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

Still waiting for even one of the “thousands” to come post over here in support of you…….hmmmmmmm……wonder why they won’t post here, even though it is anonymous?

There’s a social taboo against telling the truth about stock investing, Anonymous. You Goons are enforcers of the social taboo. But it exists without you. It exists within people’s minds. Whether other people know that they violated the taboo or not, THEY know it. They don’t feel comfortable going outside where the hive mind permits them to go.

A bull market is a highly delicate thing. The entire thing is just an emotional fantasy. One person could talk about the realities and it could all collapse. This is why the television interviewer warned Shiller before their interview to be careful what he said, he could cause prices to drop. She was right. But what she was missing was that it would be a good thing if prices dropped because that would bring them closer to reflecting the realities. In her mind, the idea was not to do that, the idea was to keep the blinders on.

To live better lives, we all need to come to understand that it is better to take the blinders off. It’s scary to be one of the first to speak up. I want things to get to a point where no one is afraid anymore, where people just say what they truly believe, just as they do in all fields of human endeavor other than the investment advice field. I want us all to feel free to learn again, to go beyond what we knew in the 1q60s, when Buy-and-Hold was developed and Shiller’s research had not yet been published.

The question is whether the onset of the next Buy-and-Hold Crisis will shake people up enough that some brave souls will start posting honestly re the research and encouraging others to do the same. I have hopes that it will. It would make sense to me that a huge price crash would break the spell. People would no longer fret about causing a recession because we will already be in a recession, so the thought would be “what the heck.” We’ll see, you know?

You always try to apply logic to this, The Ban on Honest Posting is fundamentally not a logical phenomenon. If logic controlled, there would be no overvaluation or undervaluation. All you need to know to see that logic does not control here is today’s CAPE value. If investors were logical, there never could be a CAPE value of 34. But here we are. We have a CAPE value of 34 and we have Buy-and-Hold Goon Squads patrolling the internet to be sure that no one is posting honestly re the last 43 years of peer-reviewed research. Those aren’t unrelated realities. You couldn’t have either of those two strange realities without the other.

My best wishes to you and yours, in any event.

Rob

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

<I>Everyone has heard them and it is not for you to demand that others give you access to their websites to push your agenda. Just like you block people at your website, people can choose to block you.</I>

Something that we experienced over and over again is the surprise and shock that people felt when they considered FOR THE FIRST TIME the how-to implications of Shiller’s amazing research findings. John Walter Russell devoted eight years of his life to researching those implications after seeing me bring them up at the Motley Fool board and doing some preliminary investigations that proved that my posts possessed merit. Wade Pfau held a Ph.D. in Economics from Princeton but he had never before seen these possibilities explored. This is why he was so excited that he could not sleep at night and had visions of being awarded a Nobel prize for the work he was doing with me. He told me that he kept asking himself “Am I missing something?” because he couldn’t understand why no one else had looked into these matters.

He solved that puzzle when you Goons threatened to get him fired from his job if he continued doing honest research re these questions. It’s the intense hostility that a small percentage of Buy-and-Holders feels to the idea of people exploring the far-reaching implications of Shiller’s Nobel-prize-winning research that is holding all the rest of us back. We need as a nation of people to work up the courage to stand up to you and to hold the discussions that we should have been holding a long, long time ago. I believe that we may see it happen in the days and years following the onset of the next Buy-and-Hold Crisis.

I sure hope so. We’ll see.

Rob

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

“ I have never experienced the tiniest problem convincing people.”

If that is the case, you would have people coming to this board in support of you. They can come here for your information for free. If you can’t get interest with free information, how do you expect to get interest from people when it involves money?

I have zero concern about convincing people. It won’t happen in two days. People have lots of questions. It takes time for people to get their minds around a new way of thinking about how stock investing works. But it is clear as clear can be that most people want to know how stock investing works and most people come around in time if they are able to get their questions answered.

Within six months of the day we decide as a nation of people to open every site to honest posting re the last 43 years of peer-reviewed research, we will have increased the percentage of the population that believes that market timing/price discipline is always 100 percent required for every investor from 10 percent to 20 percent. I am sure.

Rob

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

Someone has to be selling for someone else to buy. I guess you just think you have a better timing scheme vs the rest.

No one is forcing anyone else to buy stocks. If you think stocks (companies they represent) are too expensive for you, then don’t buy. Simple as that. If a buy and holder wants to keep buying, that is their right. Meanwhile , don’t expect the rest of us to sell us stocks to you at a cheap price just to make you happy.

What I have is a price discipline scheme. I am inn complete agreement with the Buy-and-Holders that it is not possible to identify when price shifts will take place. So there’s no dispute there. The problem is that the Buy-and-Holders, after making a highly convincing case that short-term timng never works, got sloppy in their thinking and their speaking and slipped into thinking that perhaps long-term timing is not always 100 percent necessary either.

That’s preposterous. Price discipline is the thing that makes all markets work. All that Shiller really did is to show that the stock market works in the same way that every other market that has ever existed. It’s a huge advance only because the Buy-and-Holders got it so wrong and because their upside-down approach fits in so perfectly with the human impulse to want something for nothing. Investors were failing to exercise privc discipline and we were experiencing out-of-control bull markets and out-of-control bear markets long before the Buy-and-Holders ever came on the scene. We want to believe that Get Rich Quick strategies can work. The Buy-and-Holders made Get Rich Quick stock investing respectable with their crazy claim that they have a funny feeling that there might be some secret peer-reviewed research somewhere that supports this nonsense approach. Um — sure there is.

I don’t want to force anyone to do anything. I want to inform people aboutb what the last 42 years of peer-reviewed research shows us about how stock investing works in the real world. So, when some con man comes along with a “study” showing that the safe withdrawal rate is the same number at all valuation levels, people can educate themselves as to the dangers of such a claim.

I believe in research-based strategies. Buy-and-Hold is not a research-based strategy. I believe that it was intended to be one. But, with a true research-based strategy, you have to make adjustments as new research is publshed. Shiller’s Nobel-prize-winning research brought about a huge advance in our understsanding of how stock investing works. That advance should have been incorpoated into the Buy-and-Hold Model. When you incorporate it, you get Valuation-Informed Indexing. VII is Buy-and-Hold with market timing added..

There’s not a switch that you can flip to have everyone drop Buy-and-Hold and adopt Valuation-Informed Indexing on the day that Buy-and-Hold is discredited by new research. People have to be educated as to what the new research says and then they need to ask questions about it and ponder the answers they hear and gradually become persuaded of the merit of the findings of the new research. That process should have begun in 1981. The abusive and in some cases crininal behavior of the Buy-and-Holders has been holding us all back for 43 years now. This is why I say all the time that we need to open every site to honest posting. That’s how we get the transition process started.

If Buy-and-Hold were a real thing, the Buy-and-Holders would be thrilled with the idea of discussing the new research. Their extreme defensiveness shows that they have doubts themselves about whether a pure Get Rich Quick approach can work out well in the lonf run. They want to believe in Buy-and-Hold. Their lives reputations and their fianncial futures are riding on it. But they possess no confidence that the strategy can survive informed debate. So they desperatel oppose the idea of opening even a single large site to honest discussion of the new research. Not good.

Rob

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’s it?  Really?

That’s it, Anonymous.

You make light of it because you are a Goon and that’s the Goon thing to do. I am as far on the other side of the spectrum of possibilites that a person could be. I believe that the question of when we will decide as a nation of people to open every internet site to honest posting re the last 42 years of peer-reviewed research in this field is the most important public policy question before our nation today. The work that I have done has been very, very difficult. But I also believe that it is very, very important. However difficult it is, I need to keep at it until it pays off for each and every one of us.

Say that each time someone says “there might be an alternate universe where market timing is not 100 percent required for every investor, you never know” $10,000 worth of wealth is destroyed. And say that each time someone says “it would make sense to permit honest posting re the peer-reviewed research at every site” $10,000 of wealth is created. Consider how many times that first statement has been made and you can see why we are likely to lose trillions and trillions in the next Buy-and-Hold Crisis. And consider how many times the latter statement will be made once every site has been opened to honest posting and you can see why we are likely to see the greatest surge of economic growth in our nation’s history once we make it together to the other side of The Big Black Mountain erected by our Wall Street Con Men friends.

We all need access to honest, accurate, research-based investment advice. We don’t need that quite as badly as we need oxygen or water. But we need it badly. Our lives will be better in countless ways once we come to love ourselves enough to permit ourselves to discuss the far-reaching how-to implications of Shiller’s amazing research findings at every internet site.

That’s my sincere take re these matters, in any event.

Rob

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

I guess the entire world just has to suck it up and mindlessly agree with you, right?  Everyone wants to be broke when they turn 60 and hope that their spouse dumps them, so that they can sit around all day and complain about how the rest of the world doesn’t treat them right.

The world will do what the world elects to do, Anonymous.

What I am going to do is to continue to say that I sincerely believe that the retirement study posted at John Greaney’s site lacks an adjustment for the valuation level that applies on the day the retirement begins.

There were a number of people at the old Motley Fool board who I over time came to think of as friends.

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 another blog entry at this site:

“ Lots of people need to change their minds.”

Because everyone needs to agree with you, including Pfau, Shiller, your wife, etc. Only Rob Bennett knows what is honest. The world just needs to fall in line.

When someone discovers something dramatically new, the world doesn’t flip a switch so that everyone comes around to the new idea in 10 minutes. There has to be a process of questioning and discussing and exploring implications before people feel comfortable moving on to something new. So it’s healthy and normal if people offer different points of view.

But, yes, there should be universal ageement on the need to open every site to honest posting. We all need to follow the laws and norms of our society.

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

Rob

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

Which one of those people don’t have a job?  Which one’s are broke?

There were regular suggestions that the Brad Pitt character would soon be out of a job, that he was unemployable because he was going with the new exciting, idea rather than sticking with the old worn-out one. Then, when things flipped, he was offered the biggest contract anyone in his field had ever been offered. That’s the way it works. New ideas are worthless until people give up on the old ideas and the new ideas come to be perceived as the only ideas worth having.

Buy-and-Hold is the past, Valuation-Informed Indedxing is the future. That’s the point. If you read history, you would expect Buy-and-Holders to hate Valuation-Informed Indexing. Valuation-Informed Indexing is so much superior to Buy-and-Hold that Buy-and-Hold cannot possibly keep up. Buy-and-Hold claims to be research-based but Valuation-Informed Indexing really is. Buy-and-Hold is waiting to expire while Valuation-Informed Indexing is in the process of being born.

None of the put-downs from Buy-and-Holders mean a thing except to show that Buy-and-Hold is in a desperate place. What matters is what the research says. There was a time when the Buy-and-Holders were in favor of looking at the research. They were right the first time!

Rob

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

They have decided.  If people valued what you have to offer, they would be over here on this board supporting you.  I am sure we can all agree that thousands upon thousands of people have seen your posts.  People clearly know who you are and what you have had to say.  There is no lack of awareness.

There is a lack of having had the experience of talking things over in a civil and calm and reasoned way.

I knew that the Greaney study was in error on the morning of May 13, 2002, right? I was still a Buy-and-Hold at that time! Explain that. It’s crazy. In my brain I just comparmentalized things. I thought, well, the Buy-and-Hold retirement studies are wrong but Buy-and-Hold in general is still good stuff. Then I spent several months talking things over with people at the Motley Fool board. On the evening of August 27, 2002, I concluded that Buy-and-Hold was garbage, that anything that made people so emotional that they endorsed death threats cannit possibly be good stuff.

If someone who saw the error in the Greaney study clearly could be fooled by this stuff, anyone could be fooled by this stuff. The thing that worked for me was talking things over. The same thing worked for John Walter Russell. He was a Buy-and-Holder on the morning of May 13, 2002. Then he engaged in discussiosn in response to my May 13, 2002, post. Then he became such a believer that he devoted eight years of his life to researching the Valuation-Informed Indexing concept for free. It was the same story with Wade Pfau. He was a Buy-and-Holder until he saw my posts at the Bogleheads Forum. Then he talked things over with me in emails. Then he became such a believer that he devoted 16 months of his life to researching my investing ideas and concluded that: “Yes, Virginia, Valuation-Informed Indexing works!”

When you are dealing with a revoltionary advance in the understanding of a subject, the talking-it-over part is an essential stage of the learning process. We cannot get from the horrible place where we are today (a CAPE value of 30!) to the wonderful place where we all deep in our hearts want to be tomorrow without passing through the talking-it-over stage of the learning process. We need to open every site to honest posting re the past 42 yeats of peer-reviewed research. By the close of business tomorrow. If not a good bit sooner.

My sincere take.

Rob

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

There are millions of smart and good people who believe that Buy-and-Hold is a sound strategy. I do not agree with them. But I very much believe that they should be permitted and encouraged to participate in all discussions. They have important things to contribute and we all need to hear what they have to say.

I believe that the contributions of Valuation-Informed Indexers are also valuable and that they too should be permitted and encouraged to participate in all discussions.

That’s where I’m coming from re this one, Observer.

Rob