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

Over at Bogleheads.org they are celebrating the 10 year anniversary of the site’s founding. As you know, your behavior at morningstar.com played a major part in the creation of the board.

Feb. 19, 2017 is a very special day. It marks the 10th birthday of this Bogleheads.org forum.

Born out of frustration over the lack of moderation at our previous home, this moderated Bogleheads.org forum has been a remarkable success. Over the past 10 years, we’ve had over 3,000,000 posts on more than 200,000 topics. We now have nearly 57,000 members and about 10 times that number of guests (affectionately known as “lurkers”). Our viewer numbers are off the charts. We get more than 70,000 unique visitors per day from all around the world. The forum averages around 4,000,000 hits per day.

https://www.bogleheads.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=9&t=211525&newpost=3246896

I’m grateful to you for providing us the link, Observer.

I am sure you understand that I do not agree with the thrust of the words quoted. I would say that there is great POTENTIAL value because of the 57,000 members and 570,000 (estimated) lurkers. Those people COULD be adding to the world’s knowledge of how investing works in a big way and it is certainly their intent and their desire to do so. But so long as fully honest posting on the implications of the last 36 years of peer-reviewed research is prohibited at the board, that potential cannot be realized.

In fact, the reality is just the opposite of the promised potential. So long as honest posting re the last 36 years of peer-reviewed research is prohibited, the board has a NEGATIVE influence. It does not help people learn how to invest effectively. It encourages them in the pursuit of their Get Rich Quick fantasies. The bigger the Bogleheads Forum is, the more harm it does, the more lives it destroys. And that will remain so for so long as fully honest posting re safe withdrawal rates and scores of other critically important investment-related topics remains prohibited.

This is as clear as anything could be clear to me, Observer. If the people running the Bogleheads Forum were thinking clearly, they would agree with me. If you asked them when they started the Vanguard Diehards board whether they believed that honest posting re the peer-reviewed research should be permitted, they would have said with zero hesitation that of course it should be permitted, that the question is an absurd one. They justified in their minds an exception to that belief when they were faced with my claim that it is not possible to calculate the safe withdrawal rate accurately without considering the valuation level that applies on the day the retirement begins and all of the ugliness that followed took place because they could not bear to live up to their own ideals. It was just too hard for them even to admit the possibility that their hero Jack Bogle had made a mistake when he failed to acknowledge the “revolutionary” (Shiller’s words) implications of Shiller’s finding that valuations affect long-term returns back when those findings became public back in 1981.

I believe that I possess a right and a responsibility to post honestly that must be respected at the Bogleheads Forum and at every other investing discussion board and blog on the internet. I believe that every one of my fellow community members, both my Valuation-Informed Indexing friends and my Buy-and-Hold friends, possess that same right and responsibility. I believe that it is a criminal act for me to fail to exercise that responsibility and for the site owners of the Bogleheads Forum to fail to respect that right.

I don’t believe that this one is a close call. I don’t believe that every act of financial fraud that has been revealed over the 15 years will be prosecuted because that would not be practical and because there is a mitigating factor of cognitive dissonance that applies (Bogle and the others who advocate Buy-and-Hold personally believe that it works). But still, in an objective sense it is a felony to insist that posters lie about the numbers that their friends are using to plan their retirements. I love my country and the relentless promotion of this dangerous and irresponsible lie has caused an economic crisis that has caused millions to begin to question their confidence in our system of government. So I don’t want to go there. Not in 15 years, not in 15 billion years. Re that one, my Boglehead friends are going to have to find someone else to participate at their board discussions (it appears from the words quoted above that they have been successful at finding quite a few someone elses).

I love my Boglehead friends, Observer. I wish them all good things. I agree with them on all issues other than the valuations issue and I believe that it is at least their intent to do good. But I cannot in good conscience participate in their discussions for so long as the Ban on Honest Posting re safe withdrawal rates and scores of other critically important investment-related topics remains in place. I believe with my heart , mind and soul that valuations affect long-term returns and that that reality (which has been known to those who follow the peer-reviewed research in this field for 36 years now) affects every issue considered at that board.

I cannot in good conscience put my name up in support of an enterprise that is in the process of destroying millions of middle-class lives and in an ultimate sense threatening the continued viability of the country that I love. I don’t believe that even a single one of my Bogleheads friends would participate in discussions held at that board if he or she were able to see clearly the things that I am able to see clearly because I have worked so hard for 15 years now to overcome the veil of cognitive dissonance that limits their vision today.

I love you guys, Observer. I wish you well. But we can not work together under the conditions that you insist on. I am not able to imagine any circumstance in which that could change.

I personally believe that conditions WILL change in a dramatic way following the next price crash. I believe that at that time we will come to be good friends. But I understand that there is nothing that I can say today that will persuade you that what I foresee happening will ever take place in the real world. So my only realistic option is to continue to do my best to get the word out re the implications of the last 36 years of peer-reviewed research at all places other than the Bogleheads Forum and to hope and pray that doing that successfully will in time generate pressure among responsible people in that board community to demand changes in the operation of that board My personal assessment at this stage of the proceedings is that my efforts will not bear good fruit until the days following the next price crash. But I will continue to give it my best shot. I can obviously do no more and I can obviously do no less.

I hope that all that helps a tiny bit, my long-time Goon friend. My best and warmest wishes to you and yours.

Rob

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

In summary, what we have learned is that Rob Bennett has been wrong about market timing and made a big mistake when he decided many years ago to sit the stock market. As documented on this website and on Rob’s blog, he has been predicting a crash year after year, that has been proven to be false. What is the bigger question is whether this mistake as harmful as his mistake of ceasing to work at the age of 43 with only $400k in savings.

Rob would like everyone to ignore these facts, so he diverts to other topics. Take a look at his website today and you will see him talk about made up death threats (that he refuses to back up with facts) and fairy tales of people going to prison (those that dare to question him).

Thanks for taking time out of your day to share your thoughts with us, Sammy.

My best and warmest wishes to you and yours.

Rob

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

“The only thing that should be banned are violations of the published posting rules.”

Well then, it is easy to see why you have been banned from boards. Take Bogleheads, for example. It bans conspiracy theories.

We’ll have to wait and see how things play out, Anonymous.

I naturally wish you all the best that this life has to offer a person.

Rob

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

What is YOUR definition of “honest posting”. Is there some measure as to the posting being truthful and, if not, it is to be banned?

Honest posting takes place when the poster says what he believes.

You believe in Buy-and-Hold. So you should say “I follow Buy-and-Hold and I urge others to follow Buy-and-Hold.”

I believe in Valuation-Informed Indexing. So I should say “I follow Valuation-Informed Indexing and I urge others to follow Valuation-Informed Indexing.”

The only thing that should be banned are violations of the published posting rules.

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:

Clearly your responsibility to the world (as you see it) is equal or higher priority than your family responsibility. This is a point of view that we ordinary family guys just cannot grasp. If people in Syria are suffering, that’s a shame. But I can’t help them and it doesn’t directly affect me. If my wife is suffering (for an hour, let alone 15 years) that is my immediate top priority.

Could you try to explain your position in terms that we simpletons can understand?

There’s no conflict between meeting my responsibilities to the world and meeting my responsibilities to my family. To be able to meet my responsibilities to my family, I need to do good work. To do good work, I need to be honest. When I am honest, I am meeting my responsibilities to the world.

The reason why people get paid for their work is that they are contributing something of value to the world. If I lie about the numbers that my friends are using to plan their retirements, I am subtracting rather than adding. I would not be earning any pay in that case and in all likelihood I would not earn much. It is by adding to the world’s knowledge that I earn what my family needs.

The stock investing world was turned upside when Shiller showed in 1981 that Buy-and-Hold cannot work and yet Bogle continued promoting the strategy, ignoring what Shiller had done. Today everyone working in this field faces a question — Do dishonest work and make a temporary killing with the possibility of going to prison at a later date or do honest work and see your career destroyed by Bogle’s various Goon squads. It would not help my family for me to go to prison. So I intend to avoid committing felonies. I have never even given the matter two seconds of my consideration.

I didn’t begin doing this work with the idea of saving the world. I expected that Greaney would be abusive when I put forward my May 13, 2002, post. But I also expected that the community would support me once they looked seriously at the historical return data and saw that I was right. No one could have anticipated what happened. Once it happened, I was stuck. I obviously cannot agree to commit felonies. And you Goons do not feel that you can permit me to post honestly because it would mean prison sentences for you for the word to get out re this massive act of financial fraud.

I have always offered to work out any deal with you Goons that does not involve me committing a felony under the laws of the United States. I continue to make that offer today. You Goons don’t feel that you can give an inch. And I think it would be fair to say that Jack Bogle and the other Wall Street Con Men feel that they cannot afford to give an inch either. Is that my doing? I am trying to help everyone out, to bring us all to a better place. But I obviously cannot do it by myself. I have always offered to do anything of a positive nature that I can possibly do. It’s not even a tiny bit reasonable to expect me to commit crimes that might well get me sent to prison in days to come.

I love my family and I want to do right by the people in my family. And I love my country and I want to do right by the people of this country. There should be no conflict in serving both goals. And there should be no conflict with Wade Pfau wanting to serve his country and his family or with Jack Bogle doing so or with Robert Shiller doing so or whoever. We ALL need to serve both our families AND our country. The fact that this has even become a controversy shows how messed up the investing realm has become in the Buy-and-Hold Era.

When I am free to serve both my family and my country, everyone else is too. When everyone else is free to serve his or her family and his or her country, I will be too. We need to apply the laws of the United States to the investing realm. That’s the only way to put the nasty stuff behind us and move on to better days.

I did not volunteer for this. It’s not like I said on the morning of May 13, 2002, “Oh, I know what I will do, I will start a revolution in our understanding of how stock investing works!” I pointed out that Greaney’s study does not contain a valuations adjustment and that perhaps the people in that community needed to consider what the SWR would be if valuations were considered. I received a very, very strong positive reaction from my fellow community members. Then you Goons stepped in and caused all the problems.

I am not seeking to be a hero. I believe that I will be perceived as a hero when we all make it together to the other side. Millions of people’s lives will be saved. That’s going to be viewed as hero stuff. But that’s not happening because I made a decision to sacrifice my family to make it happen. I put up a post relating to retirement planning at a retirement planning board and a bunch of Buy-and-Holders went freakin’nuts. I was faced with circumstances in which I had to either agree to commit financial fraud or develop the understanding of how stock investing works to the degree necessary for me to overcome you Goons. It turned out that doing that meant revolutionizing the field and me becoming a hero. I can live with that. But I certainly didn’t go into this with the intent of making that happen.

I believe that my wife will come through this just fine. But I wouldn’t agree to commit financial fraud even if someone could go into the future and tell me that me refusing to do so would cause her to not end up just fine. I cannot post dishonestly re the numbers that my friends use to plan their retirements. It is not in me. Asking me to do that is like asking me to flap my arms and fly over traffic jams. It’s an absurdity. It is something that can never happen.

If my wife gets hit by a meteor, I cannot do anything about it. I would’t like it. But there’s nothing I can do about it. If InvestoWorld has gotten so messed up that a man cannot post honestly on safe withdrawal rates without his wife being forced to pay some sort of penalty, that’s the equivalent of getting hit by a meteor. It is something that no one could expect or even understand. You are asking me to buy into something that cannot be understood. I don’t live my life that way. I try to stay rooted in the realities of life.

It is a reality of life that Shiller showed in 1981 that valuations affect long-term returns and that Greaney’s retirement study does not contain a valuations adjustment and that financial fraud is a felony publishable by a prison sentence. I of course acknowledge that some weird things have played out re this matter. But it is more than a little hard for me to believe that there is not going to be a day when the laws of this country are enforced and you Goons are placed in prison cells. On that day, I will be freed to help out the thousands of my fellow community members who have said that they want to be able to hear my message and the millions more like them out there in the real world who did not happen to participate at the discussion boards and blogs to which I have taken this matter over the first 15 years of our discussions. So I cannot imagine that this will not eventually be brought to a successful conclusion.

I love BOTH my family AND my country. I don’t see a need to choose one and sell the other out. I am working to serve both very effectively. And I have reason to believe that that plan will work out more than fine for all concerned. We know that there are millions of people who want access to a better way to invest, the first true research-backed approach. And we know that most of the people who work in this field are anxious to be able to do honest work again — those people are going to be thrilled when we make it to the other side and will be friends of mine for life. Even you Goons end up better off when I overcome you. The fewer lives you destroy, the shorter your prison sentences will be. Shorter prison sentences are better than longer prison sentences.

So I just don’t buy into your premise that there is some sort of conflict here between serving my family and serving my country. Doing good, honest work serves both. That’s my plan and that has been my plan going back to the first day.

I hope that helps a small bit.

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 really don’t know what good you think you are doing living in a dream world. In the end, it is your poor family that suffers.

Everyone on the planet suffers for so long as the Campaign of Terror against our board and blog communities continues, Anonymous.

I am going to bring it to an end. Count it.

I am 100 percent confident that I will be extremely well-compensated for doing so. That will make my long-sufering wife happy!

It will all work out in the end. We live in a great country that was smart enough to put laws in place to cover these sorts of situations long before I even came on the scene.

Anyway, I do wish you all good things. While ALSO wanting the American people to win this one, 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:

I don’t even think there is a story to begin with.

Your behavior tells a different story. No one fights this hard to block a non-story from getting out.

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:

So, were you lying when you posted your original details on your financials or are you lying now?

I’ll make an effort here to explain what this behavior signifies for people with an interest in learning how stock investing works in the real world.

Fama never showed that investors act in their self-interest when making decisions re stock investing. He ASSUMED it. Shiller checked out that assumption. He found that 145 years of historical return data discredits the idea that investors set stock prices through a rational decision-making process. Investors are humans and humans are emotional. So the market is emotional. The P/E10 value is telling us how emotional (and thus how risky) the market is at any given point in time.

Can investors act on this powerful insight to invest more effectively? They can. The peer-reviewed research that I co-authored with Wade Pfau shows them how. But there is one big obstacle holding us all back today. Deep in our hearts we all want to be rational investors. But our ability to act rationally obviously varies. The Goons are the least rational investors among us. They cannot stand to acknowledge even the possibility that they ever got anything even a tiny bit wrong.

In ordinary circumstances, the experts would not associate with the Goons in any way, shape or form. The published rules of every site at which I have posted prohibits the abusive tactics they employ. But the experts in this field hold back from taking effective action re the Goons. Why? The experts themselves have made mistakes. We did not always know what Shiller has showed to be true in recent years. Lots of experts have built careers promoting Buy-and-Hold strategies. These experts would never in a million years personally engage in the behavior we have seen from the Goons. But they tolerate it. They are not entirely unsympathetic to the Goons even though they of course disdain their tactics.

The P/E10 value tells us how irrational we all are re stock investing at any given point in time. Today’s P/E10 value is very high, telling us that we being very irrational. What you see on this thread is what you see when the market as a whole has become highly irrational.

We can do better. We do better by speaking up re this sort of thing. Lots of people want to explore these issues. I have spoken to thousands of them. Some are Buy-and-Holders, some are not. It doesn’t matter. We need to hear from all sorts of people to enjoy a rich learning experience. But we do need to leave the Goon stuff behind us. People feel uncomfortable participating in discussions when they see this kind of behavior. We need to reassure them that there are limits to what we will tolerate. The limits should of course be the limits that apply in all fields of human endeavor other than stock investing.

The problem is circular. We cannot get more rational until we speak up about the Goon problem. And we will not feel comfortable speaking up re the Goon problem until we are assured that most of our friends are too rational to tolerate this sort of thing. The way that a society overcomes this sort of thing is that a few brave souls work up the courage to speak up and then the idea spreads and spreads over time.

The Goons do not feel that they can prevail in a reasoned discussion. If they did, they obviously would not behave this way. And they also feel that there will be no consequences that will follow from sinking into the gutter. That has been their experience for 15 years now. Lots of good and smart people would participate if they did not feel a need to worry about what the Goons would say about them if they did. But it takes a lot of courage to be one of the first to take on the Goons.

We will get there. It is a process. We have made lots of progress. And deep down inside we all want the same thing. We certainly are not being kind to our Goon friends by tolerating their bad behavior. They feel worse and worse about themselves with each passing day. They want to be human too. We should encourage them in that regard. They are capable of acting in a human manner. I know them from earlier times and I can testify to this.

I hope that helps a small bit. Please be assured that the good news here is 50 times more good than the bad news here is bad.

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:

Yet again, you avoid answering the question.

The questions you want answered were advanced for the purpose of harassment, Sammy. My personal financial circumstances are none of your concern and are not the proper concern of other people reading this column.

I revealed a good bit of my personal financial history when I was posting at the Retire Early board because there it WAS relevant. We all told our stories and those listening in were able to better determine whether early retirement was a possibility for them too by noting how close their circumstances compared. After I posted honestly on the safe withdrawal rate question, you Goons changed some of the facts around to make my circumstances sound embarrassing to those who don’t know the full story and then followed me everywhere I went on the internet and demanded that I answer to your distorted presentations of the facts.

Huh?

That’s sick, man.

You are a real person inside even though you present yourself in public as a Goon. You are a person in pain. You see the case for Valuation-Informed Indexing and yet you cannot bear to hear it given voice in public.

There are lots and lots of others who want to hear that case given voice. They have told me so. I am going to continue to do what I can to help those people realize that little dream of theirs regardless of how brutally abusive you and your Goon friends are to me in your effort to punish me for choosing to spoil your Buy-and-Hold fantasy with explorations of the implications of the last 35 years of peer-reviewed research in this field.

If you have legitimate questions to ask here, please ask them and I will do my best to respond effectively.

I you have no legitimate questions to ask, my strongly held opinion is that it would be better for you to find other things to do with your time than to visit here and post nonsense comments.

If you mix up legitimate stuff and not legitimate stuff in your comments here, which is your most common practice, I will continue to respond to the stuff that is legitimate and ignore the stuff that is pure nonsense.

Regardless of your choices for yourself, I will continue to wish you all the best that this life has to offer a person. As one of the poor struggling humans, I think you deserve that much from me. Please just try to remember that the 20 percent of the population that wants to learn more about the dangers of Buy-and-Hold are poor struggling humans too and that they deserve my best efforts too and that I intend to help them out to the extent I can regardless of any pain that it causes you for me to continue to do so.

I hope that all of that makes at least a little bit of sense to you and to others listening in trying to make sense of this crazy set of circumstances in which we all find ourselves.

Rob