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 I search for the string “Academic Researcher Wade Pfau’s Statements Showing Interest ” I get over 50 hits

https://www.google.com/search?q=%22Academic+Researcher+Wade+Pfau%E2%80%99s+Statements+Showing+Interest%22&filter=0

Your ability to cut and paste the same stuff over and over again is an inspiration to us all.

That list of comments from Wade is super. It’s the most concise statement of what Valuation-Informed Indexing is all about that exists today.

And the fact that he stopped saying those sorts of things when you Goons threatened to destroy his career tells the process side of the story very well. It took Wade many years of schooling to obtain his Ph.D. in Economics. When he investigated Valuation-Informed Indexing, he was performing a public service. We all need to know whether it is indeed true that “Yes. Virginia, Valuation-Informed Indexing works!” So, when you Goons threatened him, you committed a crime against every investor alive on the planet today.

Not this boy, you know. Not in 17 years, not in 17 billion years. The only way in which I ever want to be associated with this massive act of financial fraud is in becoming known as the person who EXPOSED it.

I naturally wish you all good things. But there are limits, you know? I mean, come on.

Felony-Free 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:

In reading Wade’s comments I present day as well as the fact that he no longer speaks with you, I would not call him a true believer.

The comments below show that Wade is a true believer. Things he said because you Goons threatened to destroy his career if he continued doing honest work in this field obviously count for nothing. Our laws against financial fraud are good and necessary laws.

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:

“Valuation-Informed Indexing is linked to everything. Absolutely everything.”

Wrong again, Sluggo.

You’re entitled to your opinion. But I obviously hold a different opinion.

When I am considering what to do with the hours of life given me, I obviously have to go by my opinion when making decisions. Yes?

You do not need to go by my opinion when making decisions as to what to do with your life. You’re not me.

But I sincerely believe that it is important to get the retirement planning numbers (and much else) right. I think it would be better not to have any investing boards than to have them and to ban honest posting on the past 38 years of peer-reviewed research at them. You will say that that’s a “strident” viewpoint or some such thing. But I don’t think so. I think it is common sense.

I wish you the best of luck in your life endeavors, Anonymous. But I cannot go down the path that you have chosen for yourself. I cannot do it. I care about the people who read my stuff and I feel an obligation to share with them my honest beliefs about any matters that I post on.

I am not a Buy-and-Holder. I am a Valuation-Informed Indexer. It would make me happy if that were okay with you. But if it is not, I just have to accept that reality. I cannot pretend to be something that I am not. That one’s a non-starter and it has been for 17 years now. I wish that I could say that I posted with complete honesty even prior to May 13, 2002. It shames me that I cannot say that. I know that I never want to go back to pretending that I believe that Greaney got the numbers right in his retirement study.

And I think that posting honestly re all the other topics that have come up over the past 17 years is a good idea too. If we were all thinking clearly, I don’t think there would be a single voice raised in dissent to the proposition that we all need to feel free to post honestly for any of our boards or blogs to serve any good purpose. I acknowledge that more than a single voice has been raised in dissent. But I have to observe that it scrambles my brain each time I try to get it around that one. Holy moly!

Your good friend,
Sluggo

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 can try and put lipstick on a pig, but the archives are there to see all the nasty comments you made about Jack.

You can’t even stop for one moment when it comes to your agenda. On the day after Bogle’s death, you still have to say how you think he is wrong, all in an effort to try and promote yourself and your agenda. I bet that if you attended his funeral, you would find some way to promote yourself and VII, rather than honor Jack.

You can try and put lipstick on a pig, but the archives are there to see all the nasty comments you made about Jack.

The Post Archives show that I have expressed my love for the man on hundreds of occasions going back to the earliest days of our discussions re these matters and continuing right through today. The Post Archives show that I rank the man as the second most important investing analyst in history, second only to Shiller. What a meanie I am!

You can even stop for one moment when it comes to your agenda.

It’s a pretty darn important agenda, Anonymous. There are millions of people who have put together their retirement plans pursuant to the demonstrably false claims advanced in the Buy-and-Hold retirement studies. If you think that Bogle wants to see those millions of people suffer failed retirements, we have very, very, very different beliefs about the purposes to which the man directed his life energies.

I bet that if you attended his funeral, you would find some way to promote yourself and VII, rather than honor Jack.

If some attending the funeral with me asked me what I thought of the man, I would say what I have said in these comments. I would tell both the good and bad sides of the story. I think that the cover-up of Bogle’s mistakes has done him great harm. I think that his contributions look even more important when one tells the full truth about what we know about how stock investing works in the year 2019. I think that the 17-year cover-up has done Jack a huge disservice. Until he died, he had an opportunity to set the record straight himself. Now that opportunity is lost to him. If Bogle is looking down on us today possessing a greater clarity of mind than he possessed yesterday, I think it would be fair to say that he is probably shedding a tear at having been deprived of that opportunity to set things straight before he was required to take his leave of us.

Again, one’s take on these matters is always going to be influenced by what one believes about how Bogle felt about these matters deep down inside. I think it would be fair to say that my assessment of the man’s character is 20 times more charitable than your own.

My sincere take.

Bogle-Helping (in a Spirit of TRUE Charity) 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 Pfau doesn’t talk to you and he said his job was never threatened.

Here’s what he said in the days before he was threatened:

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:

Bernie Madoff was found guilty by his peers. Your peers have found you guilty and have banned you from the boards. If anyone is going to prison, it would be you.

Putting the guy who pointed out an error in a retirement study in prison while not putting the guy who failed to correct the error for 17 years in prison would be 100 percent upside-down, Anonymous. But that’s Get Rich Quick logic, you know? It’s all emotion. We all WANT those numbers on our portfolio statements to be real when stocks are priced at two times their fair value.

Madoff was the toast of the town in the days before his investors saw their life savings disappear. That’s when the emotion turned. We are going to have to wait to see how millions of investors react when they see more than half of their life savings disappear. I believe that people are going to be pissed. But I can’t prove it, you know? We are going to have to wait to see how things play out.

I know that I am not going to switch to the other side. That’s ASKING for a prison sentence! Not this boy, you know?

I wish you the best of luck with it. If there is ever anything that I can do to help you out, I will be there in three seconds and you won’t have to ask a second time. But there obviously are limits. If you think that I am going to say that I believe that Greaney’s retirement study contains a valuation adjustment after all, you just have not been paying attention. Not this boy. No freakin’ way, no freakin’ how.

I hope that helps at least a tiny bit.

Right-Side-Up (I Think) 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:

Sure, we can open every investing board to you, Rob. Here is what you have to do. 1) Stick to the topic instead of hijacking a thread. 2) Keep your responses short and to the point, instead of long diatribes 3) Answer questions directly, instead of evading or changing the subject 4) provide 3rd party evidence to support your claims (such as your unsubstantiated claims of job threats and death threats).

Seems reasonable, correct?

I am 100 percent happy to have the same rules that apply to Buy-and-Holders apply to Valuation-Informed Indexers.

I always stick to the topic being addressed in a thread to which I post. But, because the far-reaching implications of Shiller’s “revolutionary” (his word) research findings have not been widely explored, simple statements that I make describing how stock investing works if the last 37 years of peer-review research in this field is legitimate research cause nuclear explosions among some Buy-and-Holders and it is those nuclear explosions that highjack threads.

I don’t want to see any thread highjackings. I want us all to enjoy learning experiences by sharing our sincere takes with each other. When I put my famous post of the morning of May 13, 2002, to the Motley Fool board, there were hundreds of community members who described the discussion as the most exciting and helpful one that they had ever seen at that board. So we know that there is a huge interest in exploration of these matters.

But a number of Goon posters responded to that thread and hundreds of follow-up threads started by many different community members with death threats and other insanely abusive thread-hijacking tactics. It is you Goons who want the threads discussing Valuation-Informed Indexing hijacked. The published rules of every site prohibit the tactics that you have employed. For the majority of community members who want to be able to discuss these matters in civil and reasoned discussions, we need to have enough community members willing to stick their necks out and demand that the site owners take effective action against you Goons when you advance your insanely abusive thread-highjacking tactics. Are you willing to help out, Anonymous?

It is definitely my preference to keep my posts short when I am able to give effective responses to intelligent and legitimate questions with short posts. But you Goons have been spreading a lot of confusion re these matters for many years now. Many investors have heard the phrase “timing never works” so many times now that they assume that there must be some truth to it. This is of course false. Shiller showed in 1981 that valuations affect long-term returns. If that is so, then stock investing risk is not static but variable (changing with valuation changes). If stock investing risk grows larger when stock valuations go higher, then investors seeking to keep their risk profiles roughly constant over time MUST adjust their stock allocation in response to dramatic valuation shifts. That is, market timing is MANDATORY for investors seeking long-term investing success.

The confusion on this point stems from a failure on the part of our Wall Street Con Men friends to emphasize the critically important distinction between short-term timing (which really does not work) and long-term timing (which always works and which is mandatory for investors seeking to keep their risk profile roughly constant over time). When you Goons put forward thousands of posts that fail to note the critically important distinction between short-term timing (bad) and long-term timing (very, very, very good — it is impossible to exercise price discipline when buying stock without practicing long-term timing), you cause confusion over what Shiller’s research says and I am not able to respond to questions from my fellow community members effectively without spelling out the distinction over and over again, which of course makes my posts longer than I would like them to be or than they would need to be if only you Goons were willing to participate in the discussions we all want and need to have in a less disruptive manner.

I of course always answer questions as directly as possible and I of course never aim to change the subject. It is of course my intent to continue answering questions as directly as possible and to continue to avoid ever changing the subject.

I am of course happy to provide a mountain of evidence showing how your criminally abusive behavior has held up progress in our community discussions at a large number of boards for 17 years now. I know that the vast majority of community members finds the discussion of death threats and threats of career destruction and board bannings and financial fraud and prison sentences extremely unpleasant. I obviously share that point of view. So I would be grateful if you Goons would just knock off the funny business 100 percent by the close of business today.

Make sense?

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 I will go by what Wade Pfau says”

Me too. But unlike you, I will go by what Wade said LAST.

“The reality is that you are causing me 1000x more career damage than the Goons ever could have”

“stop harassing me all the time.”

“You’ve violated my trust in so many countless ways and yet you still proclaim to be my friend.”

“I was not intimidated by any alleged threats, and I wasn’t lying about it.”

“just the other day you were advocating that I be sent to jail.”

Going by what Wade said LAST, you’re a real asshole.

Unlike you, I will go by what Wade said LAST. Going by what Wade said LAST, you’re a real asshole.

I am going to continue to go by what Wade said during the 16 months in which he felt free to give voice to his honest beliefs. The stuff that he said after you Goons threatened to get him fired from his job if he continued doing honest work and after Bogle signaled that is okay with your use of those intimidation tactics, don’t count for much, in my assessment. If anything, they count against Buy-and-Hold. If the Buy-and-Holders believed that it would be possible to make a strong case for their strategy in civil and reasoned debate, they would go for it. They employ intimidation tactics because they are not able to come up with any other way of “defending” the strategy, given what the last 37 years of peer-reviewed research shows us all about how stock investing works in the real world.

Asshole (Not Really!) 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:

People tried to have a respectful discussion with you, but you decided that your agenda was more important. As such, there was no choice but to ban you.

My agenda is to open every discussion board and blog on the internet to honest posting re what the last 37 years of peer-reviewed research in this field teaches us all about stock investing.

If you have a problem with that, you have a problem with the laws of the United States. In the United States, we have laws against financial fraud. I follow those laws. I approve of those laws. I think those laws are good and necessary laws.

It will be interesting to see how things play out in the days following the next price crash. I have a funny hunch that the people of the United States will decide at that time there there is no choice but to place you behind prison bars, where you belong. But we of course are going to have to wait a bit to find out for sure.

I wish you the best of luck in all your future life endeavors, in any event. I hope that that helps at least a tiny bit.

Agenda-Pursuing (and Proud of 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:

“I don’t think that I suffer from a delusion.”

But you do. You have been told this time and again by many people. You choose to not believe it. You then convince yourself otherwise by interpreting things only in a way that fits with your desires. You don’t have the analytical capability and discernment to really judge if you are right or don’t. You only want to believe you are right and then you immediately reflect anything that doesn’t fit a story you want to have cast.

You’re describing cognitive dissonance, Anonymous. I am saying that you suffer from cognitive dissonance and you are saying that I do. It’s a standoff.

The back-and-forth reminds me of the comment that was made by one of the members of a peer-review committee that rejected the research paper that I co-authored with Wade Pfau (and which I view as the most important peer-reviewed research published in this field in 30 years). He said: “The elephant-in-the-room question is — What is the ultimate criterion for one to conclude with confidence that one strategy is better than the other?”

Standing by itself, the comment is of course fine. There is a world of difference between Buy-and-Hold and Valuation-Informed Indexing and the issues at stake are of the utmost importance — the retirements of millions of people are riding on the answer to these questions. So naturally it is so that we all would like to identify the ultimate criterion for concluding with confidence that one strategy is better than the other. I heartily endorse that man’s words.

Except in the context in which they were advanced. The words were offered to explain a rejection of a research paper that would go a great distance toward helping us all to figure out which strategy is superior if only it were featured on the front page of the New York Times. If we do not as a society know for certain which strategy is superior — and 100 percent of the evidence that has accumulated over the past 17 years shows that as a society we do not know for certain which strategy is superior– then we should make it public policy concern #1 to get to the bottom of that one. That means working it and working it and working it, talking it over and talking it over and talking it over, exploring in depth issue after issue after issue after issue.

You say: “You don’t have the analytical capability and discernment to really judge if you are right.” I don’t think that’s so. But there is a problem with me assessing for myself whether it is so or not. If it were so, I would not be able to perform a proper assessment no matter how I tried. So I need to run my ideas past others to over time gain the ability to make a clear and firm and balanced and confident assessment. But that is of course the very thing that I cannot do for so long as the Ban on Honest Posting remains in effect. So I oppose the ban.

I have seen amazing lows and amazing high. The Goon stuff is the lowest of the lows that I have ever seen on the internet. The Goon stuff goes so low that I often hesitate to mention it in my writings because the Normals whom I need to persuade to prevail in these debates have never in their lifetimes encountered anything so low and so my accurate reports of things that you Goons have done cause them to doubt me rather than to doubt the investment strategy for which these low tactics are put to use.

The highs are just as high as the lows are low. Say that I am right on only one point — that the retirement study posted at John Greaney’s site lacks an adjustment for the valuation level that applies on the day the retirement begins. If I got everything else that I have said over the past 17 years wrong and I got that one right, I have made the biggest contribution to this field that anyone has made over the past 17 years. In the event that the Greaney study truly lacks a valuation adjustment (and it does), Greaney didn’t just destroy the lives of the thousands of people at the Motley Fool site who used his study to plan their retirements. He destroyed the lives of MILLIONS through his insanely abusive posting tactics.

We had thousands of people at that site who would have helped us to get the word out about the errors in the Buy-and-Hold retirement studies to every investor alive on the planet today. Greaney isn’t the only one who made that mistake. EVERY Buy-and-Hold retirement study makes that mistake. And 95 percent of all articles that have been published in recent decades telling people how to plan their retirements are rooted in the findings of those Buy-and-Hold retirement studies. Our failure to get those studies corrected for 17 years now is the biggest economic and political issue before us as a people today. The survival of our economic system is at stake. It is possible that even the survival of our political system is at stake.

Or so Rob Bennett truly believes, you know?

I could be wrong. I am one of those darned humans, like Greaney and Bogle and Lindauer, and we are known as a species to make terrible mistakes from time to time. But I cannot in good conscience take the word of internet Goons that I am wrong as gospel. Those millions of people need to have someone stand up for them and insist that every discussion board and blog on the internet be opened to honest posting re these matters. I have been elected for the job. So I am going to give it my best shot. I couldn’t live with myself if I did any less.

If the entire internet is opened to honest posting and the result of a civil and reasoned debate in which people from “both sides” participate without any fear of being punished in any way for stating their sincere views re these matters shows that I am wrong about these matters, I pray that I will have the grace to say so in a clear and simple and direct way. But it is only a civil and reasoned debate that could persuade me that I am wrong. I don’t give much credence to death threats or demands for unjustified board bannings or thousands of acts of defamation or threats to get academic researchers fired from their jobs. I could not live with myself if I let acts of intimidation persuade me to sell out my country. No this boy. That’s not what I am about and it’s not a close call.

So we will have to wait a bit and see how it all plays out. If Shiller is right in what he says in his Nobel-prize-winning research (I believe that he is), then we are going to see another price crash in the next year or two or three. If the CAPE level tells us the amount of emotion present in investors at a given point in time, then a lower CAPE will be signifying less emotional investors. That is, investors more open to engaging in civil and reasoned discussion of the last 37 years of peer-reviewed research in this field. I think that’s where things are headed. We will see. I will always say everything that I can to put you Goons and our Wall Street Con Men friends in the best possible light without crossing the felony line myself. But I will never say that Greaney’s study contains a valuation adjustment. There are limits. Prison life is not for me.

I naturally wish you the best of luck in all of your future life endeavors, my dear Goon friend.

Cognitive Dissonance Sufferer (Not! — I Think!) Rob