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 is no science or research involved. It is just your opinion on an article from 1981. Period.

Please mark me down as saying that Shiller’s Nobel-prize-winning research is science and that your death threats and acts of extortion are not.

And please feel free to spread the word all over the internet that that is indeed my take.

My best wishes to you.

Opinionated Rob

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

All selective comments that lack full context. Tell us, Rob, how many of these people or on your website? What about others outside this list? Where are all these supporters of your ideas?

Here are 15 more:

16) “All Who Are Still Holding Equities at Present Levels Because Their Financial Adviser Insists That Timing Market Cycles Is Impossible to Do — Read This!” Juggling Dynamite Blog.

17) “The Fact that Aggressive and Short-Term Market Timing Was Unproductive Did Not Mean That There Were Never Times When It Would Be Wealth-Maximizing to Get Out of the Market.” Scott Burris, Director of the Center for Health Law, Policy and Practice.

18) “The Amount of Return You Can Expect From a Diversified Equity Portfolio Is Inversely Correlated to the Market Valuation at the Start of the Holding Period. It Is One of the Most Robust Statistical Relationships in Modern Finance.” Todd Tresidder, Financial Mentor Blog.

19) “Why Would Your Job Be Jeopardized By Such a Sensible Claim?” Marcelle Chauvet, Economics Professor at University of California.

20) “As Attorney. Tax Expert and Financial Writer Rob Bennett Told Us, the Problem Is That, By the Time Shiller Published His Research, Many Big Names Had Already Endorsed Buy-and-Hold.” ZeroHedge.com.

21) “This Seems to Me to Be a Fundamental Challenge to Some of the Most Basic Tenets of the Bogleheads Paradigm.” Bogleheads Forum Poster.

22) “I’ve Had Similar Experiences. I Know of Two Young Professors Who Wanted to Do Research on Fundamental Index and Reported to Me That Their Colleagues Advised Them That This Line of Research Could Derail Their Career Prospects.” Rob Arnott, Financial Analysts Journal Editor.

23) “This Sort of Intimidation Is Not Acceptable. The Cigarette and Pharmaceutical Industries Found Research Supporting Their Products By Funding It. But That Was Big Money Supporting Outcomes, Not Dissuading Others.” Lyn Graham, 25-Year CPA.

24) “Financial Economists Gave Little Warning to the Public About the Fragility of Their Models. There Is No Ethical Code for Professional Economic Scientists. There Should Be One.” Paper Titled The Financial Crisis and the Systemic Failure of Academic Economics.

25) “The Situation [Referring to the Intimidation Tactics Used to Silence Academic Researcher Wade Pfau’s Reporting of the Dangers of Buy-and-Hold Investing Strategies] Seems Well Below Any Professional and Academic Acceptable Standards.” Albert Sanchez Graells, Law Lecturer.

26) “This Is What Investing Should Be — Calculated, Deliberate, Confident, Informed and Simple.” Aaron Friday, Owner of Aaron’s Blob Blog.

27) “It Is Obvious That Rob, in Attempting to Identify New Safe Withdrawal Rate Strategies…Is Goring Your Ox. If Rob Improves on the Safe Withdrawal Rate Methodology, the Implication Is Clear: You Are All, Metaphorically Out of Business.” Bogleheads Forum Poster.

28) “Returns Are for the Most Part a Matter of Simple Arithmetic …. Much of Our Industry Seems Fearful of Basic Arithmetic of This Sort.” Rob Arnott, Financial Analysts Journal Editor.

29) “The Notion That Rich Valuations Will Not Be Followed by Sub-Par Long-Term Returns Is a Speculative Idea That Runs Counter to All Historical Evidence. It Is an Iron Law of Finance That Valuations Drive Long-Term Returns.” John Hussman.

30) “If the Response Is ‘Who Knew?”, It Won’t Be Much Comfort for Retirees in the Employment Line at Wal-Mart. This Is Especially True Since a Rational Understanding of History and the Drivers of Longer-Term Stock Returns Can Help Retirees to Avoid That Surprise.” Ed Easterling, Author of Unexpected Returns.

Rob

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

And there you go with yet another long winded post to try and distract as well as avoid the subject. You made up the 10% number. You also have no supporters. Your comment section here and on your own boards have zero comments, other than critics. You claim people are too afraid to post and THAT is what is silly.

Here are fifteen comments that people have made about my work, out of hundreds that I could cite:

1) “I Can Appreciate Rob’s Comments….Buy-and-Hold? For the Most Part, a Long Obsolete Theory.” Neal Deutsch, Certified Financial Planner.

2) “Rob’s Arguments in Favor of Value Investing Actually Make a Lot of Sense in a Way That Should Make Any Rational Buy-and-Holder Uncomfortable.” Pop Economics Blog.

3) “Rob Bennett Says that Market Timing Based on Aggregate P/E Ratios Can Be a Far More Effective Strategy. This Claim Is Consistent With Shiller’s Analysis and I Can See How It Might Be So.” Rajiv Segthi, Economics Professor at Columbia University.

4) “FIRECalc May Not Be the Last Word on Safe Withdrawal Rates.” Jonathan Clements, Wall Street Journal.

5) “In Rob Bennett’s Case, He Was Banned for No Known Listed Forum Policy. Except His Viewpoint Was Different From Other Bogleheads and He Was Perceived As a Threat.” Investor Junkie Blog.

6) “I Am Intrigued By Your Ideas.” Adam Butler, Portfolio Manager.

7) “The Calculators on Your Site Are Great Resources. It Amazes Me How So Many People Can Say ‘Valuations Matter,’ Yet in the Next Breath, They’ll Say That We Should Ignore Valuations.” John Marlowe, Logistics Analyst at Hess Corporation.

8) “His Approach Is Both Mathematically Rigorous and Easy to Understand.” Online Investing AI Blog.

9) “I Certainly Have Seen the Academic Profession Squelching Unfashionable Ideas and Have Often Been on the Wrong Side of It. Kuhn Shows How Most Pathbreaking Scientific Ideas Are Rejected At First, Usually for Decades.” Carol Osler, Brandeis International Business School.

10) “Rob Bennett Was an Early Pioneer in 3rd Generation Modeling by Advocating (Through Various Online Forums) that Withdrawal Rates Must Be Adjusted for Market Valuations Consistent with Research by Campbell and Shiller.” Todd Tresidder, Financial Mentor Blog.

11) “I Am Fascinated by the Growing Body of Research That Revolves Around the P/E10 Ratio by Robert Shiller, Doug Short, Wade Pfau, Michael Kitces, John Hussman, Crestmont Research. Jim Otat, Mike Philbrick, Adam Butler and Rob Bennett.” Kay Conheady in Advisor Perspectives.

12) “A Safe Withdrawal Rate Is Very Dependent on the Valuation of the Stock Market on the Retirement Date.” Economist Magazine.

13) “I Have Read Everything I Can About Valuation-Informed Indexing. Buy-and-Hold Is Extremely Problematic. I Respect the Passion, Hard Work and Research That You Have Put Into This Very Important Issue. Your Work Has Huge Value.” Carl Richards, Owner of Clearwater Asset Management.

14) “The World of Personal Finance Blogging Needs More Rob Bennetts. He’s Passionate. He’s Intelligent. He’s Writing Things That Go Against the Grain.” Financial Uproar Blog.

15) “The Wealth Management Industry Seems Intent on Containing This Discussion for Fear Clients Might Discover that the Emperor Has No Clothes.” Adam Butler, Portfolio Manager.

My best and warmest wishes to you and yours, Sammy.

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:

By your own definition, there are no goons, except for you.

I have goonishness within me. I was a Buy-and-Holder myself for several years, as you know. The killer is that, even after I had put forward my famous post of the morning of May 13, 2002, I still believed in Buy-and-Hold. I realized that the Buy-and-Holders got the retirement numbers wrong. But I still believed in the strategy that caused them to do that. Beat that one, you know?

And of course you saying that I am the only Goon is itself a goonish thing to say. You would be less of a Goon if you could recognize the goonishness within yourself. Being a human is hard!

Here’s the song:

My best wishes to you, dear friend.

Rob the Goon

 

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

“As you know, I am focused nowadays on writing my book. There’s a sentence in Chapter Thirteen where I say: “This is the most important book ever published in the field of personal finance.”

You are so detached from reality.

Yeah, yeah.

If you weren’t worried about going to prison, you wouldn’t be posting here, Anonymous. Please give me a freakin’ break.

Best. wishes etc.

Detached 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 lack of comments show that Get Rich Quick strategies can achieve high levels of popularity before they are exposed as scams, Anonymous.”

You can make any excuse that you want. Heck, you could claim that little green men from Mars have zapped the comments section to keep VII from spreading beyond planet earth.

The logical conclusion is that people have no interest and/or do not agree with what you say.

The same story has played out at every site that I have posted at for 17 years now. There is a significant number that has an interest and there is a significant number that agrees with what I say. But that group is far outnumbered by the Buy-and-Holders and a small percentage of the Buy-and-Holders are 20 times more intense in their opposition to open discussion as the minority is in support of it (and the majority of Buy-and-Holders tolerate the abusiveness of the intense ones, rendering their tactics effective). Those are the realities as of today.

Is there something that I can do for you?

I acknowledge these realities. There is nothing that I can do about them at the moment. I have tried lots of things. Nothing that I have tried has gotten us to where we need to be to make forward progress at this time. So what can I do? I am physically incapable of saying that I believe that Greaney included a valuation adjustment in his study. I would be going to the wrong side of the felony line myself if I did that. So that’s out. So what options do I have? I am waiting. I am writing my book and I am writing my weekly column and I am responding to your comments here and I am waiting. I do not want to wait. I want to move forward. But I have not been able to obtain the help that I need to obtain for us all to move forward. So I am waiting.

It is my strong sense that there is something else that you would like me to do for you. But I am not even able to guess what it might be. If you tell me, I will tell you whether it is possible or not. If you don’t tell me, I will just have to accept that that is the way it is.

I am not able to figure out what it might be that I can do for you that I have not already done.

I wish you well. I always wish you well. Is there something else?

Minority-View-Advocate Rob

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

You have said that we should avoid retirement failures and (as said above) be focused on effective investing. Those are your words. Why do you avoid taking about your track record and your own experiences? Don’t you think people can learn from your failures?

My investment strategies have worked fine, Sammy. If you presume that we are going to see a 60 percent price drop sometime over the next year or two or three, I am ahead of the game because I locked in a return of 3.5 percent real from TIPS and IBonds back when that was available.

The only reason why I need to reenter the work force is because of the insanely abusive posting of a small number of Buy-and-Holders (and because of the reluctance of the larger community of Buy-and-Holders to call them out on their abusive and in some cases criminal behavior.) The conclusion that people should draw from that is that there is something wrong with the Buy-and-Hold strategy. If advocates of the strategy believed that they could defend it in civil and reasoned discussion, they would avoid abusive tactics.

You follow the strategy, I am sure of that. To that extent, you have confidence in it. But you believe that the strategy will lose supporters if people who do not believe in it are permitted to make the case against it in civil and reasoned discussions. So your level of confidence is not at all high. That’s the worst of all worlds. You have enough confidence to go with the strategy but not enough to stick with it when your belief in it is tested, which is what will happen in the next price crash.

Please consider for a moment what it means that stock prices always drop to a CAPE value of 8 at the end of a bull/bear cycle That’s crazy. Why would we as a people elect to price our holdings at one-half of their fair value, making ourselves feel like we are much poorer than we are in reality? That’s just as crazy as the irrational exuberance we are living through today. It’s irrational depression. Do you know what brings that on? We get to those crazy low prices when the last Buy-and-Holder gives up and sells.

Shiller’s breakthrough is to show that stock investing is primarily an emotional endeavor, not entirely a rational endeavor. Your abusive posting is evidence that Shiller is right. To post abusively is to give in to emotional impulses. We should be talking about this stuff on every site. The Buy-and-Holders cannot imagine talking about abusive stuff because they cannot imagine talking about emotional stuff. But this is the stuff that drives stock prices, according to Shiller’s Nobel-prize-winning research.

Emotional (But at Least I Am Aware of It and Try to Rein It In) 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:

Wade said his job was never threatened. As we have all learned by now, you made up the story about death threats. I can’t find one single piece of evidence that backs up a thing you say.

It will be interesting to see what the members of your jury say, Anonymous.

I wish you the best of luck with it, in any event.

Rob

A) Academic Researcher Wade Pfau’s Statements Showing Interest In and Confidence in Rob Bennett’s Work

1) “I do cite you and John Walter Russell in my paper as the earliest and strongest advocates of this approach [New School safe-withdrawal-rate research].

2) “Are you aware of Shiller offering asset allocation advice based on PE10? …. If you read Rob Bennett’s stuff carefully, I think he did provide an important contribution in terms of describing a way for PE10 to guide asset allocation for long-term conservative investors. I also think he was right on the issue of safe withdrawal rates.” — Posted at the Bogleheads Forum discussion board.

3) “I am also extremely grateful to Rob Bennett for motivating this topic and contributing his experience and encouragement.” — Written in Acknowledgments section of Wade’s breakthrough research paper.

4)”You deserve much of the credit as the whole idea of Valuation-Informed Indexing belongs to you.”

5) “I definitely need to cite some of your work as the founder of Valuation-Informed Indexing, as I have not found anyone else who can lay claim to that. Shiller pointed out the predictive power of PE10 but never discussed how to incorporate it into asset allocation, as far as I know.”

B) Academic Researcher Wade Pfau’s Statements on the Superiority of Valuation-Informed Indexing Over Buy-and-Hold

1) “What you see in the top part of the graph for each year is the amount of wealth accumulated after 30 years for someone following Buy-and-Hold against someone following Valuation-Informed Indexing….Valuation-Informed Indexing provides more wealth for 102 of the 110 rolling 30-year periods, while Buy-and-Hold did better in 8 of the periods.”

2) “I will take steps in my final paper to test a wide variety of assumptions about asset allocation, valuation-based decision rules, whether the period is 10, 20, 30, or 40 years, lump-sum vs. dollar-cost averaging, and so on, and to show that the results are quite robust to changes in any of these assumptions.”

3) “Any data mining that I am doing is in favor of buy-and-hold, not in favor of market timing.”

4) “The findings for “market timing” are so robust anyway, that it hardly matters how we do it.”

5) “The maximum drawdown from market timing is much less. That is how far the portfolio drops from past highs to current lows. The Buy-and-Holder once experienced a 60.96% drop, whereas the worst drop for market timing was 24.16%.”

6) “Market timing provides signficantly higher returns at a comparable level of risk.”

7) “The market timer enjoys a far less risky strategy.”

8) “On a risk-adjusted basis, market-timing strategies provide comparable returns as a 100 percent stocks Buy-and-Hold strategy but with substantially less risk. Meanwhile, market timing provides comparable risks and the same average asset allocation as a 50/50 fixed allocation strategy, but with much higher returns.”

9) “If everyone increased exposure after a market fall and vice versa, then this would dampen out the big swings in the market aggregates, and we might get shallower boom/bust cycles.”

10) ““‘I’m excited about this, as depending on what you have already done, I think I can design a study using the Shiller data to provide historical simulations of Valuation-Informed Indexing strategies against fixed Buy-and-Hold strategies and also lifecycle strategies (declining allocation to stocks as one ages). If Valuation-Informed Indexing consistently outperforms fixed and lifecycle strategies, then the proof is in the pudding so to speak. Given how well valuations help to explain withdrawal rates, I think there is a lot of potential for this topic.”

11) “Yes, Virginia, Valuation-Informed Indexing Works!”

12) “It makes complete sense to have an equity allocation that is in some way flexible. Having a completely inelastic demand for equities is a bit bonkers; no-one acts that way with life’s other important commodities.”

13) “I wrote up the programs to test your Valuation-Informed Indexing strategies against Buy-and-Hold, and I must say that the results look very promising…. I am quite excited about the findings so far. As you say in the podcast, Valuation-Informed Indexing should beat Buy-and-Hold about 90 percent of the time, and I am getting results that support this for various strategies.”

14) “I have been toying with the idea of sending the paper to the Journal of Finance, which is the most prestigious journal in academic finance.”

15) “Now that I am accounting for risk, I am even more amazed by how well Valuation-Informed Indexing works.”

16) You shouldn’t be too excited with great wealth accumulations if they happened due to unusually high valuations, and low wealth accumulations shouldn’t be as scary if valuations are also quite low.”

17) “My idea is to show many different tables with results over the whole period for returns and risks. Valuation-Informed Indexing always provides more returns for often less risk.”

18) “No matter what I try, Valuation-Informed Indexing will still perform better in 85-95% of cases for 30 years.”

19) “I have a new figure for showing this as well. And a nice figure showing the outperformance percentages across rolling periods of lengths between 1 and 40 years. I think it is all quite persuasive.”

20) “You haven’t seen anything yet! This was just the secondary study. I’m still working on the main one!”

C) Academic Researcher Wade Pfau’s Statements of Incredulity That He Was the First Academic Researcher to Examine the Valuation-Informed Indexing Strategy

1) ” I know that there is an extensive literature about the predictability of long-term stock returns dating back to Campbell and Shiller’s work in the mid-1990s. I also know that there is an extensive literature about short-term market timing strategies…. But my question is about LONG-TERM market timing strategies. In other words, using market timing over periods of at least 10 years to obtain better returns than a Buy-and-Hold strategy. The literature seems slim.”

2) “Let me just explain a bit more why I posted about this here. Valuation-Informed Indexing has had critics for years, but until Norbert did it in 2008, nobody seemed to have provided a serious investigation of it. I just couldn’t understand why. And that bothered me.”

3) “Two papers by Fisher and Statman are still all I can find that provide evidence against long-term market timing.”

4) “I’m so confused by why Fisher and Statman didn’t consider risk in their idiot switching tests. Valuation-Informed Indexing is much less risky by pretty much any standard I consider. I must wonder… did I make a mistake somewhere? Why haven’t academics already published research about this?”

D) Academic Researcher Wade Pfau’s Statements on the Dangers of the Conventional Retirement Planning Advice

1) “The traditional approach to retirement planning (as described on pages 10 and 11 of The Bogleheads’ Guide to Retirement Planning, for example) is counterproductive and possibly damaging.”

2) “Retirees now frequently base their retirement decisions on the portfolio success rates found in research such as the Trinity study…. This is not the information that current and prospective retirees need for making their withdrawal rate decisions.”

3) “This article provides favorable evidence based on the historical record for long-term conservative investors to obtain improved retirement planning outcomes (lower savings rates, higher withdrawal rates) using valuation-based asset allocation strategies.”

4) Wade sent me a link to an article in Business Week that was published more than eight years after my post pointing out the errors in the Old School retirement studies and which he characterized as “quite sympathetic to the point you were trying to make all along”.

5) “Though I was only trying to do an Old School safe-withdrawal-rate study, all that I ended up doing was showing in a different way what you had been saying all along: the safe withdrawal rate changes with valuations.”

6) “Valuations are the driving factor. ”

7) “This is similar to your drunk driving analogy, which I agree with.” The discredited but uncorrected retirement studies find that in most circumstances a 4 percent withdrawal rate provides a huge cushion for the retiree using it. However, in each of the three cases in history when stocks reached insanely high price levels, retirements using a 4 percent withdrawal came within a whisker of failing. To say that this shows that a 4 percent withdrawal is “100 percent safe” (these words are used in the Greaney study) for a retirement beginning at a time of insanely high price levels is like saying that driving drunk is “100 percent safe” because 97 sober drivers drove their cars 20 miles without incident while 3 drunk drivers were paralyzed for life in car accidents but did not die. The fact that 4 percent only worked by a whisker in the cases in which valuations were high at the beginning of the retirement shows that a 4 percent withdrawal is high-risk at times of high valuations, not that it is “100 percent safe.”

8) ” Actually, this issue shouldn’t really even be all that controversial. It’s just common sense that the probabilities from the Trinity study shouldn’t be interpreted as forward-looking probabilities for new retirees.”

9) Naturally, I am finding that Valuation-Informed Indexing can allow you to reach a wealth target with a lower savings rate, use a higher withdrawal rate, and also have a lower “safe” savings rate, than a fixed allocation.

E) Academic Researcher Wade Pfau’s Statements Showing His Concerns that Continuing to Report Honestly on the Investing Realities in the Face of the “Hostile Environment” for Doing So Created by Buy-and-Holders Would Harm His Career

1) “I was trying to pay tribute to your accomplishments in what I knew would be a hostile environment.”

2) “Valuations and long-term investors is a somewhat controversial topic.” Wade posted these words to his blog in October 2011 as his explanation of why he was abandoning his plan of doing further research on the superiority of Valuation-Informed Indexing strategies over Buy-and-Hold strategies. He had told me in earlier days that “You ain’t see nothing yet!” when I praised his breakthrough research in this area. After his flip to the dark side, Wade removed the page containing this blog entry from his site.

3) “We have both read and met to discuss your paper. Unfortunately, we did not find the paper’s incremental contribution to the academic finance literature, assuming the analysis proved to be correct, rose to the level that we are seeking for papers in the JFR. Thus sending the paper to a reviewer would be inefficient.” These words are from an academic journal’s “desk reject” of Wade’s breakthrough research.

4) ) ““ I was discouraged when I first received the “desk reject” by the editors of the same journal that published the Fisher and Statman paper. I realized that I didn’t have a chance with one of the top journals.”

5) “I think I should stay publicly quiet for a while, as I really don’t want anyone sending messages about any topics to officials at my university.”

6) I don’t want them [the Goons] working behind the scenes to derail me.”

7) “I did warn the editor of the Journal of Financial Planning that they may receive some ‘hate mail‘ after I mentioned your name in the safe savings rate paper.”

 

 

Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently posted to the discussion thread for another blog entry at this site, followed by the response comment posted by one of the Greaney Goons:

I certainly take note of the fact that the same pattern repeats over and over again, Anonymous. I don’t think that there has been one day in the past 17 years in which I have not given some thought to it.

But I also have taken note that thousands of people have looked at the retirement study posted at John Greaney’s site over the course of the past 17 years and that not one of them has been able to identify in it an adjustment for the valuation level that applies at the beginning of the retirement.

Please explain.

Puzzled Rob

The John Greaney thing has been explained to you thousands of times. It is another thing that you ignore. I think you dwell on John Greaney as he has publicly embarrassed you in so many ways and you have always wanted revenge.

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

Contrary to your post, it is not just me saying this. It is the common view. You have been banned by most of the major boards and people have stopped talking to you.

It is painful for people to consider the dangers of Buy-and-Hold, as revealed by the last 38 years of peer-reviewed research in this field. Most people hate hearing what I have to say. That much is fair to say. And you are correct to say that I have been banned at every major investing site on the internet and that lots of people who were once friends to me have stopped talking to me. Telling people the realities of stock investing as revealed by the peer-reviewed research in this field is not the quick route to fame and fortune.

People need to hear it all the same. If Shiller is right, we are going to be experiencing another price crash within the next year or two or three. Some people are open enough to these ideas that all they need is to see a few more posts exploring this stuff to become convinced enough to lower their stock allocation and save themselves a lot of pain. Others are not open to that possibility but would benefit from hearing at least a little discussion of these matters so that they will understand better what is happening when the next price crash arrives and brings about a deepening of the economic crisis that began in 2008. There will come a day when people will look at Shiller’s research as a blessing. Most don’t see it that way today. But even those who very much do not see it that way very much need to be exposed to it more than they have been so far. Everyone alive on the planet needs for this debate to be launched. It is a matter of urgent public policy importance.

And you are wrong in suggesting that there have not been hundreds of fine people who have already put their necks on the line and asked that honest posting be permitted. I have had many people, Buy-and-Holders and Valuation-Informed Indexers alike, thank me for my contributions. Some work up the courage to do so publicly only once or twice and then retreat for cover because they do not like the idea of seeing the lives of their loved ones threatened. Others say something only to me and plead with me not to let anyone know their views on these matters. I have had investment professionals call me on the phone and talk to me for hours re these ideas because they want to be able to make use of them in advising their clients and then ask me not to tell anyone that we talked. That sort of thing should never happen. The fact that that sort of thing has happened on so many occasions tells a frightening story — we have as a nation advanced our understanding of how stock investing works in amazing ways in the past four decades but criminal behavior on the part of those who advocate the strategy that came first had held us back from learning what we all very much need to know.

There are some who are so intense in their hatred of any consideration of the last 38 years of peer-reviewed research that they have engaged in criminal acts. There is a larger number who personally would never engage in criminal acts but who feels a good bit of sympathy for those who do and offers them encouragement in quiet ways. And there is a still larger number who is generally complacent re these matters and cant figure out what all the shouting is about. And there is a number that is about equal in size to you Goons that would like to see the discussions held but who is only willing to say so once or twice because they are not willing to pay the price that I have paid to make that happen.

The bottom line is that as a nation we need to have the discussions. So we need to figure out as a people how to overcome the Goon problem. We need the participation of the Normals if the discussions are to achieve their full potential and the Normals will not participate until something is done about the criminal behavior. So we will as a people need to work up the courage to insist on prosecution of the criminal stuff.

I believe that that will happen in the days following the next price crash, when the cost of not having the discussions will be concrete and clear to all. I of course wish that the realities were otherwise, but, given what I have been seeing for over 17 years now, I no longer believe that they are. I believe that we are a good people and I believe that we ultimately will do what needs to be done. But for the moment we do not have it in us. I have tried everything that I can think to try and I have not been able to make the good stuff happen on a widespread scale (I have had amazing success in making it happen on a small scale, such as when I worked with Wade Pfau to co-author the most important piece of peer-reviewed research published in this field in the past 30 hears). It horrifies me to think that it is going to take another price crash to bring us all the other side of The Big Black Mountain. But that is what the history of the discussions of the past 17 years tells me is the case.

Watching and Waiting Rob