A Rich Life

The Old Ideas on Saving & Investing Don't Work -- Here's What Does

Buy-and-Hold Goon to Rob: “Who Are You to Determine How Many Schools There Are? You Are Not an Expert in the Field, Nor Do You Have Any Formal Training. You Are Not Part of a Consortium of Thought Leaders.”

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

“ That shows me that there are two schools of academic thought.”

Who are you to determine how many schools there are? You are not an expert in the field, nor do you have any formal training. You are not part of a consortium of thought leaders.

What you believe doesn’t matter one bit.

The reaction we have seen from people who have been exposed to my thinking says a lot.

We have had thousands of our fellow community members express a desire that honest posting re the peer-reviewed reseaech be permitted. That woildn’t happen unless there was something important in what I am saying. It is possible that I do not have everything 100 percent right. That’s a possibility for anyone who offers an opinion on anything. But the fact that thousands have expressed a desire that honest debate be permitted shows that we should as a nation of people permit the debate.

Then there are the people who started out as Buy-and-Holders and became converated to Valuation-Informed Indexing as a result of my words. The Wade Pfau story is an amazing story. This guy told me a numbeer of times that he just couldn’t get over what his research was showing him. He kept asking himself: “Am i making a mistake?” Because he had heard so many times that market timing doesn’t work but his research was showing him that market timing ALwAYS works and is always 100 percent required. We should have permitted Wade to tell us all what he discovered with his research and encouraged him to do more research re Valuation-Informed Indexing.

Then there was John Walter Russell, who thought this was so important that he devoted eight years of his life to researching it without ever receiving one dime of compensation. And then you have Rob Arnott, who said that everything that I say about stock investing checks out (he served as editor of the Financial Analysts Journal for four years) but that he had seen so much absuive stuff directed at him from Buy-and-Holders because he had “crossed” them by telling the research-based truth about stock investing that he couldn’t afford any more controversy in his life.

Then we have you Goons. Death threats ain’t normal. Extortion ain’t normal. Demands for unjustified board bannings aint’s normal. You Goons are in great pain. It’s because you are trying to defend the indefensible. It is a cultural norm in our society to permit breakthrough research to be discussed. If we don’t discuss such research, the breakthroughs serve no good purpose. But you Goons dont want millions of people to learn about the better way to invest in stocks. So you are reduced to abusive and in some cases criminal behavior to keep the history train from moving forward. I think we all should elect to give you a break by opening every site to honest posting.

That’s where I am coming from re this one, Anonymous.

Hang in there. old friend.

Is Greaney an expert in the field? Why is it that he gets to tell people that a 4 percent withdrawal rate is always “100 percent safe” but none of the other non-experts is permitted to ask qustions about the methodology he used in his study? I am a non-expert who sincerely believes that he failed to include a valuation adjustment in the study. I was wrong to not point that out three years sooner than I did. There were people who used that study to structure their retirement plan.

Rob

Valuation-Informed Indexing #671: The Thing That Permits Markets to Get Prices Right Is the Natural Tension Between Buyers (Who Seek Low Prices) and Sellers (Who Seek High Prices)

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I’ve posted Entry #671 to my weekly Valuation-Informed Indexing column at the Value Walk site. It’s called The Thing That Permits Markets to Get Prices Right Is the Natural Tension Between Buyers (Who Seek Low Prices) and Sellers (Who Seek High Prices).

Juicy Excerpt: 

Why doesn’t the stock market already work like every other market? What’s the problem?

“There Are Two Schools of Academic Thought re How Stock Investing Works. It Is a Logical Impossibility That Both Are Correct Because They Are Rooted in Opposite Premises. As a Nation of People, We Need to Figure Out Which One Is Right. The Only Way We Can Do That Is to Talk It Through, Showing Respect and Friendship to Those on ‘the Other Side.’ “”

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

People are happy to talk about research.  They are not happy when people keep repeating the same lies over and over again and refuse to listen to what others have to say.

There are two schools of academic thought re how stock investing works. Anonymous. It is a logical impossibility that both are correct because they are rooted in opposite premises. As a nation of people, we need to figure out which one is right. The only way we can do that is to talk it through, showing respect and friendship to those on “the other side.”

My sincere take.

Rob

Buy-and-Hold Goon to Rob: “”You Don’t Seem to Have Grown Tired of Being Broke and Cut Off From the Investment Community.”

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

“You don’t seem to have grown tired of being broke and cut off from investment community.”

Of course I’m tired of it.

What’s the alternative? To sell out my friends again? Thanks but no thanks, you know?

Rob

Buy-and-Hold Goon to Rob: “You Are Not Free to Demand That Others Give You Access to Their Platform.”

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

No one needs to agree and/or believe your opinions as to what constitutes all of the historical peer-reviewed research and what it actually says and means.

You are free to believe whatever you want to believe, but your entire message is around what you want everyone else to do. You are not free to demand that others give you access to their platform. You are not free to demand that someone change their study to correct some kind of “error” you think this person has made, despite others not agreeing. You are not free to demand that others have to pay you compensation for what you think you should get, when no one has actually agreed to pay you anything. You are not free to make up allegations and expect others to believe it when you have not provided any direct evidence of criminal activity.

It’s not an “allegation” for me to point out that the retirement study posted at John Greney’s web site lacks aan adjustment for the valuaation level that applies on the day that the rettirement begins. Evidence-Based Investing is one of the generals in Greaney’s Goon Army. Evidence said in his famous post from late 2021 that “nobody” truly believes that the Greaney study contains a valuation adjustment, “including Greaney himself.” I don’t feel that Evidence was making an ellegation. I say that he was stating a simple fact.

Do you think it would have been better if I had kept it zipped re the error in the study? I am ashamed that I did not speak up sooner. A number of people who posted at the Motley Fool board had become friends of mine over the years. They were using the Greaney study for help in planning their retirements.

Do you think I was being fair to Greaney during the three years when I was too afraid of what he would do to me if I pointed out the error to speak up? I feel that I failed him (and the entire Retire Early community) during those three years. I began to feel better about myself when I worked up the courage to post honestly. Which version of Rob Bennett do you like better, the one who sold out his friends to appease you Goons or the one who worked up the couage to do the right thing?

Rob

“If We Had All Been Thinking Clearly, a National Debate on the How-To Implications of Shiller’s Research Would Have Been Launched on the Day in 1981 When the Research Was Published. We Are Today 42 Years Behind in Our Understanding of How Stock Investing Works as a Result of Our Delay in Launching that Debate.”

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

Name on other person that has written a book on the far reaching implications of why Teslas don’t have microwave ovens.

The suggestion here is that it is not important to explore the how-to implications of Shiller’s amazing research. I think it is very, very, very important. That’s why I have devoted 21 years of my life to the project.

If we had all been thinking clearly, a national debate on the how-to implicatons of Shiller’s research would have been launched on the day in 1981 when the research was published. We are today 42 years behind in our understanding of how stock investing works as a result of our delay in launching that debate. If we fail to launch it by the close of business today, we will be yet another 24 hours behind where we could have been.

Shiller was awarded a Nobel prize for his work. He must have showed SOMETHING beyond what was known in the 1960s, when the Buy-and-Hold strsategy was being developed. Do you have any thought about what that something might be, Anonymous? I am not looking for theoretical generalities like the claim that “valuations affect long-term returns.” I certainly believe that that is so. But what I want to know is how does knowing that valuations affect long-term returns affect one’s strategic choices in investing? I say that it shows that market timing/price discipline is always 100 percent required. What do you say it shows?

My best wishes.

Rob

“The Leverage Here Is Completely Off the Charts.”

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

So your plan on making money is to be selling people on the concept of your investment scheme versus making money utilizing the investment scheme.  Got it.

There is a sarcstic tone evident in your comment, which is unfortunate. But the statement is essentially correct. I follow Valuation-Informed Indexing principles (which are the same as Buy-and-Hold principles, with the sole exception that market timing/price discipline is encouraged rather than discouraged) when investing. That means that I will earn higher lifetime returns while taking on less risk. Following VII priciples will generally add hundreds of thousands of dollars to one’s portfolio over the course of a lifetime. So it is no small thing. But it’s not something that is going to make someone millions overnight. It’s not intended to be that.

I believe that the journalism work will bring in hundreds of millions overnight. That’s because the 42-year cover-up has been so brutal. We have thousands of good and intelligent and hard-working people who long to do honest work in this field and who will be freed to do so once one large site opens itself to honest posting re the last 42 years of peer-reviewed research and promises to protect those who do honest work from the sorts of individuals who have posted in “defense” of Lindauer and Greaney. The leverage here is completely off the charts. And of course there are financial rewards that go to the person who led us from the Buy-and-Hold Era to the Valuation-Informed Indexing Era. It’s work that helps people that generate value and it would be hard to imagine anything that would produce more value than my idea of opening every internet site to honest posting re the last 42 years of peer-reviewed research, without a single exeption.

Hang in there, old friend.

Rob

“The Valuation-Informed Indexing Story Is Bigger Than Watergate. 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.”

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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

“You Don’t Know How Much You Have. You Don’t Subtract for Irrational Exuberance. How Could You Possibly Know?”

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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

Valuation-Informed Indexing #670: Valuations Affect Long-Term Returns — But Why?

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I’ve posted Entry #670 to my weekly Valuation-Informed Indexing column at the Value Walk site. It’s called Valuations Affect Long-Term Returns — But Why?

Juicy Excerpt: Think of each act of market timing as a tiny price crash. When you sell some stocks because prices have risen too high, you are crashing the market in a small way, are you not? Is it better to have tiny crashes all the time or to listen to the Buy-and-Holders and to avoid crashes until the CAPE value has risen so high that we all experience a gigantic crash?