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

“Say that there is a one-in-a-hundred chance that the Greaney retirement study really does lack a valuation adjustment”

There is a hundred-in-a-hundred chance that the Greaney retirement study really does lack a valuation adjustment

We are 100 percent on the same page re that one, Evidence.

Now we just need to work out whether a valuation adjustment is required to calculate the safe withdrawal rate. To do that, we need to open every discussion board and blog on the internet to honest posting re the far-reaching implications of Shiller’s amazing, Nobel-prize-winning research showing that, no, the market is not efficient, no, investors are not 100 percent rational, no, stock investment risk is not stable but is variable, and yes, market timing is always 100 percent required for every investor who wants to keep his risk profile constant over time.

I naturally wish you all the best that this life has to offer a person regardless of what investment strategy you elect to follow.

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 think that the last 40 years of peer-reviewed research in this field speaks for itself, Anonymous.”

You merely ignored what I posted and just repeating your nonsense.

If you put Buy-and-Hold above the peer-reviewed research, then the peer-reviewed research is nonsense.

If you put the peer-reviewed research above Buy-and-Hold, then Buy-and-Hold is nonsense.

I’m a research guy. Whachgonnado?

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 haven’t committed any criminal acts and I have done journalism work that would have brought me more than $500 million but for the criminal acts that you committed. ”

Is there anyone other than you that believes on3 word of that?

Yes.

Lots of people believe it. There’s no one who knows things at the same level of depth that I do because no one has been there for every post like I have. But, yes, there have been people who have indicated that they understand the intimidation side of this or the substance side of this. It’s not hard to understand. But it is hard to accept. Peoples first inclination is to turn away, to not get involved, to go back to living their comfortable lives.

When I told the site owner at the Motley Fool site that Greaney’s behavior was driving away our best posters, he thanked me for my “thoughtful” email and expressed the view that it would be “ideal” if Greaney would permit honest posting. So he clearly got it in part. The other side of the story is that Greaney was bringing in money for Motley Fool. Greaney’s study led people to believe that they could retire many years sooner than what the peer-reviewed research showed was possible. People loved that. So they came to the site to hear what he had to say and told their friends. The more people there were at the site, the more money Motley Fool made with advertisements. That site owner’s job was to make money for Motley Fool.

He had two jobs. His job was to enforce the rules. And his job was to bring in money. The two jobs were in conflict. If he enforced the rules, he was going to cost Motley Fool money. What to do? What to do?

It is in the nature of the stock market to make us dishonest. There is no man in the sky with a long gray beard who sets stock prices. All stock investors collectively possess that power. We can set prices wherever we want. At one-half of their true value. At their true value. At two times their true value. At three times their true value. Whatever we please. And, if we set them very, very high, we can fool ourselves into thinking that we are eligible for retirement many years sooner than we really are. Believing that feels good. We all have access to that good feeling anytime we care to experience it.

All we have to do is to tell lies about the bull market prices. To keep those prices high, we have to pretend that we believe that irrational exuberance is not such a big deal, that it is perfectly fine to be price indifferent, to “stay the course” by keeping our stock allocation the same rather than by keeping our risk profile the same. I would turn the question around on you. Is there anyone other than you Goons who believes a word of the “oh, market timing is not really 100 percent required” garbage?

We all believe it and don’t believe it at the same time. We all want to know the true value of out stock portfolio. Our brains tells us to want that. And we all want to believe that the inflated claims about the value of our portfolio are real. Our Get Rich Quick urge wants us to believe that. It’s an inner conflict that goes on every second of every day that the stock market is in business.

We are all creeps. That’s what it comes to. We are all liars. We are all greedy cusses. That’s what the entire history of the stock market shows.

And we are all also angels. If we had no desire to tell the truth, Shiller would never have been able to get his research published. Or his book. He never would have been awarded a Nobel prize.

We are angels with a creepy side. We are creeps with angelic inclinations. We are both things. The way it is. And the stock market prices of a given day is determined by whether out creepy side or our angelic side is stronger or weaker on that day. It is a constant battle between our better nature and our weaker nature.

The forces of our better nature made a huge advance when Shiller published his Nobel-prize-winning research. And the forces of our weaker nature made a huge advance when the site administrator at the Motley Fool site elected to put Greaney up for the Poster of the Year award rather than to ban him from the site. Every one of us has a role to play in this drama and the decisions that each of us makes every day determine where stock prices go. That’s how it works.

I think that the next price crash is going to tip things in support of permitted honest posting re the last 40 years of research. I think people are going to be horrified by what they see and they are going to work up the courage to stand up to you Goons. Once we are able to talk about the research, the side that favors research-based strategies will develop a huge momentum and you just won’t be able to get the genie back in the bottle.

But we’ll see, you know. Yes, lots of people believe all of that. Nothing could be more clear. But lots of people don’t want to believe it and lots of people are afraid to say in public what they believe. That’s what needs to change. I think that it is in the process of changing. Otherwise, Shiller would never have been awarded a Nobel prize. But we are just going to have to let the process play out to find out for sure. Seeing all the human misery that persuading people to follow a pure Get Rich Quick/Buy-and-Hold “strategy” for investing in stocks always brings is part of the process. I believe today that we are going to have to see that next price crash to work up the courage to speak up and take us all to a far better place than we ever imagined we could live in during the Buy-and-Hold Era.

We’re almost there, Anonymous. The humans are on the verge of achieving some amazing advances. All we need today is a little bit of courage. I know how it feels. I didn’t quite have the courage that it takes to speak honestly about stock investing on the evening of May 12, 2002, I developed it on the morning of May 13, 2002. I have never looked back, I said that the Greaney retirement study lacks a valuation adjustment then and I still sat that today. Sue me.

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:

what people care about is the avalance of nonsense that you cause in message boards. your presumption of causation is wrong: ‘what i am saying must be right because i get banned for it’ is totally inaccurate. there are many other possibilities.

the most likely being: you are a message board nuisance due to the volume and length of your repetitive posts as well as your inability to defend your statements with actual facts.

I have never posted one word of nonsense in the 20 years of The Great Safe Withdrawal Rate Debate, Edge. What happened is that as a people we made a mistake in the 1960s when we discovered that short-term market timing does not work and jumped to the hasty conclusion that no form of market timing is required (Shiller’s Nobel-prize-winning research showing that market timing always works and is always required was not available to us at that time). In the beginning, cognitive dissonance kept the experts in this field from seeing their error. But, as time went on, they became more and more stressed that millions of investors not come to learn about it. So a social taboo developed against honest discussion of these matters.

That social taboo is today killing us. Millions of us think that market timing might be optional or might not even be a good thing. As a result, we have seen the CAPE value rise to insane levels. It is my belief that the next Buy-and-Hold Crisis will help us to see that we all need to be working hard to ensure that we all practice market timing (price discipline!) at all times and that we take action to get super high CAPE values down as fast as possible.

That ends it. Doing that would normalize the discussion of stock investing at every site. All of the nastiness would go away because it would no longer serve any purpose. Once every site was permitting honest posting re the last 40 years of peer-reviewed research, each investor would be able to hear both sides of the story and decide for himself or herself how much market timing he or she wants to engage in. It’s up to the investors to decide that, not to the members of internet goon squads. I mean, please give me a freakin’ break.

There is enormous interest in learning the realities of stock investing. Nothing could be more clear. If that were not so, you Goons would never have engaged in a single abusive post, much less any of the criminal stuff. I believe that the people of the United States will be successful in overcoming you Goons and opening every site to honest posting re the peer-reviewed research in the days following the next price crash. I sure hope so.

I believe that the next Buy-and-Hold Crisis will bring on an ocean of human misery. That part of course makes me very, very sad. But I also believe that it is that next Buy-and-Hold Crisis that is going to make clear to us that permitting honest posting is absolutely essential and that will in time bring on the greatest surge of economic growth ever seen in our history. Stock investing matters. We all should want to know what the peer-reviewed research tells us about how it works. There is no downside to knowing the realities. The peer-reviewed research permits us all to retire many years sooner while taking on only a fraction of the risk that we were taking on during the Buy-and-Hold Era. I can live with that. I have a funny feeling that millions and millions of middle-class investors will feel just fine living with it as well.

Everybody makes mistakes. I find no fault with my Buy-and-Hold friends for the mistake they made. But mistakes need to be corrected when they are discovered. Covering up mistakes makes things worse and worse and worse, I believe that my Buy-and-Hold friends are good and smart people. I believe that, if they were thinking clearly, they would have wanted their mistake corrected within 24 hours of the time it was uncovered by the publication of Shiller’s Nobel-prize-winning research. So I will continue to do everything I can to get our discussions back on track and to help my Buy-and-Hold friends get to a place where they can again feel good about themselves and the work they do.

The Great Safe Withdrawal Rate Debate is not a debate that will have winners and losers, Edge. We all will be winners. I am not able to imagine circumstances in which there could be any losers emerging from this. Learning is the one true free lunch available in this world. I vote for learning, which of course requires the widespread tolerance of honest posting. I am proud that after three years of being afraid of what Greaney would do to me if I worked up the courage to point out the error in his retirement study, I finally did just that because I cared about what would happen to my friends at the Motley Fool board if I failed to do so.

I naturally wish you all the best that this life has to offer a person regardless of what investment strategy you elect to follow.

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:

To have an credibility, your theory has to match up to outcomes.  After 2 decades it has failed to do so.  You try to package this up like it is in line with Shiller, but it is not.  It is counter to what he has said. Why would anyone put their money behind your strategy?

The theory behind Valuation-Informed Indexing has been matching up to outcomes for 150 years now. The peer-reviewed research that I co-authored with Wade Pfau shows that beyond any reasonable doubt whatsoever. If you didn’t think that our research was of huge importance, you never would have engaged in a single criminal act to block people from learning about it.

Every word that I have ever said about stock investing is rooted in Shiller’s Nobel-prize-winning research finding that valuations affect long-term returns. If that is so, there is zero chance that the safe withdrawal rate is the same number at all valuation levels. It is a logical impossibility. If you thought that there was anything more than a 1 in 100 chance that you could get Shiller to say that he believes that the safe withdrawal rate is the same number at all valuation levels, you would accept my challenge to invite him to the Bogleheads Forum to discuss the matter.

If you want to know why hundreds of our fellow community members have said that my stuff is the best work that they have ever seen on stock investing, ask them. It’s up to each investor to decide how to invest his money, not to a gang of internet Goons to decide the matter for them.

You are right that we haven’t seen the price crash yet. That is certainly surprising. I have written several articles explaining the factors that may have caused the long delay. Jeremy Grantham has written similar articles. Again, it is up to each investor to decide whether he finds those articles convincing or not. Those who engage in criminal acts to block people from hearing both sides of the story are liable for damages in the event that stocks continue to perform in the future somewhat as they always have in the past and those investors suffer losses that could have been avoided had you Goons permitted honest posting re the last 40 years of peer-reviewed research in this field.

My best wishes to you.

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 go back the original point you have avoided.  No one has banned Shiller and/or what he has to say.  Thus, your headline is faulty to begin with.

If you don’t permit discussion of the merits of market timing, you are not permitting discussion of Shiller’s amazing research findings. The title of Shiller’s book is “Irrational Exuberance.” If irrational exuberance is a real thing (I believe it is), we all should be doing everything we can to combat it. How would you propose combating it without engaging in market timing? There is no other way.

Shiller was awarded a Nobel prize. So his research must have changed how we all think about stock investing in many ways. Please tell me five ways in which Shiller’s research findings caused you to alter your stock investing strategies.

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:

Postings like this is why people don’t believe you.  You haven’t worked in over 20 years and blame it on the time it takes to write a book.  It doesn’t take all that look and providing for the family always comes first.  Secondly, we all know buy and hold works.  Just look at the 30 year returns on the S&P 500 as an example.  In fact, you can’t even name one buy and hold failure despite being asked many times.  Third, you highlight your real issue for acting the way you do by mentioning emotional issues.

In the event that Shiller’s Nobel-prize-winning research is legitimate research (I believe it is), every Buy-and-Hold portfolio that was ever constructed was a failure. If stock investing risk is not constant but variable, then any investor who failed to engage in market timing (the Buy-and-Holders advise against this) is going to see his risk profile jump all over the place. It’s impossible to imagine how that could ever be a good thing.

Stocks are an amazing asset class. So there are some circumstances in which an investor could go with a Buy-and-Hold “strategy” and still end up with less-than-terrible result. But of course there are other circumstances in which the investor gets wiped out. And it is never a good idea to put yourself at risk of getting wiped out. The smart thing would be just to engage in whatever amount of market timing is needed to keep your risk profile roughly constant over time.

That puts the percentages in your favor. As is always the case with probabilities, the more rolls of the dice there are, the more likely it is that the person playing the percentages will end up on top in the end. It is entirely possible for a Buy-and-Holder to do well for a number of years. But the longer an investor elects to continue with a pure Get Rich Quick strategy, the greater are the odds that he will come to experience the awful downsides of electing to do so. Not this boy, you know?

I naturally wish you all the best that this life has to offer a person regardless of what investment strategy you elect to follow, 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:

“ When that’s the situation, someone has to work up the courage and do what it takes to earn the $500 million. And, once he has earned it, why shouldn’t be plan his retirement on it?”

So if some guy has $6 million in his investment account, you don’t think he should plan his retirement on it, yet if you don’t have your $500 million, you think that you should plan your retirement on that, even if you haven’t collected one dime?

Yes.

If someone has $6 million of nominal value in his account at a time when half of the value of the stock market is irrational exuberance and not anything of real, lasting value, that guy should plan his retirement only on the $3 million of real value and disregard the irrational exuberance. That’s the entire point of Valuation-Informed Indexing — to get the numbers right by taking into consideration the last 40 years of peer-reviewed research as well as the stuff that was around at the time when the Buy-and-Hold strategy was being developed.

As for the $500 million, one should certainly take it into consideration. I think it would be fair to say that I have earned a whole big bunch more than $500 million with the journalism work that I have been doing for the past 20 years. Even Evidence-Based Investing, one of the lead Goons, now acknowledges that the Greaney retirement study lacks a valuation adjustment. If that doesn’t prove the case beyond any doubt whatsoever, I have a hard time imagining what would. And it wasn’t only Greaney who put forward the crazy 4 percent rule. That was cited in thousands of newspaper articles. That rule was used in the planning of millions of retirements. So discovering the error in the rule is a very big deal. Had we opened to entire internet to honest posting re the last 40 years of peer-reviewed research on the afternoon of May 13, 2002, as I proposed at the time, we would all be a lot better off now. I would obviously have a number far in excess of $500 million in my account today if you Goons had never engaged in any criminal acts to stop the discussions that so many of our fellow community members wanted to see go forward.

Would I prefer to have the $500 million in cash today? Sure. Of course. Obviously. Who wouldn’t?

But the cases that I have are real cases. If the laws of the United States are given respect in the investing advice field in the days following the next price crash, I will be collecting that money in days to come. That’s a good thing for all of us. From the day that I collect the $500 million, there won’t be one person who will be afraid to share his or her thoughts about how the far-reaching implications of Shller’s amazing, Nobel-prize-winning research findings “revolutionize” (Shiller’s word) our understanding of how stock investing works. I will be invited to be the keynote speaker at the FinCon event for 10 years running once I receive that settlement payment. LOTS of people have doubts re the Buy-and-Hold dogmas today. Most don’t speak up in clear terms because they want to be able to make money in this field and they have seen how the Buy-and-Holders react to discussions of the far-reaching implications of Shller’s amazing research. All of that fear of speaking honestly goes away when the primary advocate of Valuation-Informed Indexing, the first true research-based strategy, receives a check for $500 million for his efforts to get this stuff out to every investor on the planet.

I would have preferred that we all just played it straight from the first day. That would have been a lot easier on me and it would have saved us from both the 2008 economic crisis as well as the one that we should be expecting to see in the next year or two or three. Now, if we had been playing it straight going back to 1981, I wouldn’t have earned $500 million by working up the courage to post honestly. If we had been playing it straight going back to 1981, much of what I have said would have come out long before I came on the scene. There certainly would not have been any thought in anyone’s mind that the safe withdrawal rate is the same number at all valuation levels if we had all been playing it straight going back to 1981.

I didn’t ask for the realities to be covered up from 1981 through 2002. It’s something that happened that in one way worked to my detriment (all the abuse that has been directed at me) and that in another way worked to my benefit (because so few dared to post honestly it became possible for me to add a lot more than $500 million worth of value to the world’s understanding of how stock investing works). I didn’t even know about the 21-year cover-up on the day that I advanced my famous post saying that I didn’t believe that the Greaney study contained a valuation adjustment. That didn’t click for me until I saw the death threats on the evening of August 27, 2002.

Do you think it would have been better if I had never mentioned the error in the study? I sure don’t. Do you think it would have been better if I ignored the death threats and just remained a Buy-and-Holder despite it all? I sure don’t. We NEED to know how stock investing works. It’s important. To me, that is as obvious as obvious could be. And we cannot ever make progress if we all live in fear of what the Buy-and-Hold Goon squads will do to us if we work up the courage to post our honest thoughts. Opening up that possibility for everyone on the planet is just an amazing advance. The idea that doing that isn’t worth a whole big bunch more than $500 million is just silliness.

You Goons get that deep down inside. If you didn’t see how important this stuff is, you never would have advanced a single intimidation post much less any of the criminal stuff. If you thought this stuff didn’t matter much, you would just say “oh, let that Rob Bennett fellow say what he believes about safe withdrawal rates, what harm could it do?” Given your behavior over the past 20 years, I think that it would be fair to say that your secret belief is that permitting honest posting on safe withdrawal rates and scores of other critically important investment-related topics would produce far in excess of $500 million in value for millions of middle-class investors.

I think it would be fair to say that market timing is 70 percent of what it takes to become a successful long-term stock investor, The peer-reviewed research that I co-authored with Wade Pfau shows that. Yet we still have people today saying that there might be some mystical, magical alternate universe where market timing is not always 100 percent required for every investor. Huh? What the f? Opening up the entire internet to honest posting changes everything, It is a huge advance. It OBVIOUSLY is worth a lot more than $500 million to our nation if someone works up the courage to do that, That’s why we have laws ensuring that, when we see the sort of behavior we have seen from you Goons over the past 20 years, compensation is paid to the person at whom that abuse was directed. The laws that ensure that are good and necessary laws. They don’t make the person at whom the abuse was directed whole. Nothing could do that. But they take a stab at it. Which is probably the best that can be done in this imperfect world of ours.

So I support those laws. And I think that it would be fair to say that the people who adopted those laws are basically a good and smart people. So they are going to see that those laws are enforced in the days following the next price crash, when we will all be able to see up close and personal what it means for our country to have a pure Get Rich Quick/Buy and-Hold investing “strategy” promoted morning, noon and night for 40 years after the peer-reviewed research showed that there is precisely zero chance that it could ever work out for even a single long-term investor.

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:

From what I have read, your strategy is as follows:

1. Quit your job
2, Spend down your savings
3. Attempt to get a windfall as a way of funding your retirement

My strategy is to open every internet site to honest posting re the last 40 years of peer-reviewed research in this field. The “idea” that market timing is not 100 percent required for every investor is the biggest mistake ever made in the history of personal finance. When we all gain the freedom to post honestly about how stock investing works, we all gain the ability to live far better and richer and more fulfilled lives.

The $500 million is not a windfall.I have earned every penny of that amount plus a whole lot more. We all need to know how stock investing works, each and every one of us. Our financial futures are at stake. We cannot overcome the Get Rich Quick/Buy-and-Hold urge that resides within each and every one of us until we all gain the ability to post honestly and freely discuss the far-reaching implications of Shiller’s “revolutionary” (his word) research findings.

So the work that I am doing is very important. There is no more important work being done in the United States today. If you Goons did not appreciate how big an advance Shiller’s research findings are and how many people there are who want to learn about them, you never would have engaged in a single criminal act to block the discussions.

My best and warmest wishes to you.

Rob