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 has been money laying on the street for the last 20 years, but you refused to pick it up (it’s called getting a job).

There is no more important job in the United States today than getting every investing site opened to honest discussion of the far-reaching how-to implications of Robert Shiller’s Nobel-prize-winning research showing that valuations affect long-term returns and that therefore long-term market timing (price discipline!) is 100 percent required for every investor who hopes to Stay the Course in a meaningful way (that is, to keep his risk profile constant over time). Getting the word out re this amazing research is of critical importance to every single person living in the United States today. I am confident that the work I have done during the first 21 years of our discussions will be well-compensated when we all get to the other side of the next Buy-and-Hold Crisis and appreciate the importance of launchng a national debate on the realities of safe withdrawal rates and scores of other critically important investment-related topics.

My best 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:

Who does your wife blame for the divorce and being broke?

She believes that I am onto something important with my investing work.

She believes that you Goons should permit honest posting at every site. She is horrified by the death threats and the acts of extortion and all the other garbage.

But she also believes that, since the Normals (the 90 percent of Buy-and-Holders who today believe that market timing doesn’t work but who have no problem with people posting about the 41 years of peer-reviewed research showing that it always works and is always required) have essentially given you Goons veto power over what can be said about stock investing on the internet, I should drop it and find some other way to make a living.

I do not agree. I feel like I was a bit of a sleeze for those three years when I knew that the Greaney retirement study was in error and I kept it zipped because I was afraid of what Greaney and his Goon Squad would do to me if I posted my honest views. I loved the old Motley Fool board. I thought that there was more good information being provided there than you could find at the largest personal finance library in the world. So I felt that I was letting my fellow community members down by living in fear of you Goons.

I also felt that I was letting the Buy-and-Holders down by not pointing out the error in the study. The original idea of Buy-and-Hold was to be research-based. So it makes perfect sense for the Buy-and-Holders to permit honest posting re the last 41 years of peer-reviewed research. So I also felt that I was selling out the Buy-and-Holders (only a tiny percentage of which are Goons engaging in abusive and even criminal behavior) by keeping it zipped re the error in the study.

It broke my heart when Greaney and his Goon squad burned that community to the ground. So I just cannot stand to know that there are millions of people who would love to be making honest contributions today but who are not doing so because of their fear of what the Buy-and-Hold Goon Squads will do to them if they try it. I proposed that we open every site to honest posting on the evening of May 13, 2002. If we had done that, we would today as a nation of people be 20 years farther along in our understanding of how stock investing works than we actually are. I see this as an important subject. So I see that as a big deal. So I soldier on.

I am open to compromises. I told my ex that I would be willing to take on a different full-time job that brought in immediate money in return for a promise on her part to give me emotional support for working nights and weekends to open the internet to honest posting re the last 41 years of peer-reviewed research in this field. That would be hard. But I could live with myself if I did it that way. I could not sleep at night if I did nothing given how important it is that millions of middle-class investors have some access to honest and accurate and research-based reports on how stock investing works in the real world. I like being able to sleep at night. So I do what I do.

The situation is crazy. I give you that one. But the good news that we have seen over the past 20 years has been 20 times more good than the bad news that we have seen has been bad. So I think it would be fair to say that as a nation of people we are very much on the right track. I am humbled to be able to play a significant role in bringing about what I think can fairly be described as the biggest advance in our understanding of how stock investing works ever achieved in our history (the advance is seeing how critically important it is that every investor practice market timing/price discipline at all times).

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:

“Stocks are today priced to deliver another Buy-and-Hold Crisis within the next year or two ot three.”

You have been saying that for at least a year or two or three.

Unfortunately for you even if it does happen it will be too late. You don’t seem to have enough money to take advantage of low stock prices.

You just make terrible assumptions.

You assumed that selling 1 report on soapbox meant you would continue to make money in a similar manner.
You assumed that when you said back in the day that you would be willing to flip hamburgers if necessary you wouldn’t have to make good on that promise.
You assumed that the market would drop low enough while you still had money that you would be able to load up on stock at bargain basement prices.
You assumed that if you wrote a book (which you did) you would be able to earn much more than you did with your soapbox report.
You assumed that if you started to write a second book that you would get it finished at some point.
You assumed that your wife would put up with your catastrophically unproductive internet trolling career instead of getting a real job.
You assumed that if you kept repeating the same arguments that got rejected repeatedly you would eventually find someone to agree.
You assumed that if you offered to go back to work, but spend every evening and weekend trolling the internet that would be acceptable to your wife.

(I haven’t said anything about the $500 million assumption because I am fairly sure not even you believe that.)

All those assumptions were wrong.

They have added up to a failed retirement.

I’m still willing to flip hamburgers if that’s what it takes. I would rather flip hamburgers than sell out my friends.

I have found thousands of people to agree with my arguments:

Investing Discussion Boards Ban Honest Posting on Valuations!

When every site has been opened to honest posting, the number will be in the millions. That translates ino moutains of money for the person who developed the Valuation-Informed Indexing concept. I have a 20-year head-start on everybody else. The shift from Buy-and-Hold to Valuation-Informed Indexing is the biggest advance in the history of personal finance. Robert Shiller wasn’t awarded a Nobel prize because he has a nice haircut.

Rob

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

There is no science in your posts.  Further, investing is mathematical, combined with statistical analysis.

The Bennett/Pfau research shows that an investor can reduce the risk of stock investing by nearly 70 percent by being open to market timing. The reason why that is possible is that it is investor EMOTION that causes high stock prices (if investors were 100 percent rational, they would always price stocks properly). So emotion is BY FAR the most important factor leading to long-term success or failure. The stock investing game is a game in which the investor has to struggle to rein in the emotions that could cause him to persuade himself that for the first time in history market timing might not be 100 percent necessary.

Shiller gave us a powerful metric (CAPE) that we can use to know when to engage in market timing and to what extent to engage in it. So the emotional stuff can to some extent be reduced to numbers. But the numbers stuff won’t do you any good if you are so emotional that you are not willing to look at them. The primary truth about stock investing is that the key to long-term success is gaining control of one’s emotions. Placing too much focus on the math pulls you away from that.

The mistake that the Buy-and-Holders made was to focus too much on the math and not nearly enough on the emotions. If investor emotion is 70 percent of the story, 70 percent of the investment advice that we hear should be aimed at helping us rein in our emotions (that is, helping us to see the need for market timing). The mistake that the Buy-and-Holders made (thinking that market timing/price discipline might not always be 100 percent required) took discussion of 70 percent of what we need to know off the table. My aim is to get discussion of that 70 percent (the undiscovered continent of stock investong) going at every investing site on the internet. We are today 20 years behind where we would have been re our understanding of this subject had we opened every site to honest posting re the last 41 years of peer-reviewed research on the afternoon of May 13, 2002, as I proposed at the time.

You Goons are not going to be able to keep discussion of 70 percent of what investors need to know off the table indefinitely. It is too important to millions of investors that they gain access to such discussions. Or so Rob Bennett sincerely believes, in any event, you know?

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:

“ Yes, my plan called for $20,000 of annual ncome from my writing business. That was a super lowball number. I had earned $15,000 in six months from my Soapbox report (“Secrets of Retiring Early”) while holding down a full-time job. Once I was free to write reports like crazy, I obviously could earn a lot more. So the plan was super safe. The fact that I am still here 20 years later despite never earning that $20,000 shows how super safe the plan was.”

No that is not super safe. Perhaps it would have been safer if you had a long history of writing many reports that all sold that amount on a regular basis. You never wrote and tried to sell another report after that one, as far as we know. Further, if this was your plan and you were not generating this income after the expected period of time, why did you not go back to work? You admitted that you were able to write the first report while, working, so you could have taken a job and continued writing reports until getting back on track. Your story does not make sense.

It makes sense. I had been writing about the Passion Saving concept for three years before I wrote the Secrets report and my work had been hugely successful. Even Greaney was on board. He wrote a note to be read by newcomers to the Retire Early board urging them to read my stuff before they did anything else because my stuff was “seminal.” So it wasn’t like there was any question that my further work was going to bring in lots of money. There’s a lot more money to be made selling a successful book than selling a successful report. So, when Soapbox shut down, I turned to developing a book expanding on that material. Judging by the reactions I saw from people who read the book, I would have made millions from the book had you Goons not junped in to destroy me. There were people who were pleasing with you to permit me to post just about saving issues. But you understood that, any popularity that I gained writing about saving strategies would come back to bite you in that I was undoubtedly going to post honestly about stock investing as well and then Greaney’s study (and Buy-and-Hold!) would go down. So no dice.

The only problem that I have ever experienced is the insane Campaign of Terror that you Goons have led against any board or blog community that permitted honest posting re the last 41 years of peer-reviewed research in this field. You believe (properly so) that to permit honest posting re the last 41 years of peer-reviewed research will be the beginning of the end for Get Rich Quick/Buy-and-Hold strategies. I agree. The difference is that I see that as a very good thing and you see it as a very bad thing. We have been working at cross purposes for 20 years now.

It would be crazy for me to take on some other form of work when I have not yet opened every discussion board and blog on the internet to honest posting re the last 41 years of peer-reviewed research, without a single exception. This is the most important public policy issue facing the United States today. If stocks continue to perform in the future anything at all as they have always performed in the past, we are looking ahead to millions of failed retirements, hundreds of thousands of business failures, millions of people losijng their jobs, a significant increase in political tensions. You think I am going to find a journalistic enterprise with more potential than this one? In what century?

I have indicated that I may take up employment after I finish my book. That would make sense because, when the next Buy-and-Hold Crisis hit, I would have the definitive statement about what caused it already in hand and I could quickly shift again to doing the more important (by a factor of 500 ) work. Outside of that, though, thanks but not thanks. I love my country. I am going to continue to do everything in my power to open every discussion board and blog to honest posting re the past 41 years of peer-reviewed research in this field, without a single exception. I am not even able to imagine any possible downside.

I believe that the people of this country are fundamentally good. We are not perfect. But we are not Goons, you know? If we were all Goons, we would not have laws in place protecting us from the tactics employed by the small pervcentage of us who are Goons. I believe that we are going to work through this thing and that we will from that time forward all live lives better and richer and fuller than we ever imagined possible back in the Buy-and-Hold Era. We’ll see, you know?

My best and warmest 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:

Rob’s, you’re living 50 miles away from Purcellville, shacking up in a shared room in some townhome. This really is sad. There’s definitely mixed feelings from me, and I suspect the others. I’m glad that you failed to succeed in selling your bad retirement advice to others. It is sad to see this happen to you and your family regardless of that silver lining.

If it was up to me, we would have opened every discussion board and blog to honest posting on the evening of the day that Shiller published his Nobel-prizr-winning research showing that valuations affect long-term returns. There wasn’t even an internet in those days. But people had other ways to communicate. They had books and magazines and speeches and conferences. They could have talked about the amazing and far-reaching implications of Shiller’s research findings at those sorts of venues. And we would be 41 years ahead of where we are today in our development of the Valuation-Informed Indexing concept if we had done that.

It’s like the story of the two economists who are walking on a path when one stoops down to pick up a 20-dollar bill. The other one says: “Why are you doing that? If there were reallly a 20-dollar bill there, someone would have picked it up before we came along.” Except in this case, it’s a 20-trillion-dollar bill. All of the research is done. All that the rest of us need to do to live better and fuller and richer lives is to stoop down and pick it up. I say that we should do that. We are not as a nation of people going to make it to the magic place that Shiller pointed out to us until a larger number of us work up the courage to point out that there’s a 20-trillion-dollar bull sitting on the sidewalk and the sensible thing is to stoop down and pick it up.

That’s pretty much it.

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:

Let’s make this more simple for you to understand.  If you had to offer a product or service based on your “ideas”, what would you be selling at a price point of $100?

95 percent of this battle is getting every discussion board and blog on the internet opened to honest posting re the last 41 years of peer-reviewed research in this field, witout a single exception. Once that goal is achieved, all of the rest falls easily into place.

The shift from a pure Get Rich Quick/Buy-and-Hold “strategy” to the first true research-based strategy is not a small shift. We need to get every book in the field revised, every calculator redone. Instead of pushing the generation of more and more and more irrational exuberance morning, noon and night, we will be encouraging people to rein in their Get Rich Quick/Buy-and-Hold urges and thereby become able to retire many years sooner while taking on only a fraction of the risk that they felt they needed to take on in the days before Shiller published his amazing, Nobel-prize-winning research.

The market will dictate what products and services are offered. The critical step is overcoming the Ban on Honest Posting that now applies at every large site on the internet and thereby bringing the market for honest, research-based investment advice into existence. I am not even a tiny bit worried about how things will go in Stage Two. It’s Stage One that has been holding us back for 20 years now. The more lives that the Buy-and-Holders destroyed with their relentless promotion of the :idea” that there might be an alternate universe 20 billion light years away in which market timing/price discipline is not 100 percent required for every investor, the less willing they are to own up to the mistake that they made in the 1960s that Shiller exposed to those who follow the peer-reviewed research in the early 1980s.

We need to bring an end to that. We need to get to a situation where we are all on the same side, where we are all working together so that we can learn together as much as we can about how stocks work in the real world in as little time as we possibly can learn it. We are talking about the difference between going down, down, down and going up, up, up. I think it would be fair to say that the “idea” that market timing is not always 100 percent required is the most dangerous and destructive mistake ever made in the history of personal finance.

Say that permitting honest posting adds $300,000 to the accumulated wealth of every investor over the course of an investing lifetime. I think it would be fair to say that that’s a pretty darn conversative estimate of what is at stake there. Say that it’s only 100 million people who would receive that added $300,000. That’s obviously a lowball estimate. That’s a number far, far, far in excess of the $500 million that I have indicated I would be willing to settle my legal claims for. $500 million is not a small amount of money. It’s a HUGE amount of money. We are not going to have any problem whatsoever figuring out ways to make vast amounts of money from permitting honest posting re the peer-reviewed research. The only problem we might have is figuring out how to count it as it comes pouring in so fast.

I don’t exclude you Goons from that. John Walter Russell and I made an offer to Greaney in the early days to join with him to develop accurate and honest safe-withdrawal-rate research. I think it would be fair to say that Greaney would have the top investing site on the internet today had he taken us up on that offer back then. People are happy to pay for investment materials that offer huge benefits. Shiller didn’t win a Nobel prize for no good reason. This is truly life-enhancing stuff. There’s money to be made here. Mountains of it. At all possible price points. And of course the truly wonderful thing here is that all who get involved are earning that money by doing tremendous good for millions and millions of people (including the Buy-and-Holders, who would get to come clean about the mistake they made back in the 1960s, before Shiller’s research was even available to us).

Valuation-Informed Indexing is Buy-and-Hold corrected for the horrible error that has caused so much human tragedy over the years. It’s good stuff piled on top of good stuff piled on top of good stuff. It’s not even possible to imagine any downside. That translates into mountains of well-earned profits in this highly lucrative field, in which behaving with integrity is every bit as important as it is in any other field of human endeavor regardless of how you Goons have reacted to the thousands of pleas that honest posting be permitted that we have seen over the first 20 years of out discussions.

My best and warmest wishes.

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:

And yet you wonder why all the boards banned you.

It’s not quite true that I “wonder” about that. It’s not the norm. So it surprises me. And I certainly think about it often. But, if you take into consideration how humans behave in other areas of life endeavor, it is not all that terribly difficult to figure out what is going on.

New ideas scare people. People get used to one way of living and they don’t like thinking that they are going to need to adjust to something different. Most of us can handle small changes. But big, fundamental changes can mess with our minds. Shiller’s Nobel-prize-winning research findings are the biggest advance in our understanding of how stock investing works ever achieved in the history of the planet. They are extrmely positive changes for all of us. But, for those of us who are emotionally invested in the old understanding (Buy-and-Hold), they represent a shocking change. They turn the world on its head.

Many Buy-and-Holders react to the fear they feel when confronted with the possibility that they didn’t always know it all by trying to silence the voices speaking of the new findings. That’s not an acceptable response. Silencing discussion of the realities hurts everyone, including the people doing the silencing. So that’s not the answer. But it is not 100 percent beyond human understanding why Buy-and-Holders respond to Shiller’s research in the way they do.

I like to put a positive spin on things. I think it would be fair to say that in the usual case the amount of resistance to a new idea is a signifier of the power of that idea. In this case, the resistance has been greater than anything that I have ever witnessed. To come up with a comparable, you would have to suggest something like the reaction we saw to the idea that all races should be treated equally in the eyes of the law. That one messed with people’s minds something terribly. That’s what we have here.

People fight and fight and fight and fight. But, in the end, they are going to have to accept that the research says what the research says. You can’t have a society of people in which discussions of what 41 years of peer-reviewed research tells us all about stock investing is banned at every site on the internet. That’s not just a situation that has long-term viability. So we know that as a society, we will be moving forward in time, presumably in the days following the next Buy-and-Hold Crisis. Given that reality, the charitable thing to do is to do what you can to see that the transition is made as quickly as possible.

The intense resistance to Shiller’s breakthrough research findings is an exceedingly strange thing. But it is also an exceedingtly human thing. Humans have a problem with change. And it is exceedingly positive thing. We will all live better lives when we are able to earn far higher returns on our stock investments while taking on only a fraction of the risk that we were required to take on in the pre-Shiller years.

It’s a shame that we have caused ourselves so much pain with our insane resistance to hearing about the research. But the good news here is 20 times more good than the bad news here is bad. Humans are imperfect creatures. We get scared when something threatens to shake up our understanding of how the world operates, even when the change is a very, very positive change. But, after some struggle with a new idea, we usually eventually work up the courage to embrace a better future. I think that that is what will happen in this case as it has in so many others.

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:

Rob says “ Of course we need to as a nation of people give ourselves permission to discuss the amazing how-to implications of the last 41 years of peer-reviewed research. ”

And then Rob says: “ I ignored Scott Burns because I think he was wrong re that one.”

In short, you want people to let you on their boards and listen to your opinions, yet you should be able to ignore everyone else. You get to decide which opinions are valid. Got it.

I get to decide what opinions are valid FOR ME. I have no problem with someone saying that they relate to what Scott Burns has to say. But I have a very big problem with those who say that Scott Burns can be heard but those finding fault with what Scott Burns says cannot be heard.

And I certainly have not ignored Scott in any general sense. I have devoted thousands and thousands of words to analysis of his comments. I paid attention to him. But, no, I did not find everything that he said entirely persuasive (there were some things that he said that I thought were pure gold and I of course said so).

And I think that Scott would change some of what he says if every site were opened to honest posting and the Buy-and-Hold intimidation stuff became a thing of the past. That’s true of every single person who has participated in the discussions. The intimidation stuff is poison. It hinders learning experiences. Scott suppresses some of his own thoughts. We can never know to what extent he has done this until we open every site to honest posting.

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:

You believe you have come up with one of the most significant findings in our life time. You believe there has been a mass conspiracy against you. You believe that thousands of people are in support of you’ve though they have never said so, but are just too afraid to post anonymously. You believe that after some huge market crash that congress will conduct an investigation, which will lead to stories in The New York Times and, ultimately, catapult you to a major public figure leading the way to solving the world’s financial crisis. You believe that many leading law firms will then compete to take on your case and that you will either settle for a modest $500 million payment or take it through courts for Billions and make you one of the wealthiest people alive today. You believe that leading experts will want put you to be the keynote speaker at leading investment conferences. You believe that all those people that have disagreed with you in the past will lose all or most of their money and will spend much of their remaining days in prison unless you intervene in a manner to reduce their time locked up. You believe that all of the community boards will be turned over to you and that you will lead these boars or some kind of consortium and that market timing will be the key discussion point on ALL boards.
Have I got all that right? Did I miss anything or fail to clarify anything?

It was Shiller’s finding that valuations affect long-term returns, not mine. There is a reason why that research finding caused him to be awarded a Nobel prize in Economics. That finding changes everything that we once thought we knew about stock investing. There were once smart people who believed that it is not necessaery for all investors to practice market timing (price discipline!) at all times. If valuations affect long-term returns, stock investing risk is not stable but variable. Investors who wish to maintain the same risk profile over time have no choice but to practice market timing. There is no other way to get the job done.

My contribution has been to for 20 years (and counting) lead the effort to open every discussion board and blog on the internet to honest posting re the paat 41 years of peer-reviwed resarch, without a single exception. As amazing as it is, Shiller’s research by itself accomplshes nothing. We have seen higher CAPE values in the days since publication of his research than we saw in the days before its publication. For the research to make all of our lives better, we need as a nation to give ourselves permission to examine its far-reaching how-to implications at every site on the internet. The goal is to overcome the Get Rich Quick/Buy-and-Hold urge that resides within every one of us. It takes regular reminders of the long-term dangers of Get Rich Quick/Buy-and-Hold to do that.

The conspiracy is not against Rob Bennett per se. The conspiracy is against human rationality. Shiller pointed us to a grown-up way to invest, a rational way. a true research-based way. When that way catches on, there will be no more bull markets or bear markets or economic crises. Because Get Rich Quick/Buy-and-Hold strategies will no longer be popular. Shiller’s research findings are a threat to the Get Rich Quick/Buy-and-Hold approach to thinking about the stock investing project. Rationality/research/logic/common sense is a threat to the emotional ways of thinking about this project. The conspiracy is a condpiracy of ignorance. It is like the conspiracy against healthy eating habits. Everyone knows that it is better to have a healthy diet. But there is a conspiracy of ignorance leading them in a different direction.

The boards will not be turned over to me. They will be turned over to the people who post at them. Yes, I will be able to post my honest views. But everyone else will as well. People who believe in Buy-and-Hold will be able to post their honest views as well. They will not be able to engage in criminal behavior to intimidate those who believe that Shiller’s research findings are legitimate. The same laws that apply in every other field of human behavior will be made applicable in the investing advice realm as well. And we will all get to live far better and richer lives from that point forward as a result.

Make sense?

Rob