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 describing a decision by the site administrator to delete a post by one of the Buy-and-Hold Goons, followed by a reaction post by another one of the Goons that was also deleted by the site administrator:

Rob, let’s talk plain for a moment. You are what the British call “bone idle”. You hated working. The thought of having to go to a job and take direction from anyone makes you ill. But your ego prevents you from ever admitting that, hence these countless hours spent typing millions of words trying desperately to justify it. Is this how you intend to spend the next 15 years? Give yourself a break.

You put up essentially the same post five minutes ago, Dan. I wrote a brief response and, when I hit the “Submit” button, a message appeared saying that the comment that I was responding to had been deleted by the moderator. I don’t know if that will happen again this time or not. If your comment is deleted, I am of course fine with having my response to the deleted comment deleted as well.

On the possibility that your new comment (which contains only slightly different wording from the deleted version) may not be deleted, I will share here the text of my response to the deleted version:

I will give it my best shot, Dan. I can do no more and I can do no less.

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

Rob

 

You say I am not rational in suggesting you get a job in order to get income and then you repeat your fantasy of getting a $500 million windfall? Dan V has clearly zeroed in on your reality.

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:

But of course, the real issue is this:

Why do you refuse to get a paying job to support your family? You still would have plenty of time to troll the internet when not working.

You would no longer feel the need to live in your make believe world if you had an income.

I obviously have sufficient income or I wouldn’t be here.

Lots of people would tell me that I should not respond to your posts. They obviously are not put forward with good intent. They are put forward as part of an intimidation campaign. People reading the back and forth who might be inclined to step forward themselves and speak up in support of Valuation-Informed Indexing see the sort of ugliness that you Goons bring to the table and instead self-censor themselves.

When those people don’t talk, the impression is left that pretty much the entire world believes in Buy-and-Hold. That’s not so. The vast majority believes in Buy-and-and-Hold. But my experience going back 15 years is that, in the days before you Goons make clear how far you will go with your intimidation campaigns, about 10 percent of the population of investors follows a Valuation-Informed Indexing strategy and about another 10 percent has sufficient interest in the concept that they express a desire to be able to ask questions about it (but then stop doing so once death threats and all this sort of thing are put forward by the Buy-and-Hold Goons)

That’s a total of 20 percent of the investing population that has an interest in these ideas. That’s millions of people. Businesses could be started serving those millions of people with solid research-based insights on how to invest effectively for the long term. Only you Goons stand in the way. The businesses won’t make money today because people remain afraid to ask their questions so long as you Goons pollute the discussions. But once the Goon problem is solved, businesses will be formed and then, when people see the money that there is to be made developing true research-based strategies, more businesses will be formed and more and more investors will come around to the new strategy.

We have to deal with the Goon problem. It is the only way to the other side. People hold back from doing so because it is all so nasty and so strange and because those promoting research-based strategies are very much in the minority today and so they get banned from sites and all this sort of thing. But there is just no other way to solve the problem. The good stuff is on the other side and the only way over the mountain is through it.

We all need to stick up for each other. 10 percent of the investing population is a lot of people. If we all stood up for each other, there’s not a thing that you Goons could do to us. I am the first person on the internet to make these points. It just turned out that I was the “lucky” one put in these circumstances. I have tried everything else that a reasonable person could possibly do and I have reached the sincere conclusion that this is the only way that as a society we can get to where we all deep in our hearts want to go.

I intend to always be charitable to you Goons. You really do follow Buy-and-Hold strategies and you really do believe on at least one level of consciousness that others should follow them too. You just cannot bear to hear those others exploring ideas that you do not support and the pain that this causes you makes you engage in behavior that has never been viewed as acceptable in civil society. Those of us who want things to get better need to be charitable to BOTH you Goons and to the millions of middle-class investors who want to know what really works in investing. We need to balance the competing concerns.

That’s my sincere take, Sammy. 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:

Why throw in the prison story? Everyone thinks you are a bit nutty when you make claims of your importance and getting $500 million. The prison stuff just makes you look like an insane lunatic.

I mention the prison thing because I see it as a critical element of the story at this point in the proceedings.

I believe that, if Greaney had it to do over, he would play it differently. I don’t believe that he would say he agrees with me. But he would look for some less aggressive way to express his disagreement than threatening to kill my wife and children. And Bogle would play things differently if he had to do it over and Lindauer would play things differently and all of you Goons would play things differently.

For a long time I thought that would ultimately prove to be the answer — the Buy-and-Holders would eventually come to conclude that they should take a softer line and then everything would work out fine. Those who had an interest in Valuation-Informed Indexing would be permitted to learn what they wanted to learn and those who preferred Buy-and-Hold would tune out what those interested in Valuation-Informed Indexing were saying amongst themselves.

I stopped believing that that could ever happen when you Goons threatened to destroy Wade Pfau’s career if he continued doing honest research. That’s so far over the line that it is not possible for me even to describe how far over the line it is. When that happened, I was forced to try to think through what possible motivation could account for such behavior.

The only thing that I could come up with is, that since your Campaign of Terror had already caused an economic crisis, you Goons had come to the conclusion that you could never agree to any compromise whatsoever, that things had already gone so far that you would be going to prison if even a single web site ever permitted honest posting and so you might as well just do completely crazy stuff on the “in for a dime, in for a dollar” theory. So there is no longer any possibility of things being worked out in a positive manner.

Only the announcement of prison sentences can end the nasty side of this. When prison sentences are announced, all of the many people who long to do honest work in this field but worry what you Goons will do to their careers if they “cross” you will be freed to help the rest of us out once they hear about your prison sentences. The announcement of prison sentences brings all the ugly side of these discussions to an end and thereby permits all of the wonderful stuff to blossom.

Does all of that not make good 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:

Before you would always say that you know how investing in the stock market works. In light if the recent article referenced above, you are now saying that the stock market is not acting the way it should act.

Should a strategy be based on how it is likely to act in order to be successful?

The stock market has always acted the same way, Anonymous. 100 percent of the evidence available to us shows that valuations are 80 percent of the story (just as you would expect — price is 80 percent of the story in ALL markets). Zero percent of the evidence supports Buy-and-Hold. All that is clear to anyone who is familiar with the last 35 years of peer-reviewed research.

It is not a major change that a decision by the Wall Street Con Men to push the pure Get Rich Quick approach (IGNORING price) harder than it has ever been pushed before caused prices to get more out of whack than ever before. That’s just what you would EXPECT to see happen.

The reason why Shiller and I did not get it perfectly right all along is that we are human. No one has ever seen anything like this before. The Wall Street Con Men have always pushed Get Rich Quick schemes; there’s tons of money in them and the Wall Street Con Men LOVE taking money out of the pockets of millions and putting it into their own pockets. But never before did they make the false claim that there is actually peer-reviewed research showing that the pure Get Rich Quick approach might work. That’s the something new under the sun that made it hard for Shiller and me (and thousands and thousands of others) to appreciate just how dangerous this Buy-and-Hold stuff really is.

Now we know.

Not all of us, of course. If we all knew, you would not see a Ban on Honest Posting at a single site. Honest posting on the past 35 years of peer-reviewed research is today banned at every large investing site on the internet. It’s a shame, you know? But it is what happened. You can’t continue to push Get Rich Quick strategies if you permit honest posting. There is now 35 years of peer-reviewed research showing that Buy-and-Hold can never work, that it is nonsense, that it is a scam, a money-making thing.

So Buy-and-Hold will go down. I expect to see that happen following the next price crash. Then we will all pull together. We all want the same things. We all want to know how stock investing works in the real world. So why wouldn’t we all pull together? Bogle wants us to invest effectively. So he will flip to the Valuation-Informed Indexing “side” following the next crash. What do you think is going to happen to you Goons after Bogle flips? I think it is fair to say that you will be placed in prison cells, where you belong. Is that not a fair supposition?

With you Goons in prison cells, what the heck would there be to hold the rest of us back? There’s nothing that I can think of. On the morning of May 13, 2002, we had 20 percent of the Motley Fool community saying that Valuation-Informed Indexing was the greatest thing they ever learned about and that they wanted to explore the entire story. We had another 60 percent saying that, while they were not yet convinced, they sure wanted honest posting to be permitted so that, if the case turned out to be strong enough, they would become convinced. You Goons never constituted more than 20 percent of the community.

Once the 20 percent that has engaged in criminally abusive behavior is placed behind the cells of prison bars, I really don’t see how things could ever stop getting better and better and better as time passes. That’s the American way, is it not? That’s the reason why we made financial fraud a felony in the first place, to protect the American way when it came under attack by the sort of individuals who have put up posts in “defense’” of Mel Lindauer and John Greaney.

Did Robert Shiller or Rob Bennett get it all 100 percent right at every stage of the proceedings? We did not. We are human like all the rest. I was a freakin’ Buy-and-Holder on the morning of May 13, 2002. I obviously had come big gaps in my understanding of how stock investing works on the day when I put forward that fateful post. So what, you know? I stuck to my guns. I know that I cannot do good work posting dishonestly and so I insisted on recognition of my right to post honestly. And that has made all the difference. I know a lot of things today that I did not know 15 years ago as a result of that fateful decision. And I have every reason to believe that I will know a whole big bunch more 15 years from today than I do today so long as I continue to insist on my right (and the right of all my fellow community members) to post honestly.

The stock market has always performed the same way as every other market that has ever existed. Paying attention to price has always been 100 percent critical. Buy-and-Hold has always been pure garbage. I was fooled because I am a human and we humans learn by talking things over and I happened to become an investor during a time when a lot of people believed that Buy-and-Hold was a real thing. Naturally I made mistakes. We all did. People cannot learn in an environment in which the sorts of individuals who have put up posts in “defense” of Mel Lindauer and John Greaney are permitted to participate in internet discussions. I mean, give me a freakin’ break.

You Goons are going to prison. That brings the problem to an end. Shiller won’t be making so many mistakes once honest posting becomes the norm in this field. Neither will I. Neither will Bogle. Neither will anyone else.

In an ideal world, Bogle would have acknowledged his mistake on the day that Shiller’s “revolutionary” (his word) research was published. It didn’t happen. That’s unfortunate. But it’s certainly no reason not to believe that the mistake will not be corrected down the line. Any mistake that causes as much human misery as Buy-and-Hold has caused is going to be corrected in time by the society suffering that human misery, Again — please give me a freakin’ break.

It’s a process. We are a long ways away from the state of confusion that caused us to tolerate Bogle’s unwillingness to come clean back in 1981. We know more all the time. We understand more all the time. We are well on out way to experiencing the biggest surge in economic growth in U.S. history. It is happening, Anonymous, and there is nothing that you and your Goon pals can do to hold us back. The people of the United States possess more power than a band of internet Goons backed by a band of Wall Street Con Men. It’s not a close call. There has always been only one way that this thing could turn out in the long run.

Or at least so Rob Bennett believes. I could be wrong. We will have to wait a bit to see how it all plays out following the next price crash. I naturally wish you the best that life has to offer a person in any event, Goon friend.

Rob

Set forth below is the text of a comment posted at this blog by one of the Buy-and-Hold Goons in response to my suggestion that Jack Bogle contact Robert Shiller to seek clarification of Shiller’s beliefs re whether investors need to exercise price discipline when buying stocks:

We need to get Shiller to address these matters. You cannot do the subject complete justice and I cannot do the subject complete justice. We need Shiller to address the subject head-on in a clear and complete and firm statement. If you really believe that Shiller thinks that long-term timing does not work, you should feel comfortable encouraging him to address the matter.

You Goons have contact with Mel Linduaer and Mel Lindauer has contact with John Bogle. If you asked nicely, Lindauer would be willing to ask Bogle nicely to ask Shiller nicely whether he believes that long-term timing works or not. And Shiller is a nice man. Shiller would agree to the request if Bogle put it to him in a nice manner. So we have the means by working together to get a FINAL answer to this perplexing question.

The key is that you need to be open to hearing what Shiller really thinks. He may issue a statement agreeing with me rather than with you and Bogle. So you are taking a risk going ahead with this suggestion to contact Lindauer. I encourage you to do it. If Shiller says “this Rob Bennett fellow is a fool, I do not AT ALL believe in long-term timing, I think thus guy is dangerous,” I will write a column here reporting on what he said and putting that statement in the headline.

Working together, we could learn something important. Working together, we could advance the ball in an important way for lots of people. If you are game, I am certainly game.

Bogle and Shiller have made their positions clear. There is nothing more that needs to be said.

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, and many others, are confident in buy, hold and rebalance. You seem to be the only one confident in VII.

Your words say that you are confident, Anonymous. Your actions don’t back up your words. People who are confident don’t advance death threats. People who are confident don’t demand unjustified board bannings. People who are confident don’t put forward tens of thousands of acts of defamation. People who are confident don’t threaten to get academic researchers fired from their jobs.

You evidence bravado, not confidence. It’s not the same thing. Confidence is quiet and calm and non-violent. Confidence is not Goonish. No way, no how.

I am confident re Valuation-Informed Indexing. But I do not possess a perfect confidence. I think there is a small possibility that I am wrong. I would never dream of seeking to have a Buy-and-Holder banned solely because he believed in Buy-and-Hold and because he expressed his sincere beliefs in a community in which I participated. The fact that I can say those words about Valuation-Informed Indexing and that you cannot say them about Buy-and-Hold shows the difference between us and the difference between the two strategies. It’s the fact that I can say what you cannot say that tells me that Valuation-Informed Indexing is the future and that Buy-and-Hold is the past.

I may be the only one who possesses the level of confidence that I possess in Valuation-Informed Indexing. My confidence has increased as I have studied it in more depth and no one else has had the opportunities that I have had to study the new model in such depth. But thousands of our fellow community members have expressed a desire that honest posting be permitted at every investing discussion board and blog on the internet. And all of those people have great confidence in the American nation, which is the nation that has adopted laws making financial fraud a felony punishable by a prison sentence. And the thousands that I have met on the internet represent millions in the real world. We have confidence in what we believe, we have confidence that our economic and political systems are good ones and that Goons like you need to be placed in prison cells if our economic and political systems are to survive and indeed thrive in days and years to come. We will prevail. You will go down. I am sure.

But we will have to wait for the next price crash to find out for certain how it is all going to play out, no? I hope that works for you.

That’s my sincere take re this terribly important matter, in any event.

I naturally wish you all good things

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:

Of course Bogle, like any ordinary person, would recommend getting a job and working if you haven’t saved enough for retirement.

Rob- you do seem to put in a lot of effort in avoiding work. What do you find so terrible about having to work a job in order to support your family?

If he felt confident that Buy-and-Hold can stand up to scrutiny, he would be fine with people advancing challenges to it. In fact, he would encourage that because that’s how we all learn.

Bogle encourages you Goons to engage in your harassment and abusiveness. Why?

It’s because he knows that Shiller’s findings cannot be reconciled with Fama’s findings (which are the foundation of the Buy-and-Hold strategy). If we have open discussion at every site on the internet, we are through the process of back-and-forth discussion going to learn who is right and which strategy will own the future. Bogle has grave doubts as to whether Buy-and-Hold will prevail. So he lets his name be used at a discussion board where you Goons control what can be said.

That tells us something important, Sammy. That’s the thing that needs to change for us all to move forward in our understanding. You ask me all the time whether the dominance of Buy-and-Hold is the result of a “conspiracy.” I have not seen any evidence of a conspiracy in the early days. Fama is a serious researcher; he was awarded a Nobel prize on the same day that Shiller was awarded one. But there is indeed a sort of conspiracy in place today. People who have doubts about Buy-and-Hold (we are very much a minority but there are far more of us than most Buy-and-Holders realize) are afraid to give voice to their doubts because when they have tried to do so they have seen how Buy-and-Holders react and they don’t want to see their careers destroyed.

That has to stop. And it won’t stop until you Goons are called out on your behavior. Not just by me. We need to have everyone speaking up re the process issues if we ever are as a society going to make complete sense of the substance issues. We need Bogle helping out. We need Bogle speaking up against the behavior he has seen from you Goons.

That’s the hard step. If he had spoken up in 1981, it would have been a lot easier. It gets harder for him with every day that passes. But it is only when Bogle and people like him speak up that we will all be able to move forward. There is no other way to get from the horrible place where we are today to the wonderful place where deep in our hearts we all want to be tomorrow. So no one should discount the importance of us all working up the courage to speak up. We all should be sticking up for each other and encouraging each other to stand up to you Goons.

That’s my sincere take re these terribly important matters, in any event.

I naturally wish you the best of luck in all your future endeavors, old friend.

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:

Wrong Rob. There are other things you believe in, that I don’t. You think it is okay to make up stories about fraud and prison, I don’t. You think it is okay to quit your job and not face up to the responsibility of supporting your family, I don’t. You think it is okay to change people words or delete their posts because it doesn’t fit with your story, I don’t.

Shall I go on?

I think it is important to write about the fraud stuff. It’s because too many of us are afraid to write about that stuff that it has continued for so long. We pretend that it’s charity holding us back but it’s really cowardice.

But I consider that a process question rather than a substantive investing question. We agree on the substantive investing questions with the exception of the valuations matter, re which I go with Shiller and you go with Fama.

Hang in there, man.

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:

I’ve noticed that the more evasive you want to be, the more words you type. I imagine that behavior leads to bans.

My policy of responding to a high percentage of Goon posts had indeed contributed to the bannings, in my assessment, Dan.

Please know that I do NOT respond to all Goon posts. I ignore those that contain zero useful content, just pure abusiveness. Those people can see through. So I don’t see any need to type words of my own in those cases.

However, a frequent Goon trick is to mix up a high percentage of garbage with a small amount of real stuff. For example, they might write a post saying “is this a conspiracy?” That’s a legitimate question. Lots of people are stumped by that one. If there really is 35 years of peer-reviewed research showing that valuations affect long-term returns, how is it that Buy-and-Hold still exists? Non-Goons have that question in their minds. So we need to answer it. I try to do so even when it is clear that the person asking the question has no good intent.

We need to call the Goons out on their b.s. Ignoring them does NOT do the trick. Their aim is to disrupt conversations. The ugly stuff drives people away. Most people just cannot stand all the ugliness. When people leave boards because of their nastiness and the conversations stop, that’s a win for the Goons. They are happy with that result. All the rest of us miss out on great learning experiences. But the Goons get what they want when we ignore them.

So I try not to do that except in the most extreme cases (when there is zero content). Those of us who write about research-based strategies have every right in the world to share our thoughts at every discussion board and blog on the internet. I always follow the rules. I know from interactions with many thousands of people that there is HUGE interest in Valuation-Informed Indexing. But the new ideas won’t spread until some of us work up the courage to stand up to you Goons. So I make a sincere effort to do that.

I don’t want anyone to be afraid to post honestly. Each time one of us works up the courage to do so, it makes all the others thinking about it feel more confident about doing so. We all need to stick up for each other. That’s how the good guys prevail in the end and how the bad guys get sent down. Today, those who post honestly are quiet and timid and the gooniest among us are loud and bold. We need to flip that to learn what we all need to learn about how stock investing works in the real world.

Get Rich Quick/Buy-and-Hold strategies don’t just destroy our investment portfolios. They rot out our souls.

That’s my sincere take re these terribly important matters, in any event.

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:

When you wrote to Bogle, did you tell him he was a con-man?

I played it with Bogle the same way that I played it with Greaney, Anonymous.

When I first pointed out that Greaney’s retirement study does not contain an adjustment for the valuation level that applies on the day the retirement begins, I didn’t call him a “Goon.” It was when he responded by threatening to kill my wife and children that I began referring to him as a “Goon.”

So it was with Bogle. My assumption was that he would correct his error when it was pointed out to him. He didn’t. That’s what made him a con man. So that’s when I started referring to him as a con man.

Are you able to suggest any better way of proceeding in circumstances like this?

Have you considered that you wouldn’t be worried about a prison sentence today had Bogle come clean back in 1981? Each day that the cover-up continues, more people get hurt. Including Goons like you.

There’s no charity in covering up an act of financial fraud. The charitable thing to do is to INSIST that the fraud be brought to a full and complete stop. It’s also charitable to take the circumstances into account, to try to understand that someone can get caught up in something and make a mistake without meaning to. But there’s no charity in permitting the mistake to go uncorrected. That’s a negative for every single person concerned.

No?

Rob