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

Do you really think anyone is stupid enough to believe even one thing you say anymore.  You have burned very bridge and have destroyed any credibility you thought you might have one had.

If there hadn’t been lots of people (about 10 percent of the population of community members) who said that I was the first person who they ever heard who described how stock investing works in a way that made complete sense, you never would have insisted that I be banned from every board. If large numbers of posters did not find Valuation-Informed Indexing as very exciting, you would not have seen me as a threat.

I will continue posting honestly. Re safe withdrawal rates and re scores of other critically important investment-related topics.

My best 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:

The last 20 years did not turn out as you said it would.  Why should anyone listen to what you have to say?

The last 150 years did not turn out as you said it would. Why would anyone listen to what you have to say?

To be wrong for 150 years is worse than to be wrong for 20 years. And the 20-year thing (it’s really only 15 years) can be explained. We are going through a weird period. I have written several articles explaining why that is so. So has Jeremy Grantham. No Buy-and-Holder has ever offered an explanation for why there has been a correlation between valuation levels and long-term returns for 150 years now (if the market were efficient, there would be no correlation).

If someone wants to say that they are not going to follow my advice because the price crash has been long deferred, I have no problem with that. But you have to do something, you have to follow some investment strategy. And the pure Get Rich Quick/Buy-and-Hold approach has been doing great harm to stock investors ever since the first market opened for business. That’s hardly an improvement. If someone comes up with a third way that checks out, I will certainly take a look at it. As of today, there are only two models that are promoted as research-based. And 100 percent of the data available to us supports one of those models while 0 percent supports the other. I go with the model with 100 percent support. Call me madcap.

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:

Your jury will demand to see proof of death threats.  Your jury will demand to see proof of VII outcomes.  Your jury will demand to see proof of extortion.  Your jury will find that you have committed perjury.

Yeah, yeah.

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:

“One of the two strategies is suited for use by humans. The other is not. That’s the difference.”

Are you now marketing your timing scheme to aliens? I guess that is your only option since there is no one here on earth supports you.

You don’t support yourself, Anonymous. You had to click an “I Agree” button before you were permitted to post at any of the boards you post at. So your yourself gave your agreement to the laws by which we govern ourselves in this country. That’s a problem for you and the other Buy-and-Holders.

I acknowledge that honest posting re the last 40 years of peer-reviewed research in this field is banned at every large site on the internet. But I don’t think that the Ban on Honest Posting is a viable long-term proposition. If Shiller’s Nobel-prize-winning research is legitimate research (I believe that it is), we are going to see an ocean of human misery during the next Buy-and-Hold Crisis. That is going to melt people’s hearts. People are going to work up the courage to stand up the you Goons at that time. And we will all live richer and more fulfilling lives from that point forward. Once we make the transition to Valuation-Informed Indexing, there will not be one person who will ever want to go back to Buy-and-Hold.

We are living through a huge leap forward in our understanding of how stock investing works. Huge advances can be messy. I wish it wasn’t so. But it is obviously so. And you are right about the bans. But I am right about the laws of the United States. The laws of the United States say as much about what we are as a people as does the Ban on Honest Posting re Shiller’s amazing research findings.

We’ll see.

I wish you all good things, 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:

“ No”

And THAT is the reason that the community has rejected you. You are incapable of having any normal conversation. You would never tolerate it, yet you somehow think it is okay for you to do so.

The community has not rejected me. Hundreds of community members have praised my work in the most effusive manner imaginable. I have been humbled by their comments.

You Goons are not the community. You make up about 10 percent of the community. Many community members are afraid of you and censor themselves when they see the price that they will be made to pay if they participate in discussion in an honest and helpful and constructive way. That only shows why we have adopted laws prohibiting the types of tactics that you have employed. Once we begin enforcing those laws in a reasonable manner, the Goon stuff will be a thing of the past and we will all be on our way to living richer and better and fuller lives in the future.

The community LOVES this stuff, Anonymous. That has been true going back to the first day. It is the community’s love for this stuff that caused the Goon freak-out. Most community members don’t fully understand it. That’s why they need to be able to ask questions and learn over time. And most community members follow some form of Buy-and-Hold strategy today. So that is where their sympathies lie. But the majority of community members believe that honest posting should be permitted. And that is what matters. Once the possibility of honest posting is opened up, we are on our way to a very, very good place.

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:

It’s not what you say about yourself.  It is what others say.  You have to learn to deal with that reality.

Investing Discussion Boards Ban Honest Posting on Valuations!

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:

“We need to hear the positions of both sides expressed with the full strength with which they are felt.”

That’s ridiculous. We only need to hear positions which are backed up with data. Your data-free feelings are of no value, no matter how many thousands of words it takes you to express them.

You obviously disagree. I guess we’ll see who is right, in the increasingly unlikely event that anyone ever reads your book.

Okay, Anonymous.

I naturally wish you all the best that this life has to offer a person regardless of what investing strategy you favor, 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 don’t quite follow what you are getting at when you say that Shiller has positioned himself to be right no matter what happens.”

Obviously, if the market crashes, Shiller says classic CAPE was right. If the market soars, he says Excess CAPE Yield was right.

And as always, you ignored my simple question. Why is CAPE everything, but ECY is nothing? They both come from the same Nobel Prize winner.

To some extent, I agree with you re this one. I think that everyone (Buy-and-Holders and Valuation-Informed Indexers alike) should be holding Shiller (and all others, to be sure) accountable. We are 19 years into this and we have not yet seen Shiller asked “Is the safe withdrawal rate a constant or it is a number that varies with changes in valuation levels?” We should know what Shiller and everyone else thinks about that question.

And we should know what stock allocation Shiller thinks is best when prices are at today’s levels. He has written that stocks are more dangerous than usual at today’s prices but also that things aren’t as bad as people like me suggest they are. The way to clear up the confusion is to ask him what allocation level he thinks makes sense. You Goons started asking me specifics like that on the morning of May 13, 2002. It is a good way to sharpen one’s understanding of what a person is saying. We should all be doing that with Shiller. And of course we should have been doing it with Bogel when he was alive. Bogle said in one post that he could see how Valuation-Informed Indexing could work. He should have been asked to square that statement with his many statements that market timing doesn’t. You Goons were very, very quiet when Bogle said that he could see how Valuation-Informed Indexing could work. A big part of the problem is that you DO NOT WANT TO KNOW how stock investing works. You prefer not to know to being confronted with mistakes that you have made in the past.

I wrote an entire column on the Excess CAPE YIeld stuff. I do not think it is nothing. But it certainly does not make me feel more comfortable about today’s stock prices. It makes me feel LESS comfortable. Today we have huge pressures for stock prices to fall over time and also huge pressures for interest rates to rise over time (which would bring stock prices down even more). That’s the worst of all worlds. I don’t think that Shiller covered himself in glory in the article in which he used the Excess CAPE yield concept to “justify today’s stock prices.

That said, yes, he IS a Nobel prize winner. So I think it is important that people listen carefully to what he has to say re these matters. The fact that the guy who is the leading advocate of the idea that valuations matter would say these things is a big deal and it counts in favor of the Buy-and-Hold position. I think that the answer is for everyone to join in the debate. We need to hear the positions of both sides expressed with the full strength with which they are felt. It’s theoretically possible that Shiller is right re this matter and that I am wrong. I don’t think so. But then, I wouldn’t, would I? Each investor needs to be exposed to both sides and to think the matter through and then to invest pursuant to the conclusions that he arrives at as the result of hard thinking about the matter. That’s the best that us flawed humans can do in this flawed world that we live in.

No one has all the answers. Not me. Not Shiller. Not Bogle. Not Lindaeur. Not Greaney. Not Pfau. We all need to give it our best shot and we all need to agree to abide by the laws of the country we live in when engaging in discussions re these matters. That’s the answer. 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:

<i>Scott Burns told you that he was posting dishonestly and wanted to post honestly? Really?</i>

Sure. He didn’t say those words directly. But read between the lines of the words he said and that is the message that is delivered.

That’s true of just about everyone. It’s true of freakin’ Greaney! How many times have you heard Greaney say “I absolutely included a valuation adjustment in my study!” I don’t ever recall hearing him say that. That’s one tiny way in which he has been honest. He hasn’t corrected the study. That’s dishonest. He advanced death threats and engaged in acts of extortion. That’s dishonest. But he has never directly claimed that he included a valuation adjustment in the study. At its root, that’s the same game that Scott Burns and thousands of others have been playing.

People want to be honest. They understand that that is the norm and they endorse the norm. But they have a problem. Post honestly about the last 40 years of peer-reviewed research and you end up concluding that more than 50 percent of today’s stock market value is just irrational exuberance, cotton-candy nothingness that will be blown away in the wind with the next price crash. Greaney does not want to say that and Burns does not want to say that and thousands of others do not want to say that. Say that and the bull market collapses.

So they fib a little. Then, in time, they end up fibbing a lot. What would you have them do, cause stock prices to collapse?

I would have them cause stock prices to collapse. I think that the best way out of this mess is just to acknowledge the mistake that was made back in the 1960s, accept the consequences that follow from doing that and begin a rebuilding process rooted in what the peer-reviewed research teaches us about how stock investing works. But lots of people cannot bear the thought of going there. So for the time-being we are stuck in this twilight zone where we know how stock investing works but dare not say what we know out loud.

But many of us hint at the truth. You see that all the time. That shows that we want to be honest. It’s just that the 40-year cover-up has put us in such a fix that we cannot bear to go there at this point. It’s like someone who is 200 pounds overweight being afraid to go to the doctor. He knows what the doctor is going to tell him and he cannot stand the thought of doing what the doctor is going to tell him. So he doesn’t go. It doesn’t follow that he is so dumb that he does’t think he needs to go. He knows perfectly well that he needs to go, He just cannot bear to do so at this point in time.

When he has a heart attack, he will go. When prices crash and we experience another economic crisis, we will open up the internet to honest posting re the past 40 years of peer-reviewed research.

Or so this Rob Bennett individual sincerely believes, you know?

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:

Your old pal Greaney still hasn’t gotten banned from Motley Fool: https://boards.fool.com/hocomania-still-active-34829648.aspx?sort=whole#34829648

He suggests you may be a bot, but in your defense, bots are more original.

The Retire Early board was an amazing place in the days before Greaney and his Goon Squad burned it to the ground. I still say to this day that the retirement study posted at his web site lacks an adjustment for the valuation level that applies on the day the retirement begins.

Rob