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

No one is going to send you an engraved invitation. That just doesn’t happen. Which of course you know. Apparently the real reason for your withdrawing from the board community, where you once were so vibrantly active, will remain a mystery.

I am willing to help out at any blog or board that is looking for the help that I am able to provide, X. I love what Buy-and-Hold used to stand for. I believe that the game changed when Shiller published his “revolutionary” (his word) research. I now promote Valuation-Informed Indexing because VII is now what Buy-and-Hold used to be in earlier days.

There is huge interest in the exploration of the implications of the new research. I know that because I have seen it with my own eyes at every board and blog to which I have posted. Every site owner should want to tap into that huge interest. Firstly, because it is the ethical thing to do — it’s financial fraud to mislead investors into thinking that the pre-1981 research is the last word on what we know about how stock investing works. Secondly, because there is a lot of money to be made in developing and promoting the first true research-based strategy. And, thirdly, because its fun to see debate re new ideas play out.

Even Buy-and-Holders should be encouraging The Great Debate. If Buy-and-Hold is the real thing, it will prevail in the debate. That makes the case for Buy-and-Hold look stronger while blocking the debate makes the case for Buy-and-Hold look very weak indeed. Also, having to respond to challenges from Valuation-Informed Indexers helps Buy-and-Holders sharpen their arguments and their thinking. And overcoming those challenges would enhance the confidence that the Buy-and-Holders feel for their strategy. That will turn out to be a big plus if ever there are times when things do not appear to be going well for Buy-and-Hold. Investors need confidence to “Stay the Course” in such times. Confidence is developed by being willing to partake in the give-and-take that is a natural part of the discussions held in all field of human endeavor with the exception of investing analysis.

I don’t with your “that doesn’t happen” comment. Unjustified board bannings should not happen. In cases in which they do, it makes all the sense in the world for a site offer to send a message letting the person who was improperly banned that a mistake was made and that the banning has been retracted. It doesn’t make much sense for a poster who has been improperly banned to return to a board where he was banned without him having heard any indication that attitudes have changed. What constructive purpose would be served by doing such a thing?

The site owners would need to make an explanation to the entire community in any event, no? If I were to return to the Bogleheads Forum or to Morningstar or to the Early Retirement Forum and I were not re-banned, do you believe that other posters would not ask me what was going on? It sure seems likely to me that many would do that. What would you have me say? We would need a statement from the site owner.

I don’t have a problem with the idea of having the statement from the site owner not address every detail of what has gone on. I of course understand that this is a delicate matter. But it does seem to me that there needs to be some sort of recognition that a change has occurred. Some issues can be finessed. But the core issue — whether all boards and blogs are going to begin permitting exploration of the implications of the post-1981 research — must be addressed. If it is not, there is just going to be more confusion and more ill will generated in the future. No one wants that. It makes sense to be diplomatic. But an effective diplomacy puts the ugly stuff truly behind us. To achieve that goal, we need to be at least a tiny bit clear on the core question.

These things can be worked out. I feel a great respect and affection for my many Buy-and-Hold friends. I have zero hard feelings towards anyone. If that attitude is shared on your side of the table, people can sit down together and work things out in a way acceptable to all. And we have great opportunities here. The Buy-and-Hold Pioneers are heroes — no one believes that more strongly than I do. They are greater heroes in my eyes than they are today in their own eyes because I see clearly how good things look on the other side of The Big Black Mountain. None of what I have done is anti-Buy-and-Hold. VII is the FULFILLMENT of the Buy-and-Hold promise. It is what Buy-and-Hold was intended to be going back to its first days.

So what we need is an acceptance of the reality that we need to do things that perhaps in ordinary circumstances “just don’t happen.” On the day when you want to work together for the good of every human being on the planet, I am here for you. That will never change. There’s no dirty name that you can call me that will cause me to question my conviction that that is the way to play this thing.

I hope that those words help a tiny bit, X.

My best and warmest wishes to you and yours.

Rob

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:

You are not on the same page as Wade as he asked you to stop. You are not on the same page as he wont even speak with you. Sending out 30,000 emails about someone says more about you have significant issues versus the message itself.

Wake up, Rob. That is NOT normal. It is called stalking.

As for your desire to have expel say, “I was wrong”, that goes back to the central issue of you wanting to find someone else to blame for your failures. Your retirement plan failed because of you. Stop blaming other people.

The 30,000 e-mails were not all about Wade, Sammy. They were about the problem that we are having as a society making the transition from Buy-and-Hold to Valuation-Informed Indexing. The article that I referenced in the e-mails did indeed tell about how Wade and I worked for 16 months on this amazing research and about how excited he was about our findings and about how he was threatened and about how he stopped promoting the research so that the threats would stop and he could continue to be successful in his career. But the article talked about a lot of things other than Wade. And it of course said many things that put Wade in a very positive light. I love Wade. The idea that I would ever do anything to harm him in any way is of course 100 percent crazy. That’s Goon talk, nothing else.
You are right that Wade asked me to stop talking about our research and to stop talking about Valuation-Informed Indexing and not to send the e-mails. That part of your statement is accurate. But why do you think he did that? Wade himself had been promoting the study heavily before he was threatened. He had gone to the Bogleheads Forum and told people all about it. He got a generally good response. When some Goons came onto the thread and started doing what Goons do, he was very harsh in his responses to them (harsher than I usually am). Wade is not a Goon and Wade doesn’t like Goon tactics. So why did he ask me to stop telling people about our amazing research?
He is EMBARRASSED.
Nothing could be more clear. He knows that our research is of huge importance. He knows that it belongs on the front page of the New York Times. And he of course knows that he is no longer doing what needs to be done to get it there. So he is embarrassed.
He’s not the only one. Shiller is embarrassed that he has not done more. Bogle is embarrassed that he has not done more. Michael Kitces is embarrassed that he has not done more. Carl Richards is embarrassed that he has not done more. Bill Bernstein is embarrassed that he has not done more. Rick Ferri is embarrassed that he has not done more. Larry Swedroe is embarrassed that he has not done more. It would be a shorter paragraph if I wrote the names of people who are NOT embarrassed that they have not done more. We are ALL embarrassed that we have not done more.
We’re all in the same boat, Sammy. We all want the same things. We all want to know how to reduce the risk of stock investing by 70 percent. How do we get from the place where we are now to the wonderful place where we all want to be omorrow? We don’t get there by silencing each other out of embarrassment that we didn’t get there quicker, do we?
I want Wade to win the freakin’ Nobel prize, okay? There’s no bigger Wade Pfau fan than Rob Bennett.
I want Bogle to go down in history as the biggest hero to the middle class that ever lived. There’s a good chance that that is going to happen if he corrects the one error he made when he developed his strategy. There’s not too much chance if his continued unwillingness to correct the error puts us in the Second Great Depression. I am the best friend that Jack has on this planet. He doesn’t see it that way today. But it’s so. And I bet that he is going to see it that way following the next crash.
If the 34-year cover-up had never happened, there would not be one person today offering any opposition to the idea of teaching every investor all there is to know about Valuation-Informed Indexing. Our problem is that the 34-year cover-up DID happen. And it is very embarrassing to many people for this to get out.
Now —
What are we going to do about it?
I follow a two-prong approach. My rule is to be as honest as possible without crossing the line and becoming uncharitable while also being as charitable as possible without crossing the line and becoming dishonest. Does that not make sense? I am trying to HELP my Buy-and-Hold friends. Always. I want to bring all the embarrassment to an end. We can’t do that without ending the cover-up. So I want to end the cover-up. But it’s not that I want to hurt my Buy-and-Hold friends in any way. I want to PRAISE my Buy-and-Hold friends. But I only want to praise them for the things they got right, which is a lot, not for things they got wrong. I HURT my Buy-and-Hold friends when I praise them for things they got wrong. That just makes things worse. It’s because too many people have been doing things like that that we are in this mess in the first place.
I have raised the possibility of an amnesty for people who have continued to promote Buy-and-Hold because they once truly believed in it and who are suffering cognitive dissonance re the last 34 years of research because it is just too hard for them to accept that they got something wrong. That makes sense, does it not? But I can’t adopt an amnesty by myself. We have to get Congress involved. That means that we have to have a national debate. I’ve been calling for a national debate for 13 years now! That’s the answer. Once we all come clean, it all gets better and better and better with each passing day instead of worse and worse and worse.
This column entry is about going to the dentist. I told my dental troubles to a fellow I was talking to at a church picnic this weekend. The guy told me that he hasn’t been to a dentist in 10 years! He knows that he needs a root canal and he is afraid to go! Huh? Wha?
That’s sad stuff, Sammy. It’s also painfully human stuff. This fellow made his situation worse by going into denial. He needs to make a darn dentist appointment! Yes, it is going to hurt. But then the hurt is going to pass. And he won’t be walking around anymore with all that fear about what the future is going to bring.
The Buy-and-Holders are wonderful people who have done wonderful things. Shiller added a piece that they didn’t possess when they were putting together their strategy. Shiller is their friend, not their enemy! And I am their friend, not their enemy!
Wade wants to be writing about Valuation-Informed Indexing and talking about Valuation-Informed Indexing and teaching Valuation-Informed Indexing and answering questions about Valuation-Informed Indexing and taking up research project on top of research project exploring the limits of Valuation-Informed Indexing. The 16 months that we were working together were the happiest 16 months of his life. He told me so on many, many occasions.
He just doesn’t want you Goons harassing him like you have been harassing me for 13 years.
You Goons need to knock off the funny business. That’s the answer. We all win (including you Goons!) when you do that.
That’s my sincere take, in any event.
Hang in there, Sammy. It gets better. A LOT better.
I am sure.
Rob

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:

According to Wade Pfau, who is the expert, yes. Anyone can go to his site and search your screen name of hocus and will see what he said about you and SWRs. I would tell you that you should take it up with him if you disagree, but I understand he no longer speaks with you after you decided to send out over 30,000 emails about him even though he asked you to stop.

I sent the 30,000 e-mails to academic researchers who work on these issues. They all want to do good and honest work, Sammy. And they help us all when they do.

And Wade very much wants that too. I worked with him for 16 months. We exchanged hundreds of e-mails. He told me that he wants that at many different times and in many different ways. Nothing could be more clear.

I know that we will all be in a better place when I can go to any discussion board or blog on the internet and post with 100 percent honestly and not have any concern whatsoever that intimidation tactics will be directed at me. We all do our best work when we feel free to follow our ideas where they lead us as we further develop them. Is that not so?

I want that for everyone. I want it for Bogle. I want it for Shiller. I want it for Pfau. Heck — I want it for you, Sammy! I have learned from you on numerous occasions. I want to learn more from you. Once you no longer feel a need to cover things up, you are going to feel free to say all kinds of things that you do not feel safe to reveal today.

I once recorded a podcast where I talked about my vision for the future of investing analysis. One thing I mentioned in that podcast is that I would like to see Money magazine have a ten-part series of cover stories focused on an “I Was Wrong” theme. Bogle could write one. And Bernstein. And Carl Richards. And Michael Kitces. I would write one. I have been wrong about some things. I think people might well learn more by me writing about things that I have gotten wrong than they would by hearing me push my views on SWRs one more boring time. No?

We permit (and even encourage!) honest posting in all fields other than stock investing. We all should be taking a step back and asking ourselves why the investing field is so different. It’s not that honesty is less important in this field. It’s that honesty is MORE important in this field.

Say that a bicycle manufacturer uses a new kind of metal to make bikes for the purpose of making them more lightweight but that in reality for some reason using the new metal made the bikes heavier. That’s a mistake, right? The company needs to fix that, right? So they do. It’s not a mistake that ruins millions of lives. So the people who make that kind of mistake feel comfortable acknowledging the mistake and thereby moving on to better things.

The problem in the investing field is that mistakes have devastating consequences. Get the safe withdrawal rate wrong and millions of people suffer failed retirements. Yikes! That’s why we have seen a cover-up of the errors in the Old School studies. Also, the errors that we make in the investing field are not revealed in practical terms for a good number of years. People don’t see their retirements fail immediately. It can take as long as 10 years before they even begin to see negative consequences. And the first negative consequences might not be that dramatic. It can take a long time indeed before people see in the flesh-and-blood world why it is so critical to always, always,always take valuations into consideration when putting together a retirement plan.

I don’t have anything to take up with my good friend Wade. We don’t agree on every little question. But we agree on 90 percent of the stuff that matters. The most important thing that we agree on is that academic researchers should not be intimidated into silence when they do powerfully important research that would help millions of people if it were featured on the front page of the New York Times. Wade was so excited about the research that we co-authored that he told me he could hardly sleep some nights during the months that we were putting it together. He told me that he had visions of winning a Nobel prize. And i think he will indeed win a Nobel prize in the end. His prize has been delayed, not cancelled.

Wade doesn’t speak to me today. But we sure will be speaking on a daily basis once he wins that Nobel prize! I am pretty darn sure of that. And he will be thrilled that I sent out the 30,000 e-mails when we all get to the other side of The Big Black Mountain. Wade and I are on the same side just as Bogle and I are on the same side and just as, ultimately, Sammy and I are on the same side. We all want the same things, Sammy.

We all need to work together to bring this intimidation stuff to an end. We cannot do our best work for so long as we are afraid of what will be done to us if we state clearly and firmly and simply what we have learned about stock investing from the last 34 years of peer-reviewed research in this field. We are on the one-yard line today. We are almost there. But not quite. We all need to hang in there and remain optimistic.

That’s my sincere take re this terribly important matter in any event, my old friend.

Rob

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

Buy, hold and rebalance is certainly a lot better than your plan, Rob, given your failed retirement and overall lack of success.

Your comment evidences emotion, Sammy.

If you were confident that Buy-and-Hold works, you wouldn’t car whether my retirement failed or not. You obviously care a great deal. You are not confident. You WANT to believe in Buy-and-Hold with your entire heart, mind and soul. But you can’t quite pull it off. So you lash out as those who encourage your doubts.

Shiller showed us that is it primarily INVESTOR EMOTION that determines stock prices, not economic developments. So we all need to make a switch to talking primarily about investor emotion, not interest rates and new products and management ability and all the other things that most people in this field write about today. We should be looking for signs of emotion and then trying to explain them.

There are TONS of signs of emotion in Buy-and-Hold communities. But people don’t write about them. They act as if this sort of thing is normal. I sure don’t think it is normal. But even I hold back sometimes because the new way of understanding how stock investing works shocks people accustomed to the old way. This is a transition that can only be achieved gradually over time.

I don’t think that Buy-and-Hold ever works for anyone. I think it is an unmitigated disaster. But so what? You believe in it. Why do you care what I think?

You obviously care deeply. That’s the problem. That’s the emotion that is driving today’s insanely high stock prices. That’s the emotion that today’s P/E10 level is trying to warn us about. The difference between me and you is that I think that we should be listening to that warning and you cannot bear the thought of doing so. That’s why you dislike me so.

I was a Buy-and-Holder myself until the evening of August 27, 2002. It was on that evening when a poster at a discussion board (a fellow who had been a good friend of mine until then) threatened to kill my wife and children if I continued posting honestly re the errors in the Old School safe-withdrawal-rate studies (these studies do not contain an adjustment for the valuation level that applies on the day the retirement begins). That amazed me. What amazed me even more was that 200 of our fellow community members endorsed his post (50 endorsed a post saying that the tactics being employed by the Buy-and-Holders were so sub-human that the board should be shut down). That told me what I needed to know about Buy-and-Hold to know that I wanted nothing more to do with it, that the days of rationalization had to come to an end

That’s where I stand, Sammy. I wish the best for you. But I don’t think that Buy-and-Hold is the answer. I think that it is hurting lots of people. I need to tell my readers that. I love my many Buy-and-Hold friends and I will always tell the story in the most charitable way that I can think to tell it. But I feel strongly that I am leaving out something important if I leave out how emotional the Buy-and-Holders become when their ideas are challenged.

It is that emotion that tells me that the Buy-and-Holders are on the wrong track. I don’t think the Buy-and-Holders are bad people or dumb people. I think that they are very smart and I think that we all owe them our respect and gratitude for all the powerful and genuine insights that they have advanced. But I also believe that they are on the wrong track re the valuations question and that their emotion shows that even they realize that on some deep level of consciousness.

I think we all need to be talking about that.

Rob

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

“I intend to take over control of the Bogleheads Forum and set it up here as a sub-domain.”

The owners of the Bogleheads forum will not sell or give you the forum.

They are not going to give it to me today, Evidence. I think that much is more than fair to say.

I am talking about after the next crash. The next crash changes things.

You have to come to an understanding of some basic realities to figure out where things are headed.

I do not believe that the current owners of the Bogleheads Forum are bad people. And I certainly do not think that they are dumb people. I think that they are smart and good people. Okay? That’s my core premise. Everything else I say follows from that belief.

I believe that the owners of the Bogleheads Forum are wrong about the need for price discipline (long-term timing) when buying stocks. Smart and good people sometimes get things wrong, no? That’s what I believe has happened here.

Those smart and good people suspect that they may be wrong re price discipline (long-term timing). They are not sure that they are wrong. In fact, they still follow Buy-and-Hold strategies themselves. So I think it would be fair to say that they think it more likely than not that following Buy-and-Hold strategies will produce good long-term results. They are sincere in their advocacy of Buy-and-Hold. But they are not without inner doubts. That’s why we have seen so much friction. Their doubts trouble them. They very, very much want to silence those doubts. And this Rob Bennett fellow won’t shut the heck up about them. That’s why they are not so crazy in love with this Rob Bennett fellow at this particular moment in time.

What happens after the crash?

After the crash, the floodgates open. People will give up their feelings of embarrassment and shame and become determined to get things back on the right track. It won’t just be the Valuation-Informed Indexers who will do that. It will be the Buy-and-Holders doing that too. We are all on the same side. We are all in this together. We all need to know the realities of stock investing. After we experience the next crash, we are going to see that. Everything is going to change. The Buy-and-Holders did not intend to cause the Second Great Depression and, when they see that that is where we are headed, they are going to change their behavior in whatever ways are required to pull us back to a good place.

At that point the owners of the Bogleheads Forum are not going to be resisting my efforts to take over the forum. They are going to be encouraging them. They are going to be asking me to take over the forum. We are going to be friends. We are all in this together. We all want the same things. There is no reason why we shouldn’t be friends. It makes no sense to play it any other way.

I say that I am going to take over the forum because I am trying to help.

Say that we open every investing board and blog on the internet to honest posting following the crash. That’s going to be a huge step. But we are not instantly going to know the answer to every possible question. There are questions that I have not been able to answer in these 13 years. There are almost without a doubt things that I have gotten wrong. There are questions that have not even occurred to me. We are going to need to be exploring all those questions.

The Valuation-Informed Indexers cannot do the job alone. We need the Buy-and-Holders helping us out. The Buy-and-Holders have different beliefs and different life experiences. We need to add those to the mix to make sense of things. I am uniquely qualified to run a board that permits and encourages honest posting from both sides. I have been arguing for 13 years that the Valuation-Informed Indexers must be permitted to post honestly. But I have for that entire time-period also made a point that the Buy-and-Holders must be permitted and encouraged to post their honest views. I am the only one who can say that, Evidence. It’s not my intent to brag. I am just explaining where things stand re this matter.

When we are speaking as friends, we will be able to talk about all sorts of questions in a very different spirit. It could be that we will all participate in a discussion in which it would become evident that I am not the best person to run the board. Perhaps I will be too busy with other things or something. If that happens, we will make a different decision. Good for us! We will do what we think is right. What else can we do?

The point that I am making when I say that it is my intent to take over the Bogleheads Forum is that I think that the board community there must be permitted to work its will. The board community has made clear on numerous occasions that it wants honest posting to be permitted. It is an act of financial fraud for the current owners to reject that 100 percent proper demand. When honest posting is banned, the board becomes a corrupt enterprise. That must change. That will change. That’s the point.

Once the owners of that board committed financial fraud, they set a trap for themselves that they cannot escape. I have been trying to help them out to the extent that they can be helped. I will continue to do that. I cannot force them to help themselves. If they are bound and determined to completely destroy themselves, I guess we are going to see them completely destroy themselves.

But you are never going to see me endorse their acts of self-destruction. I want to help in any way that I can. I want to help the owners of the board. And I want to help the board community to which they have done so much harm. That’s where I am coming from and that’s why I have formed an intent to take over that board following the next price crash. When I take over operation of the Bogleheads Forum, I help every single person involved. I naturally want to do that. So I intend to pursue that goal with a good bit of determination.

I hope that helps you to understand things a little bit better.

I naturally wish you all the good things that this life has to offer a person.

Rob

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

Why is it that you are the only one banned at so many of these sites? The problem seems to be you.

You are asking a great question, Anonymous. But the correct answer is the opposite of the one you have suggested.

I have insisted on recognition of my right to post honestly re what the peer-reviewed research tells us about how stock investing works. Honest interaction is the norm in every other field of human endeavor. Honesty in communication is an entirely good thing, there is nothing bad about it whatsoever. It is the condemnation of honesty that is considered a negative in every other field of human endeavor. It is not my demand that my right to post honestly be recognized that is the problem. It is the demand of Buy-and-Holders that honest posting re the peer-reviewed research be banned at every site that is the source of all our problems (the economic crisis, the difficulty that many feel about being able to finance safe retirements, the destruction of so many board communities, your prison sentence, and on and on).

I was a Buy-and-Holder on the morning of May 13, 2002. I obviously don’t have any bias against the strategy, right? I rank Jack Bogle as the second most important investment advisor in history. I certainly did not start out with any negative feelings re the man, right? Yet today I describe Buy-and-Hold as “smelly Get Rich Quick garbage” and say that Bogle is guilty of an act of financial fraud 500 times worse than that committed by Bernie Madoff. What the heck happened to bring about such a change in assessments? Is that not a good question?

The short answer is that John Greaney threatened to kill my wife and two children if I continued to post honestly re the errors he made in his retirement study. It was on the day that he put forward his first death threats (August 27, 2002) that I stopped believing in Buy-and-Hold. Everything else followed from that. Once I stopped believing in Buy-and-Hold, I naturally needed to figure out what really works. Every article and podcast and calculator that I have produced in the time since was rooted in that determination that Buy-and-Hold was a dead end.

It wasn’t just what Greaney did that caused me to give up my belief in this strategy. By itself, Greaney’s bad behavior was not so shocking a thing. There have always been people who behaved poorly. What was shocking was how many Buy-and-Holders endorsed Greaney’s behavior. There were about 50 members of the Motley Fool community who said they could not tolerate threats of physical violence. None of those 50 ended up doing much to show that their opposition to those acts was serious. They said that they were going to start notifying Motley Fool of all abusive posts and perhaps they did so for a day or two and then they went right back to engaging in normal interactions with you Goons. And over 200 community members endorsed one of Greaney’s posts bragging about the threats of physical violence. Huh?

There is nothing rational in the support for Buy-and-Hold. This is what I learned.

Buy-and-Hold started in rationality. Eugene Fama is a highly respected researcher. He is real and Buy-and-Hold started in his research. But something went haywire somewhere. The Greaney study is not real. The means by which Buy-and-Holders have supported that study are not real. What happened? How do we explain how something so real became so corrupted?

It was all a mistake, Anonymous.

Fama showed something important. He showed that short-term timing does not work. That is huge. It is the second most important finding in the history of personal finance.

The mistake was in how Fama reported his finding. He didn’t say: “Short-term timing doesn’t work.” He said: “Timing doesn’t work.” That is false. Fama never even looked at long-term timing. Shiller was the first researcher to look at long-term timing. He found that it always works and that it is always 100 percent required. Long-term timing is price discipline. All markets run on price discipline. Without price discipline, a market will become dysfunctional. We MUST have price discipline in the stock market, we must encourage all investors to practice price discipline at all times. Because of Fama’s mistake, we started DISCOURAGING the exercise of price discipline. We took our amazing good fortune and transformed it in amazing bad fortune by misunderstanding in a tragic and epic way what Fama had discovered.

I didn’t know any of this on the morning of May 13, 2002. It was the reaction to my famous post (which of course was 100 percent correct — Greaney’s study really does not contain an adjustment for the valuation level that applies on the day the retirement begins) that showed me that there was something very, very messed up about Buy-and-Hold. I continued to interact with you Goons and with lots of Normals too to figure out what that something was. Now I know. The problem with Buy-and-Hold is that it is rooted in a terrible mistake. The entire historical record shows that price discipline is the key to long-term investing success and the Buy-and-Holders have staked their lives on the opposite belief, that long-term timing might not always be 100 percent required or even that long-term timing might in some circumstances be a bad thing.

In ordinary circumstances, everyone would rejoice at my discovery. We all want to become effective investors. The Buy-and-Holders are good and smart people. So they corrected all of their books and calculators and podcasts when I reported the realities to them and they thanked me profusely for helping them to get back on the right track, right?

No!

It didn’t play out that way!

Investing is no small thing. It is of huge importance to millions of people.

So when mistakes are made in this field, the people who made them become insanely defensive. They cannot bear to think that they have hurt so many human beings in such serious ways. And of course they don’t like the idea of being sued either. So the Buy-and-Holders went into cover-up mode when Shiller discovered Fama’s error in 1981. More and more evidence came in that Buy-and-Hold was rooted in error and the Buy-and-Holders became more and more abusive. And then they became insanely abusive and even started engaging in criminal behavior to keep the millions of middle-class investors from learning about the peer-reviewed research showing their mistake.

When I came on the scene in 2002, all this had already being going on for 21 years. I didn’t know. And you Goons didn’t really know either. I knew that we all needed to learn how stock investing works. And you knew that the Buy-and-Hold strategy you followed and advocated was deeply flawed and that permitting honest discussion of its flaws was likely going to lead to great embarrassment for you. The internet is a highly open communications medium. So you didn’t have many options when it came to keeping the cover-up going. And of course I showed precisely zero willingness to stop talking when you dropped hints that you would destroy me if I didn’t shut up. So you came back with death threats and defamation and board bannings and all the rest.

Everything that has happened for the past 13 years is out of line for the United States of America, Anonymous. We are a free country and we are a country that owes its economic success to a love of progress. Shiller’s finding (combined with the findings of the Buy-and-Holders that have stood the test of time) represents the biggest advance in the history of personal finance. The research that I co-authored with Wade Pfau shows us all how to reduce the risk of stock investing by 70 percent while permitting us all to retire five to ten years sooner than we ever before imagined possible. We are on the verge of seeing the greatest economic advance in our history. All of the comments that Wade put forward when he discovered these realities with me are rooted in a solid appreciation that we are part of the luckiest generation of investors who ever walked Planet Earth.

There’s only one problem.

If this were 1964, there would be a universal celebration of our good fortune. We would all be working together to spread the word about Valuation-Informed Indexing to every investor on the planet.

But it’s not 1964. In the past 50 years, hundreds of thousands of financial advisors have built businesses rooted in a belief in Buy-and-Hold, the opposite in every way to what works. Those people don’t want millions learning what works. They have a very strong personal interest in blocking people from learning what works.

What to do, what to do?

We have to move forward. Buy-and-Hold is pure poison. It has caused an economic crisis on every occasion in history in which it has become popular. The stock market is bigger now than it has ever been before. So we are looking at a bigger economic crisis than the three earlier ones caused by the promotion of Buy-and-Hold strategies. We are looking at something worse than the First Great Depression. That’s not good.

Or we are looking at the greatest surge of economic growth that we have ever seen in our history. That’s very good indeed.

Those are the two choices that stand before us today.

No, I am not the problem. Honest posting about the last 34 years of peer-reviewed research is not the problem.

The problem is the criminal acts of the Buy-and-Holders.

Were the Buy-and-Holders not looking at prison sentences, they would be happy to help me spread the word re what works. There are huge amounts of money to be made here. And of course the Buy-and-Holders are good people who want to help other people. So this should be so easy.

What makes it so hard is that the Buy-and-Holders have been suffering from cognitive dissonance for many years now and they cannot bear to come clean re their big mistake. They do not want people talking about the mistake. It causes them great emotional pain for such conversations to take place.

They cannot overcome their cognitive dissonance re these matters without participating in a national debate re the implications of the past 34 years of peer-reviewed research. There is nothing that I can say that by itself will convince you. You need to hear Bogle speak honestly re his beliefs re these matters. And Shiller. And Pfau. And on and on and on and on and on. That’s the only thing that will work.

But none of these people want to be sued or to be embarrassed or to go to prison. So there is great opposition to the launching of the debate that would do us all so much good.

That’s the rub.

If I had the power to release you all of your prison terms and your civil-suit liabilities and your various embarrassments, I would do it in two seconds in exchange for your willingness to permit the national debate that thousands of our fellow community members have evidenced a desire to see proceed. But I obviously do not have that power.

So I have to go about things though other means. I need to make you and others aware of the crimes that you are committing on a daily basis. And, when I have 10 people who have the courage to stand up to your insane abusiveness, I need to persuade them to attack the problem in a balanced way. The balanced way is described in the motto that guides my every post — To be as honest as possible without crossing the line and becoming uncharitable while also being as charitable as possible without crossing the line and becoming dishonest.

I am trying to help you. I am trying to solve the problem. I have zero desire to hurt you in any way. But we MUST have this debate. This is not optional. It is 100 percent imperative.

That’s the story.

I am not the problem. I am trying to SOLVE a problem that had developed unbeknownst to me long before I even came on the scene.

I hope that helps a bit.

Rob

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

“No, the internet didn’t exist. But the same tactics were being employed in the pre-internet days.”

Can you please supply even one piece of evidence that supports this fantasy?

The most obvious piece of evidence is that most investment advisors were not warning people of the dangers of Buy-and-Hold in those days, Laugh.

Buy-and-Hold was a legitimate belief once upon a time just as once upon a time there was a legitimate belief that the earth was flat. If you don’t know any better, the idea that the earth is flat seems to make sense. You look around you and, as far as you can tell, the earth is flat. But at some point in the history of humankind, we learned that, no, what appears to be so is not indeed so — the earth is actually round.

Do you think that everyone switched from believing that the earth is round to believing that the earth is flat in one day? I do not. I wasn’t there. But my strong hunch is that it took a good number of years for this exciting news to “take” with most people. People who had learned the truth spoke up at the dinner table and said: “You know, it now appears that the earth is actually flat, not round.” And the people eating with them said “sure it is” or “huh?” or “that can’t be!” or “you must have forgotten to take your meds” or “who do you think you are, challenging what all the experts on this subject know to be true?” or “what a perfectly dangerous idea!” and on and on and on and on.

People don’t accept changes in fundamental beliefs in one day or one week or one year. It takes a long time for powerful new ideas to sink in. The finding that being willing to exercise price discipline when buying stocks is 80 percent of the investing project is the most important finding in the history of investing analysis. So no one should have been surprised that Shiller’s “revolutionary” (his word) finding was not universally accepted within 24 hours of the time his peer-reviewed research was published.

But 34 years? Huh?

What do you think happened, Laugh?

I don’t know what date you want to use as the date that the internet started. If you go from the date in 1981 that Shiller published his research showing that there is zero chance that a Buy-and-Hold strategy could ever work for a single long-term investor, it’s a lot less than 34 years. But it’s a good amount of time. How do you explain why Valuation-Informed Indexing did not take over the world in that amount of time?

Have you stopped to think how much money there is to be made by being one of the first to promote the first true research-based investing strategy? The $500 million that will be coming to me in my settlement is just the beginning. There will be hundreds of people who will become multi-millionaires by being the first to show millions of middle-class investors how to retire many years sooner while reducing the risk of stock investing by 70 percent. There were many millionaires made during the early years of computers and the internet. These advances in the investing realm are 100 times more important. Stock investing is how people achieve financial freedom — you can’t get more important than that in a capitalist society. We are going to have hundreds if not thousands of new Bill Gateses and Steve Jobses once we open the internet to honest posting on the implications of Shiller’s findings. What is your explanation for why we have not had thousands of people step forward to claim that money?

It’s not only the intimidation tactics of the Buy-and-Holders that have caused the delay. There is real cognitive dissonance in play here too. The Post Archives show that. But it is not only cognitive dissonance causing the problem. We have seen at board after board after board that most people LOVE learning the realities of stock investing. We have seen that going back to the first day. So there is no way that this could have been hushed up in all those pre-internet years without a lot of funny business going on. There were threats of career destruction then too. It’s human nature for people making lots of money (and the Buy-and-Holders have made HUGE amounts of money!) to protect the turf that permits them to make that money. To argue that there wasn’t funny business going on in the pre-internet days is silly.

It doesn’t matter all that much. If the Buy-and-Holders want to say that the corrupt stuff started on the morning of May 13, 2002, they can say that. My strong hunch is that Shiller will be coming out with a book-length description of the intimidation tactics that were directed at him in those days once he feels safe in telling the true and full story. But if we never find out about all the ugly stuff that went on in pre-internet days, does it really matter? We sure don’t have to look hard to find out what happened in post-internet days. We have hundreds of thousands of time-stamped posts explaining in great detail and in great depth precisely how the Buy-and-Holders used their wealth and power to crush those who tried to do honest work in this field. So we know what the story is. There’s zero reason to believe that things were proceeding on an entirely different track in the days before the internet was around. I mean, come on.

Humans are humans, Laugh. Humans go on the attack when they feel threatened. Valuation-Informed Indexing is a huge advance. So it constitutes a huge threat to those pushing the opposite strategy, the purest and most dangerous Get Rich Quick strategy ever concocted by the human mind (that’s obviously in contrast to VII, which is the first true research-based strategy). So the Buy-and-Holders responded with felonious behavior when they saw that their cash cow was about to go down. Gee, what a surprise! Whoever would have thought that humans could respond in such a way to losing their livelihoods? Has anything like this ever happened before? Some of this stuff is so darn hard to figure out!

There’s a reason why as a society we adopted laws making financial fraud a felony, a crime calling for the imposition of prison sentences. The behavior we have seen over the past 13 years is behavior that has been going on since the beginning of time. This is the worst example of it. The promotion of Buy-and-Hold in the 34 years since the peer-reviewed research showed that there is precisely zero chance that it could ever work for a single long-term investor has caused more human misery that any earlier finance-related crime in the history of humankind. But the basic story here is not a new one. We have seen this general story play out over and over and over and over again. That’s why we enacted laws to protect ourselves from the sorts of individuals who have put up posts in “defense” of Mel Linduaer and John Greaney and Jack Bogle. D’oh!

Do you know why this particular act of financial fraud has been so massive in scope?

It’s because the advance is so massive and life-affirming!

The stronger the appeal of the challenge to the conventional thinking is, the more brutal are the intimidation tactics that will be used to silence those seeking to spread the word re the new idea. VII is the biggest advance we have ever seen in this field by a factor of 500. So the brutality we have coming from the other side has been off the charts, worse than anything we have ever seen before in this country by a factor of 500.

The good news is that things end up in the same place — we put some in prison, we bring civil actions against a much larger number, those who lead the opposition to the discredited idea become wealthy beyond their wildest dreams and the entire society forges forward in a very, very big way, We all live better lives for many years to come. Good for us!

There was funny business going on prior to the introduction of the internet on the scene, Laugh. I am sure of it. I can’t document much of it because I was not around. But I can document everything that has happened since the morning of May 13, 2002, in great detail. That’s the documentation we need to tell this story in a full and clear and understandable way to the millions of middle-class investors who need to come to terms with why they are in the process of losing most of their life savings. The Post Archives available to us today get the job that needs to be done here done well. So we are set.

I wish you all the best that this life has to offer a person.

Rob

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

Your problem is with Shiller. Take it up with him. Maybe if you threaten him with prison, it might make him do what you want since that threat has worked so well for you in the past.

My problem isn’t with Shiller, Anonymous. My problem is with financial fraud. It’s a violation of the laws of the United States. It’s a felony. That means prison time. Going to prison is not on my bucket list. So I am 100 percent unwilling even to consider going there. Do you see?

I like your second sentence A LOT. That one is right on point.

Shiller doesn’t want to go to prison. Neither does Bogle. Neither does Pfau. Neither do you. But all these people have committed financial fraud by failing to speak up against the 13-year cover-up. I get it that they don’t want to go to prison. I don’t either. So I sympathize 100 percent. What the heck am I supposed to do about it?

If there were a way to get this done without people going to prison, I would be all for it. We could adopt an amnesty. That makes some sense in these circumstances. I don’t oppose that. If Bogle comes to me with an offer where everyone who has posted in defense of Linduaer and Greaney and Bogle gets off in return for an opening of the entire internet to honest posting re the last 34 years of peer-reviewed research, I would sign that deal in ten seconds. Why the heck wouldn’t I? What possible motivation would I have not to sign?

The problem is that I don’t have the power to bind the millions of middle-class investors whose lives have been destroyed by the 13-year cover-up. I don’t have the authority to sign that piece of paper and have it stick. So what do you want from me?

This situation is a big mess. The Buy-and-Holders tried to do something very good. They did indeed achieve a good number of amazing breakthroughs. They got one point wrong for perfectly understandable reasons. When the error was discovered, they went into a state of shock. They couldn’t believe that they messed up. Part of the reason why it shocked them so much is that their intent was to do good and it horrified them to think that they had hurt people they were trying to help. So they went into cover-up mode. The longer the cover-up continued, the harder it became to come clean. Things eventually reached a point where their mountain of lies caused the worst economic crisis in U.S. history. Now they really don’t want to come clean.

I feel bad for them. I LOVE the Buy-and-Holders. I have respect for them. I have affection for them. I am grateful for all that I have learned from them. I obviously could not have even begun to do all the important work that I have done over the past 13 years without first having learned all the wonderful stuff that I learned from my Buy-and-Hold friends.

Now –

What the heck do you want from me?

If you want me to endorse an amnesty, I will do it. But guess what? My endorsement is not going to have much effect because you have for 13 years threatened to destroy anyone who associates with me and the result is that there won’t be many people spreading the word about my call for an amnesty. You have placed yourself in this crazy situation where you will be going to prison for a long time following the next price crash. I have been fighting you every step of the way. I have been fighting HARD.

Please tell me what you want from me.

I have offered to put forward some words aimed at getting your prison sentence reduced a bit.

Is there something else?

Rob

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

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-06-08/u-s-stocks-on-wrong-side-of-history-with-rate-increase-in-sight?cmpid=yhoo

So the next stock market drop will be blamed on higher interest rates and not on goons or buy and hold.

I guess we won’t see anyone going to prison and you will have to do without your $500 million. Better cancel your order for the new Porsche.

You are accurately describing the game that the Buy-and-Holders have been playing for a long time now, Anonymous. They take credit for anything that happens that is good and they blame others for anything that happens that is bad. When Taylor Larimore is able to buy a house with the Pretend Money he gets from following a Buy-and-Hold strategy, he calls it “The House that Jack Built.” But when we see the economic crisis that inevitably follows from the widespread promotion of this strategy, he does not refer to it as “The Economic Crisis That Jack Built.” Heads, the Buy-and-Holders win. Tails, everybody but the Buy-and-Holders lose.

Your suggestion is that everyone will continue to permit the Buy-and-Holders to get away with such nonsense. I don’t buy it.

My personal belief is that even the Buy-and-Holders won’t permit themselves to get away with such nonsense following the next crash. The Buy-and-Holders are not bad people. They did not INTEND to cause an economic criss. They did. It happened. There is 34 years of peer-reviewed research showing why we always experience an economic crisis when large numbers of people are persuaded that Buy-and-Hold strategies can work in the real world. So the Buy-and-Holders messed up big time. But I have not seen any evidence that they INTENDED all this bad stuff. I have been studying this stuff for a long time and it is my strong impression that the Buy-and-Holders did NOT intend all this bad stuff and that they are on one level of consciousness horrified to see it playing out.

Do you see?

We are not on different sides. We are on the same side. Even you Goons did not intend all this bad stuff. So even you Goons are going to want to set things right following the next crash. Then of course we all have no problem. From that point forward, it is good stuff piled on top of good stuff piled on top of good stuff. For ALL of us. Valuation-Inforrmed Indexers and Buy-and-Holders alike.

Humans respond to incentives. If you want people to perform good acts, you reward them for them. If you want people to avoid performing bad acts, you penalize them. That’s how we do it in every field of human endeavor other than investing analysis. With investing analysis we encourage advisors to perform bad acts (to say that price discipline is not always 100 percent required) and we discourage advisors from performing good acts (to always point out that it is essential to exercise price discipline). Why the heck do we do that? Why are all the rules that apply in every other field of human endeavor turned on their heads in the investing advice field? That’s the question that we all need to come to terms with to be able to bring this economic crisis to an end and move on to the greatest period of economic growth in our history.

It’s not because getting investment advice right doesn’t matter. It’s because getting investment advice right matters so darn much. If investing advice didn’t matter that much, the Buy-and-Holders would have corrected their error when it was discovered in 1981. They would have said “sorry” and moved on to giving better advice and no one would have been upset and that would have been the end of it.

The reason why it didn’t happen that way is because it is a very big deal when someone gives bad advice on how to finance a retirement plan. People cannot fix their retirement plans when they go bust. They are too old to start over and earn all the money they need for retirement a second time. So it is very, very, very hard for the Buy-and-Holders to acknowledge their mistake. The mistake has had devastating consequences. We all need to keep that in mind when we are trying to persuade them to come clean.

And we need to keep in mind that this was so in a smaller way way back in 1981. The Buy-and-Holders were excited about their own discoveries, which they believed were taking us all to a very good place. Shiller’s 1981 research discredited the corner-stone on which the entire Buy-and-Hold strategy was built. The Buy-and-Holders were horrified to think that they had been giving dangerous advice. They became defensive. They went into cover-up mode. Not because they are bad or stupid. Because they care about their readers and clients and possess a sincere desire to help them and because they could not bear to think that they were hurting the people they thought they were helping.

Do you see, Anonymous?

This didn’t start out as financial fraud. It started out as a sincere effort to do wonderful things. And, indeed, many of the things the Buy-and-Holders did really were wonderful. Part of the answer here is making that point over and over and over again. The more we make the Buy-and-Holders feel good about all of their very real and important contributions, the less defensive they feel and the more willing they become to come clean about the issue (valuations) re which they messed up.

You are suggesting that they will never come clean, that the Buy-and-Holders are 100 percent corrupt and that they will continue to use their power and wealth and connections to destroy anyone who dares to “cross” them by posting honestly re any important investment-related question. I don’t see it. I believe that you are wrong. I believe that the Buy-and-Holders are going to come clean and that we all are going to make it safely to the other side of the big black mountain and that in coming days we all will be achieving financial freedom many years sooner than we ever imagined possible back in the days when we were collectively ignorant of the realities of stock investing.

The Buy-and-Holders have blocked the learning process that we all need to see take place for far, far longer than I imagined possible. I will give you that one. It is my job to figure out WHY that is so. I do not believe that it is because the Buy-and-Holders are corrupt through and through. It would take a long time for me to put forward all the reasons why I am convinced that that is not so. If you ask for me details, I will give them. But I cannot spell it all out in a single post. What I will say here is that I am personally persuaded that the Buy-and-Holders started out with good intent and generally possess good intent right up to the current day. That’s an important part of the story.

The people who now run the Bogleheads Forum used to refer to themselves as “Vanguard Diehards” back when their board was run from the Morningstar site. Does that mean that they were evil? It does not. It means that they really, really, really believed in what they were saying. Being a “diehard” is a bad thing when it means that you are arrogant and not willing to listen to other points of view. Being diehards has gotten these people in a lot of trouble and caused millions of people to suffer serious financial harm. But the feeling that caused these people to become “diehards” was a positive one. THE BUY-AND-HOLDERS WANT TO HELP PEOPLE! Good! That’s wonderful!

We need to take this positive energy and turn it to positive purposes.

Do you see?

The Buy-and-Holders want to help people. They know all about the laws of the United States. We need to persuade them that they need to FOLLOW those laws. You can’t commit felonies just because you are a “diehard.” That’s 100 percent unacceptable. So they need to rein in this impulse they have to lash out at anyone who talks about the implications of the last 34 years of peer-reviewed research in this field. The financial fraud stuff is 100 percent unacceptable. But the other stuff is great. The fact that the Buy-and-Holders want to help people is great. They fact that they care so much is great. The fact that they have so much energy and determination is great.

You are suggesting that the energy that the Buy-and-Holders have been putting to negative purposes for 13 years now can never be put to positive purposes. I just don’t buy it. If the Buy-and-Holders were bad people, I might buy it. But they aren’t! They are good people. They are smart people. They want to help. They are determined. That’s good. That’s what we want. So long as they don’t take the diehard part so far that they are committing felonies under the laws of the freakin’ United States.

I don’t buy into any of your negative scenarios, Anonymous. That’s all just garbage Goon talk.

I of course get it that bad stuff has happened. But the root realities here are 50 times more good than they are bad. We are going to get things on the right track. It might well take another price crash to get us there. But I am firmly convinced that we are going to get things to a positive place. I am sure.

Do you know who taught me what I needed to know to see that Greaney’s retirement study got the numbers wildly wrong?

It was John Freakin’ Bogle! It was by reading Bogle’s book that I figured out what I needed to know to take Greaney on.

What a terrible, terrible person that Jack Bogle is! How horrible that he helped us all learn how to calculate safe withdrawal rates properly and by doing so opened the door to hundreds of additional powerful insights that we have developed together over the course of the past 13 years!

You see things though a Goon perspective. I do not. You see only negative stuff. I see tons and tons and tons of positive stuff, enough positive stuff to make us the luckiest generation of stock investors ever to walk Planet Earth.

We are headed to a good place. Bogle is going to come clean. So are all the rest of the Wall Street Con Men. So are you Goons.

I am sure.

Hang in there, man. It gets better. A LOT better.

Rob

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

So which of the Vanguard funds and underlying securities are run as a Ponzi scheme similar to Bernie Madoff?

They all are. Every last one of them.

That’s like asking: “How many of the soda fountains in the pre-Civil Rights South discriminated against blacks?” They all did. Every last one of them.

The reason why the answer is the same in both cases is that the underlying dynamic is the same in both cases.

There was no justification for discrimination against people with black skin. There was an historical explanation of the phenomenon. But there was no justification that made sense to people in the years just before the Civil Rights Revolution took place. For anyone to practice racial discrimination, everyone had to do so.

There were soda-fountain owners who did not want to practice racial discrimination. It was made clear to them what would happen to them if they failed to do so. If one soda-fountain owner treated blacks fairly, it made all the soda-fountain owners who did not do so look very, very bad. So a Social Taboo was created prohibiting fair treatment of blacks.

Not everyone believed in racial discrimination. But everyone practiced it. That was so by definition. If you didn’t practice racial discrimination in the pre-Civil Rights South, you were removed from the society. So, once again, everyone in the society practiced racial discrimination. The practice was too horrible to survive unless it was universally practiced (and therefore never challenged).

That’s where things stand today with Buy-and-Hold.

There has never been a sliver of support in the peer-reviewed research for this smelly Get Rich Quick garbage. It is impossible for the rational human mind to imagine how there ever could be a sliver of support. So to keep it going, we must force everyone to pretend to believe in it. The day Buy-and-Hold is subject to questioning in the same way that every other idea is subject to questioning in our society is the day that Buy-and-Hold falls.

How can an “idea” survive when it is plainly absurd (the claim that price discipline is not required in the stock market is the OPPOSITE of what is true in every other market — price discipline is the thing that makes every other market work!) and 100 percent at odds with all of the peer-reviewed research available. Huh?

For Buy-and-Hold to survive, everyone must pretend to believe in an absurdity. There is 34 years of peer-reviewed research showing us all that Buy-and-Hold is dangerous as all get-out. So in ordinary circumstances we would all move on to better things (Valuation-Informed Indexing). The problem is the 34-year cover-up. If as a society we permit honest posting re what works with stock investing, lots of wealthy and powerful people will be going to prison for a long time. They don’t want to go to prison. So they are using their power and wealth to keep the cover-up going another day, another week, another month, another year.

The problem with that strategy is that each day the cover-up remains in place we destroy thousands of additional middle-class lives. That means that the anger will be even greater following the next price crash. And that means that the prison sentences for those who continued to advocate Buy-and-Hold with 34 years of peer-reviewed research showing that there is precisely zero chance that it could ever work for even a single long-term investor grow even longer. Not good.

My job is to help BOTH the millions of middle-class investors AND the Wall Street Con Men. By exposing this massive act of financial fraud, we let the millions of middle-class investors learn about the first true research-based strategy. At the same time, we shorten the prison sentences for the Wall Street Con Men and for the members of their Internet Goon Squads. Pretty darn cool trick, huh?

I sure think so.

I wish you all the best that life has to offer a person, Anonymous.

Rob