was once viewed as a hero for winning the races he won as a biker. Most of the journalists who covered him were aware of charges that he used performance-enhancing drugs. Were they liars for not including mentions of that fact in their articles even though they knew that Armstrong would use his considerable wealth to sue them if they did?
People are people, Sammy.
I wish that Bogle would come 100 percent clean today. I wish that Wade Pfau would work with me to get the research that we produced together on the front page of the New York Times. I wish that Shiller would say every time that he is asked about timing that his research shows that short-term timing never works and that long-term timing always works and is always 100 percent required.
But I also acknowledge the other side of the story. Each of those three people knows from personal experience what happens to people who tell the full truth re these matters. Each of them wants to be effective. And so each of them tells himself that it is better if he tells half of the truth and leaves half for his listeners to figure out for themselves. I don’t agree with the choice they have made. I believe that we all need the help that they could provide by telling the full truth. But I also have to acknowledge that each of those three (and all the others playing the half-truth game) have helped us all in a huge way by telling those half-truths in a way insuring that at least half the truth can be heard. Each of those three knows that no truth at all would be heard from them if their careers were destroyed because they told the full truth.
We’re in a tight spot, Sammy. We’re also in a wonderful spot. The shift from Buy-and-Hold to Valuation-Informed Indexing is the biggest advance in the history of personal finance. We will all live better lives after we all give ourselves permission to tell the full truth re these matters. But we are not there today. It makes lots of people feel bad to hear the full truth. Lots of people have their lives riding on Buy-and-Hold and cannot bear to hear that there is now 34 years of peer-reviewed research showing that it can never work in the long term.
If we were starting from scratch today, Bogle and Pfau and Shiller would all be speaking in a perfectly clear way. But we’re not. Those 34 years of cover-up happened. We cannot go back in a time machine and play it differently on the second try. We are going to have to find a way as a nation to come to terms with the cover-up. There is no other possibility open to us.
I am certain that the answer is not to say that Bogle and Shiller and Pfau are telling the full truth. Doing that just encourages continuation of the cover-up. I am also certain that the answer is not to baldly call Bogle and Shiller and Pfau “liars,” as you suggest. That claim might be accurate in some hyper-technical sense but it is not true at all in the real world of flesh and blood and sin and redemption. These three men are great men. They have helped us all in huge ways. They are entitled to some respect and affection as a result. If we must say that they are not speaking in an entirely accurate way, then fine, we need to say that. But we need to BALANCE those harsh words with some kind and ALSO ACCURATE words that help people understand the CIRCUMSTANCES in which these half-truths were put forward.
That’s my sincere take. I rank Shiller as the most important investing analyst of all time. I rank Bogle second. I rank Pfau in the top ten. These are great men. Yes, they are great men telling haf-truths about stock investing today. We all need to work together to change that. We all need to do so in a CHARITABLE way if we are to avoid causing even more problems rather than solving the ones that face us today.
There is one other person who has written about these matters who has a history of engaging in half truths. I knew about the errors in the Old School safe-withdrawal-rate studies in May 1999, when I put my first post to the Motley Fool’s Retire Early board. It wasn’t until the morning of May 13, 2002, that I put forward my famous post showing that those studies are in error because they do not contain an adjustment for the valuation level that applies on the day the retirement begins. I was for those three years, in your terminology, a “liar.”
So be it. It’s a correct claim, considered without context. What I said about investing during those three years certainly was not entirely true, I certainly did not say all that I knew.
I was afraid, Sammy. It scares people when they learn that the numbers that they have used to plan their retirements are wildly off the mark. It scares them a lot. A common reaction is to strike out at the people reporting this news to them. So I was afraid. Now look at what has happened to me over the past 13 years. Was I not right to be afraid? Do my deceitful actions not become at least somewhat understandable when considered in the light of what came after?
Bogle is afraid.
Shiller is afraid.
Pfau is afraid.
And it’s killing us all that these three (and many, many others) are not helping us all out by telling us the full and complete truth of what they believe about how stock investing works in the real world. We need them. And they need us. So we are going to have to figure out a way to acknowledge that, yes, they have not told the full truth for these 34 years, but that, yes, they are also great men who have helped us all out in very important ways.
They are humans, Sammy. Humans sometimes lie under pressure. It has been known to happen. Humans are also capable of doing all kinds of wonderful things if you give them half a chance. These three men have done all kinds of wonderful things for millions of people. Let’s all be sure to tell that part of the story too when we point out where they have failed themselves and others in their guarded statements about what we learned as a result of Shiller’s “revolutionary” (his word) research of 1981.
Maybe Bogle and Shiller and Pfau really are liars. But they are liars who have done more good for this world than 99 percent of their fellow humans ever manage to do. If I am going to be pinned to the wall and forced to call these great men liars,” I am going to add some words about how they are a lot more than just common, ordinary liars. They are liars and they are great men. That’s the full truth re that one, in my assessment.
Humans are flawed creatures. Great mystery of the last 34 years of investing history solved in four words! Who’d a thunk it?
I hope that you have never been tempted to tell a lie, Sammy. I hope that you are as perfect as you make yourself out to be in the way you frame your questions.
My best and warmest wishes to you and yours.
Rob

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

Any wife would be saddened by a husband who is capable of working but hasn’t “made a dime in 13 years”. Since you acknowledge that fact, to what extent (if any) does it bother you?

It bothers me.

But it doesn’t bother me enough to persuade me to betray my fellow community members and to betray my profession and to betray my country and, yes, to betray my family.

Timothy is 15 and Robert is 13. They are going to be making their own way in this world in not too long a time, Anonymous. Are they going to be making their way in a country trying to survive the Second Great Depression? Will that Second Great Depression bring us to the Third World War in the way that the First Great Depression brought us to the Second World War? Or will they be making their way in a country enjoying the greatest period of economic growth in its history, a country in which the risk of stock investing has been reduced by 70 percent and in which millions have learned what they need to know to retire many years earlier than what they thought was possible in the Buy-and-Hold Era?

We all have jobs to do in this world. Opening the internet up to honest posting on safe withdrawal rates and scores of other critically important topics is mine. It’s a hard job. It’s not a job that I sought for myself; it is one that was handed to me. I don’t see anyone else stepping forward to take on this important work. So I soldier on.

When I am awarded the $500 million settlement payment, that will be my wife’s money too. She will have earned it with her patience as I earned it with my determination. No one gets paid $500 million for nothing. My wife will have earned every dime of that money. She will be able to live the rest of her life proud of the sacrifices she made so that our country could recover from the economic crisis caused by the Buy-and-Holders (inadvertently — but still!).

She has hung in there in the face of all that you Goons have dished out to us. I am proud of her. She shouldn’t have to exercise such patience. But we don’t all get everything that we deserve in this life. We all have times when we have to bear up in the face of injustices. She’s done a good job of that. To her great credit.

I hope that helps you understand the thinking going on in the Bennett household a bit better, Anonymous. We certainly don’t approve of any of your Goon garbage. But we try not to let it influence our behavior too much. We try to keep our eyes on the prize — the shift from Buy-and-Hold to Valuation-Informed Indexing that will liberate millions of middle-class workers from the ignorance that made stocks a risky investment class for many years prior to the publication of Robert Shiller’s “revolutionary” (his word) 1981 research.

My best and warmest wishes to you and yours.

Rob

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

Rob,

Why do you continue to do what you do? Clearly, you are not making any money running this board and it doesn’t seem to have resulting in a consulting business or other kind of revenue generating endeavor. You also don’t seem to have a following. So after spending all these years going down the same path, the question remains why you keep doing what you are doing?

I’m not making any money, Reality. You got that one right. I haven’t made a dime in 13 years. That makes me very, very, very sad. It makes my wife even sadder!

I don’t think you are right when you say that I don’t have a following. There’s one sense in which you are right. No one posts comments here but you Goons. That reality leaves the impression that I do not have a following. But I have had thousands of people express great enthusiasm re my stuff. I have had some of the biggest names in the field tell me that they rank my site as the #1 investing site on the internet. That translates into MILLIONS of followers once the Ban on Honest Posting is brought to a full and complete stop. That translates into wealth at Bill Gates and Steve Jobs and Warren Buffett levels. I could get by on those sorts of amounts, you know?

The short answer to your question is that I have never been offered any options for handling things in any other way. Back in the 1960s, the Buy-and-Holders started us all off on a grand quest to learn in a scientific way how stock investing works. They generated dozens of genuine and powerful insights. They made a mistake re valuations. Shiller corrected the mistake in 1981. The Buy-and-Holders elected to cover up the mistake rather than to acknowledge it. We are now in the economic crisis that inevitably was going to follow from that terrible choice. The Buy-and-Holders would be thrilled to go back in time to gain an opportunity for a do-over. But no time machines are available to them. So they go with this abusive stuff instead to put off for a day or a week or a month or a year the time when they will finally have to come clean and acknowledge that valuations really do affect long-term returns after all.

I love my country, Reality. That’s a four-word explanation of why I do what I do. I love my country.

Our country is in a jam. We shouldn’t be. We are the luckiest generation of investors who ever walked Planet Earth. Combine Shiller’s “revolutionary” (his word) finding with the many good findings of the Buy-and-Holders and it becomes possible to reduce stock investing risk by 70 percent. The peer-reviewed research that I co-authored with Wade Pfau shows that. So we are in an amazingly positive situation.

But the Wall Street Con Men have power and money and influence and a ruthless determination to block millions of middle-class people from learning how stock investing works in the real world. So tens of thousands of entrepreneurs have seen their businesses fail. And millions of workers have lost their jobs. And millions more are on their way to suffering failed retirements.

I don’t think we will be able to make it if we don’t open the internet to honest posting following the next price crash. It’s not just that we are going to see a deepening of the economic crisis, possibly putting us into the Second Great Depression. Even the continued viability of our political system is in jeopardy. Millions of middle-class people are not going to get the joke when their retirement plans fail. They are going to be angry. They are going to be asking lots of hard questions. I want to be available to soften their anger to the extent that that will be possible. I need to have credibility in their eyes to be able to do that. I won’t have credibility if I tell lies just to make a buck today. So I continue to post honestly.

We have a great country, Reality. I believe that we will get through this. We have gone through dark times before and survived them. The Buy-and-Holders are not bad people. Jack Bogle is a hero of mine. None of the material at this site would exist were it not for the things I have learned from reading Bogle’s books and speeches. I think it is going to melt Jack’s heart when he sees the human misery he caused with his support for the Campaign of Terror led by you Goons. I think Jack is going to flip and demand an end to the Ban on Honest Posting. I expect to be working closely with Jack to turn things around. I think the years following the next crash are going to be exciting and positive times. I believe that even some of you Goons will be getting involved in constructive projects in those days. We’ll see.

I love my country and I want to help. I want to help the millions of middle-class investors. I want to help all the investment advisors who don’t like the idea of giving up their personal integrity to be able to make a buck in this field. I want to help all my Buy-and-Hold friends who started out doing something very, very good and important and now find themselves on a very dark path indeed. I get a kick out of helping people. I look forward to taking all the bad stuff we have seen over the first 13 years of our Debate About Having a Debate and turning it into gold.

I talked to lots of people at the Financial Bloggers Conference (FinCo15) that I returned from the other day. There were a few who debated me. That’s of course fine. There are lots of good and smart people who still believe in Buy-and-Hold and I think we all learn from them making their case to the best of their ability. There were a greater number whom I would describe as confused, who see that there are holes in the Buy-and-Hold dogmas but who cannot begin to perceive how fatal a mistake the Buy-and-Holders made when they elected to cover up the last 34 years of peer-reviwed research in this field. And there were a good number of people whom I spoke to who agreed with me on most points but who hold back from saying so in clear and firm and simple language because they know how that would upset lots of people and do damage to their careers.

We are on the one-yard line, Realty. It’s been 34 years since Buy-and-Hold was discredited by the peer-reviewed research. When you see people using death threats to intimidate those trying to tell people about the peer-reviewed research, you know that the “strategy” under discussion is in its last days. Buy-and-Hod died intellectually 34 years ago. It is close to dying in practical terms. It is one stock crash away from its demise. Or at least so Rob Bennett believes.

I love my country. I enjoy putting the talents that God gave me to productive use. I get a kick out of helping people. I am honored and humbled to be the lead player in the most important political/economic story of my lifetime; what journalist would turn down that opportunity? I care about every soul that I have connected with over the past 13 years, including you Goons.

Does that tell you what you need to know?

I call the situation that I am in “the Perfect Trap.” I can’t make a penny because if the model for understanding how stock investing works that I have developed becomes better known, lots of powerful people will have to say the words “I” and “Was” and “Wrong” and they really, really, really don’t want to do that. Yet I cannot let go because the shift from Buy-and-Hold to Valuation-Informed Indexing is the biggest advance we have ever achieved in the history of personal finance by a factor or 50 or more. Yowsa!

Could I be wrong?

Anybody can be wrong about anything. I check myself every day trying to find any sign that I am wrong. I have never found anything of any consequence. So I have to continue on the path that I am on today. In the event that I am wrong, I will just have to live with it. These things happen in this world. I cannot deny the mountain of evidence that says that I am right. I couldn’t live with myself if I did that.

If I am not wrong, our country is close to entering the greatest period of economic growth in our history. We will in not too much more time be seeing 34 years of powerful insights becoming opened up to us in one day. Imagine seeing all the advances that we have seen in the computer electronics field arrive on our doorsteps in a single day. That’s what we are going to see in the investing field except to a far bigger extent than what that suggests because it is far more important that we get investing right than that we be able to communicate through computers.

We are in the process of changing the world in a very big way and in a very positive way, Reality. I’m not trying to keep any of this to myself. I am open to sharing with everyone. This is good stuff piled on top of good stuff piled on top of good stuff piled on top of good stuff. No downside whatsoever. You don’t see projects with that sort of upside too often. I have never seen anything like this anytime, anywhere.

That’s the story. I love the good that thousands of us have done with a burning love. I don’t love the Goon stuff even a little bit. But I do acknowledge that even you Goons have made many positive contributions mixed in with all the smelly garbage that you specialize in. This story is so positive that even those doomed and determined to destroy themselves and their country end up making positive contributions! Wow!

Love is the answer, Reality. It really is. I 100 percent believe that you are going to see that following the next price crash. I’m rooting for you!

Rob

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

The person named Laugh is correct.

I half agree with both you and with Laugh, Reality.

I posted Laugh’s comment as a blog entry because I think he is making an important point. Shiller’s book was a best-seller. It is available in most public libraries. He was awarded a Nobel prize for his “revolutionary” (his word) research. Shiller’s findings have been covered-up in an important sense — there is not one site on the internet other than this one that explores the implications of those findings in depth. So the cover-up is real. Yet it is a very strange sort of cover-up in which the findings win a Nobel prize and in which a book reporting on the findings is a best-seller and is added to the collections of most public libraries.

We agree on the basic facts. The general public will have to decide for itself whether those facts constitute a “cover-up” or not. I say that it is a cover-up but a highly unusual one. I don’t think the Buy-and-Holders had bad intent when they started out. And I believe that they follow Buy-and-Hold strategies themselves to this day. It is not their intent to hurt people. They think they are giving good advice. I can sign onto any statement saying that.

But death threats? Demands for unjustified board bannings? Tens of thousands of acts of defamation? Threats to get academic researchers fired from their jobs?

Huh?

That stuff sure sounds like the sort of stuff you see only in a massive cover-up, Reality. I cannot say different re this aspect of things.

What I believe is that there was good intent starting out. Then Shiller published research throwing doubt on the entire Buy-and-Hold project. The Buy-and-Holders suffered cognitive dissonance. They could not accept that the model that they had developed was wrong. So they ignored Shiller. They went on with their business thinking that they had done nothing wrong. And they hadn’t done any serious wrong at that point. They were wrong about how stock investing works, in my assessment. But they were sincere. And they had put forward many genuine insights. So it was a mix. Which is what you would expect in the early days of a project to take the speculation out of investing analysis and make it more of a science.

But as time passed the Buy-and-Holders became more and more embarrassed about how they had not tried to respond to Shiller’s findings. In science, we discover mistakes as new research is published and we move forward. That hasn’t happened in the investing field and it is because of the efforts of the Buy-and-Holders that it hasn’t happened. So over time it became a thing not where they were just ignoring Shiller themselves but where they were also engaging in intimidation tactics to block people from explaining to others how they had ignored him and how they had thereby caused an economic crisis.

That’s where the financial fraud comes in, in my assessment.

I think it is fraud if you run a blog and you advocate Buy-and-Hold and a fellow comes on and points out that there is 34 years of peer-reviewed research showing that Buy-and-Hold is dangerous and your readers tell you that the fellow is upsetting them and you ban him because you want to make a buck and you can’t do it so long as this guy keeps posting stuff in accord with the last 34 years of peer-reviewed research. I say that that is fraud. I say that you can go to prison for that.

You say otherwise. And Laugh says otherwise.

Okay.

What do you want me to do about it?

I’m not going to join in on this massive act of fraud. I have not done that in 13 years. And I am not going to do it in 13 billion years. For obvious reasons.

I suppose that we will find out what the rest of the community of investors believes following the next crash. At that point people will have no emotional reason to continue to believe in Buy-and-Hold. They will be angry at the “experts” who caused them to lose their retirement money. They will be looking for people to hang from a tree. The Buy-and-Holders will be the obvious candidates. Especially the ones who engaged in insanely abusive intimidation tactics.

Do you know what I will be doing then? I will be arguing for mercy. I will be saying that we need to pull our country together and that going after the Buy-and-Holders and even you Goons will to a large extent be counter-productive. So I will be on your side. I am on your side now. But it will take more friendship for me to be on your side then, when I will have lots of people calling for your hanging. But, if I am true to myself, I will remain on your side even then. It’s the right way t go. I am sure.

That doesn’t mean that I will say that there should be no prison sentences. I think there should be some. And we will not be able to calm down the millions who will have seen their retirement plans collapse without mixing in a little justice with the all-important mercy. We sent Bernie Madoff to prison. You Goons have caused 10,000 times the human misery that Bernie Madoff caused. I am not able to see how we could fail to send at least a small number of people to prison following the next crash.

Maybe it won’t happen. I am not God. I could be wrong. I certainly am not going to demand prison sentences if most others don’t see a need for them. I am going to post honestly. I am going to tell the story of why millions of middle-class people will have lost their retirement money. If people demand prison sentences, I will ask for a show of mercy given the unusual circumstances re the lengths of those prison sentences. If most people do not demand prison sentences of any length, I will go about my business of helping people to understand how stock investing works in the real world, according to the last 34 years of peer-reviewed research in this field. It’s not going to bother me one tiny bit if you don’t get sent to prison, Reality. I have much, much bigger fish to fry.

We’ll see what happens, okay?

I believe that deep in your heart you want to know how stock investing works in the real world, just like everybody else. So I believe that deep in your heart you are on the same side that I am on. That’s why I chalk your behavior up to emotional pain and am able to bring myself to say that your prison sentence should be shorter than it would be in other circumstances. I believe that you will flip following the next crash. Maybe you will call for a prison sentence for your old self at that time! That’s a strange thing to say. But it’s no stranger than a lot of other stuff we have seen during the first 13 years of our Debate About Having a Debate.

I am going to continue to post honestly. That’s in stone. That can never change.

I love my Buy-and-Hold friends and am going to show as much charity to them as it is possible for me to show them without crossing the line and becoming guilty of financial fraud myself. That’s also in stone. That also can never change, no matter what you Goons say or do.

We are all going to just have to evidence a little patience and wait to see how it plays out. We don’t have any other options available to us. It’s not just that I will not post dishonestly re safe withdrawal rates. It’s that I CANNOT post dishonestly re safe withdrawal rates. It’s not in me. If something is not in a person, that something is not in that person. That’s the way it is. I mean, come on.

I will be as honest as I can possibly be without crossing the line and becoming uncharitable while also being as charitable as I can possibly be without crossing the line and becoming dishonest. And we will all see how that strategy plays out following the next price crash.

I believe that it is going to play out very, very well indeed.

Because I love my country. I believe in it. I think we have the capacity to work through these sorts of things in time.

But we’ll see.

I naturally wish you the best of luck in all your future life endeavors, Reality.

Take good care, man.

Rob

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

Hey Rob. When can we expect to hear all the stories of your great successes at FinCon?

I’m at the conference now, Question. I brought my computer this year.

I have indeed had some great successes. I have had some great frustrations too. I always do. That’s been the story for 13 years now — great successes combined with great frustrations.

I organized a community event that was a lunch for people who wanted to share thoughts on why Buy-and-Hold doesn’t work. We had six people (including me). I would like to have had a lot more. But six worked well in that everyone had a good chance to talk about his or her own views and also ask lots of questions of the others attending. So I would call that a success. I intend to put together the same community event again next year. In the event that we see a price crash by then, my bet is that we will have many more people attending next year.

I sat one morning by accident (I was just looking for an empty chair where I could sit and eat my breakfast) with a group of four women who called themselves “preppers.” I had never heard the term before. These are people who are planning in one way or another for a collapse of our economy or our political system or whatever. I tend to think of such people as “doom and gloomers” and I tend not to associate with them much.

I agree with the idea that the “establishment” has failed us in important ways in recent years. But I am also a big believer in the idea that a functional society NEEDS an establishment that reins in the spreading of crazy ideas. Without any establishment, we would have chaos. I am by nature very much an establishment guy (I cannot stand Donald Trump, for example — my favorite in the Republican race is Rubio). Shiller’s views are certainly unconventional. But they SHOULDN’T be, in my assessment. Shiller is as establishment as it gets. He teaches at Yale. He won a Nobel prize. His ideas are supported by 34 years of peer-reviewed research. Fama is establishment too. It is my belief that Buy-and-Hold and Valuation-Informed Indexing are BOTH establishment approaches and that open and honest posting should be permitted on both of them at every board and blog on the internet.

These women impressed me. They were not even a tiny bit strange. They were all intelligent and balanced in their views. They argued that I should get involved in prepper communities because lots of average people want to know more about how the stock market works and people in these communities are more open to non-conventional viewpoints. I am going to give serious thought to their suggestion. I do think there is potential in this direction. Ultimately, I want VII to be a mainstream thing. But it may make sense to work in these sorts of communities until we see the crash and the non-mainstream ideas of today are adopted by the mainstream groups.

I had conversations with lots of financial planners. Phil has been inviting small-shop financial planners who use social media to come to the conference. There were a lot of people here from the Gen X/Gen Y financial planning group. These people were without exception entirely open to hearing my message. That’s not to say that they agree with it. There were four planners I met who I would say either entirely agreed or largely agreed. But all were polite and at least a small bit interested in hearing the story. I had a discussion at dinner last night with a planner that went on for over an hour. He did not adopt my views and I did not adopt his. But we got along great.

The key to persuading people is repetition. It is virtually impossible to convert someone in the space of a single conversation. That’s actually a good aspect of human nature, in my view. If people changed their minds on important issues as the result of a single conversation, life would be harder because people would be too fickle. So it is good that it takes repetition to persuade people. We just don’t have that re VII today. If the fellow who I talked to last night saw someone on television speaking about VII after he spoke with me, things would click that didn’t click just from his exposure to me. That’s what needs to change. I believe it will change following the crash. But we will have to wait and see.

I had dinner the first night with a fellow who is super smart and super kind. We talked about all sorts of things, investing and lots of personal stuff too. He had a great deal of sympathy for my investing views but he did not have the sense of alarm that I have re the Social Taboo that has blocked the spread of Shiller’s ideas for 34 years now. He was very interested in the literature re how people fool themselves about all sorts of things an about how people gradually pick up on new ideas. He pointed me to some resources that I did not know about. He suggested that I focus on using humor as a teaching tool. I think that’s a great suggestion and i intend to ponder how I could do more along those lines.

The conference is good because you meet people in person. There are all sorts of things that you pick up on in person that you do not pick up on in e-mail exchanges. So I continue to find value in it. People have always been interested in the ideas. That has been so going back to May 13, 2002. But the change from Buy-and-Hold to Valuation-Informed Indexing is so big (even though it is only the treatment of valuations that changes) that people experience lots of cognitive dissonance trying to integrate all these new ideas. That’s just the way it is. That’s the challenge.

I continue to believe that we are getting there, inch by inch. But I certainly acknowledge that I am biased and probably couldn’t bear to think otherwise. The humor guy made that point to me. We were talking about Bogle. I told him how much I love Bogle and how I believe that all that adding the valuations factor to the mix does is make all of Bogle’s many important contributions that much more important. He said that Bogle just has too much invested in Buy-and-Hold. I objected to that a little bit and he said that I would probably feel the same way if Valuation-Informed Indexing was discredited. I told him that I hoped that that was not true but acknowledged that it might be all the same. We all have a hard time seeing our own weaknesses.

I shared with him a personal story that makes the point. My wife has on occasion expressed the view that I am too hard on you Goons. I don’t agree. I agree that I am hard but I believe that I am as kind as I am able to be without crossing the line and becoming dishonest. She once used the term “self-righteous” to describe me and said that she feels that I am sometimes self-righteous in my speaking to her when we are having disagreements. My initial reaction to this was that it was pure craziness. I think of myself as the least self-rightous person I know.

I was thinking about this a week or two ago when something hit me. Many years ago I had a major blow-up with my older brother (an INTJ, engineer type!) that I have ever since regretted. I was EXTREMELY self-rightous in that incident. So the thought hit me to do a search on Google for “INFJ (my personality type under the Myers-Briggs system) and self-rightous.” Sure enough, there were several long threads at various sites about “the dark side of the INFJ personality type” that focused on how the compassionate, sensitive “F” of the INFJ can turn cold and ugly in certain circumstances. So I had a conversation with my wife before I left for the conference apologizing for the times when I have become self-rigtheous with her (I am not yet at a point where I can identify those times — self-examination of one’s negatives is a hard business).

I am going to put it on my list to do something similar re you Goons. As of today, I honestly do not feel that I have ever been unfairly harsh in my dealings with you. But I also think that it is possible that there are things that I just cannot see because of my human limitations. I may look through some earlier discussions and see if I can identify places where I have been unfair or unkind. If I can, I hope that I will have the courage to own up to them publicly. This 13-year saga is all about incorporating an understanding of human emotion into investing analysis (since investing is done by humans). This is the sort of thing that I need to do to come to a fuller understanding of how investing works. I need to examine other people’s emotions. I also need to examine my own.

The one other thing that came up is that a guy I met at breakfast this morning said that he did an Ignite talk in his own town. I loved the two Ignite talks that I did in earlier years. So I am going to put it on my list to see if there is a group that puts on Ignite talks either in Leesburg or in D.C. and try to get signed up to do one in the not-too-distant future. That would be a scary but exciting thing to do.

I hope that helps a bit, Question. Hang in there, man.

Rob

Set forth below is the text of a comment that I posted in the discussion thread for a recent entry at my weekly column at the Value Walk site:

Rob,

My comments are based on the truth and supported by facts. All one needs to do is read your posts and see that the vast majority of your posts include complaints about what you think Shiller, Bogle, Pfau and others. You want to talk about taking people Down, Down, Down? Just read your own posts. Tell us again about people going to prison, or made up death threats or defamation that are frequent topics that you bring up on your board. Who is bringing us Down, Down, Down?

Secondly, you like to take a creative license to what people say. Notice how you make it seem that Aaron believes your negative views on buy and hold (which you have yet to fully define). I see nothing in his posts that mentions buy and hold (and what that really means).

Third, you position yourself as an expert, yet you want to hide from the fact that your retirement plan failed and that you also don’t really follow your own investment strategy. that all cuts towards credibility and I think gives an insight to readers as to why you say what you do. You are looking for a scapegoat for your own failures.

It’s not my intent to bring anybody down, Sammy.

The historical reality is that we did not know all we need to know about how stock investing works until 1981, when Shiller published his “revolutionary” (his word) research. The Buy-and-Holders made many wonderful contributions. I say that all the time. But they dropped the ball on one key issue — the need for investors always, always, always to be 100 percent sure to practice price discipline when setting their stock allocations (that is, to always, always, always practice long-term timing, the one form of market timing that has been working for 145 years now, as far back as we have records).

Were the Buy-and-Holders dumb or bad to make that mistake?

They were not.

Bogle didn’t found Vanguard until the mid-1970s. So index funds were not available at the time when Fama did the research on which the entire Buy-and-Hold Model is based. Long-term timing only works with index funds. So Fama had no way of knowing that it was important to check whether long-term timing works. Naturally, he didn’t attempt to perform any check. He obviously couldn’t get this one right without even doing a check!

Shiller was the first researcher to check whether long-term timing always works and is always required. He found that it is. Dozens of researchers have checked this finding in the 34 years since. Every single one has confirmed that Shiller was right. We are the luckiest generation of investors ever to walk Planet Earth. We are the first to know (at least intellectually) that it is possible to reduce the risk of stock investing by 70 percent just be being open to the idea of practicing long-term timing (I am the co-author of peer-reviewed research showing that this is so).

So everything is great, right?

Not quite.

Between 1965, when Fama did his research, and 1981, when Shiller did his, tens of thousands of businesses were formed promoting the Buy-and-Hold strategy. It was promoted as “research-based.” It is not that. Shiller’s research shows that Buy-and-Hold never works in the long run. But the people who founded those businesses truly believed that Buy-and-Hold was research-based at the time they founded them. And, when Shiller showed that Buy-and-Hold can never work, they were none too excited about the idea of acknowledging their mistake.

So as a society we developed a Social Taboo against speaking frankly about the implications of Shiller’s amazing findings. 34 years have now passed. It is now harder than ever for the Buy-and-Holders to come clean. They have been covering up Shiller’s findings for 34 years now. What to do?

These people WANT to come clean, Sammy. I know. I have spoken to many of them and they have told me so. Others try to sneak lots of valuation-based stuff into their presentations even though it makes zero sense to consider valuations if the market is truly efficient, as Fama believed. So we are all on the same side. We all know that we need to make every investor on the planet aware of what Shiller showed and of what his research signifies.

But how do we get from this horrible place where we are today (where the relentless promotion of Buy-and-Hold strategies has caused an economic crisis) to the wonderful place where we all want to be tomorrow (where we reduce risk by 70 percent and ALSO earn sufficiently higher returns to be able to retire five or ten years sooner than we ever imagined possible during the Buy-and-Hold Era)?

We get there by talking frankly about this stuff. That’s my take. That’s certainly how it is done in every other field of human endeavor when huge advances are produced.

The reason why we have not made more progress in the past 34 years is not that this stuff is not so important. It is that it IS so terribly, terribly important. The Buy-and-Holders cannot bear to acknowledge their mistakes because it has caused so much human misery and because the cover-up has continued for so many years, something that should never happen in a free society.

You are hurting. It comes through in ever comment you advance here. You really do follow Buy-and-Hold strategies yourself and you really do hope that they will work out. But you have doubts. And you cannot bear to have those doubts encouraged by someone who writes a weekly column on Valuation-Informed Indexing. So you come here and engage in all sorts of disruption.

That’s not the answer.

I am sure.

We have had thousands of people express a desire that every board and blog on the internet be opened to honest posting on these matters. That’s the answer. Once people are able to hear all the arguments pro and con, they will make their decisions. But we have to have honest posting. That means that the intimidation tactics need to go. The Buy-and-Holders need to work to rein in their emotional impulses.

We all have a role to play in seeing that that happens. We will benefit as a society when Shiller’s ideas are discussed more openly and more freely. And so we all need to direct our energies to seeing that we complete this transition from a model for understanding how stock investing works that at one time seemed plausible to lots of smart and good people to a model that is truly supported by the peer-reviewed academic research in this field.

I love the Buy-and-Holders. I was once a Buy-and-Holder myself. I want to work with the Buy-and-Holders to develop their ideas that make it possible that they will work in the real world. That’s why I call them out on their mistakes. The Buy-and-Holders are my friends. If I had made such a mistake, I would want my friends to call me out on it. So that’s how I play it.

I naturally wish you the best of luck in all your future endeavors, my long-time Buy-and-Hold friend.

Rob