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 might want to insert a correction in your post or you might be guilty of fraud.

I’m not guilty of financial fraud, Anonymous.

There’s a difference in how we handle things.

I believe in Valuation-Informed Indexing, which is rooted in the research of a Nobel-prize-winning economist.

You believe in Buy-and-Hold, which is rooted in the research of a Nobel-prize-winning economist.

I acknowledge that there are two schools of academic thought as to how stock investing works.

You do not. You engage in abusive trickery to deceive people into believing that there is only one school of academic thought as to how stock investing works.

That’s the fraud part. That’s the prison part.

I don’t do that and I have zero intention of ever doing that. Not in 14 years. Not in 14 billion years.

It’s a very, very, very big difference and a very, very, very important difference.

If I turn out to be wrong, I will have hurt no one because everyone who was persuaded that Valuation-Informed Indexing is the best strategy knew that Buy-and-Hold was an alternate school of thought and decided for himself or herself which school of thought to follow.

If you turn out to be wrong, you will have hurt millions in very serious ways because you have persuaded people to follow Buy-and-Hold that do not even know that there is 35 years of peer-reviewed research throwing doubt on the merit of Buy-and-Hold. Those people have a perfect right and responsibility to seek compensation for their losses from you and from all other Buy-and-Holders who have engaged in trickery. In cases like your own in which there has been ongoing abusive behavior that has hurt millions, those people have a perfect right and responsibility to insist that the laws against financial fraud be enforced to insure that you are put away in prison for a long time.

A society has a right to defend itself against predators seeking to bury it. Millions of people are today unemployed as a result of the Buy-and-Hold Crisis and millions more will be suffering failed retirements in days to come if the crisis continues. I want no part of the cover-up except to play the lead role in EXPOSING it and thereby helping the citizens of this country get about the business of rebuilding the economic and political systems that those posting in “defense” of Mel Lindauer and John Greaney and Jack Bogle have been so intent on destroying for their personal profit (whether financial or psychic) for 14 years now.

I hope that helps a bit, my 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:

“Bogle got this one wrong”

………………….according to Rob Bennett the investment expert, who also states that Jack Bogle is more of a con man versus Bernie Madoff and also that Jack Bogle is going to prison.

I’ve said those things, Sammy. But if you were trying to be fair you would also note that I have said that Bogle is a great man and that I have learned a great deal from him and that I rank him as the second most important investing advisor in history (Shiller being the first).

You are trying to stir up trouble by pointing out things that I have said about my good friend Jack that sound harsh to people who are not aware of all that has gone on over the past 14 years. The financial fraud stuff IS shocking and I don’t object to you pointing it out — people certainly need to know about it and we need as a society to work up the courage to take ACTION re all that has gone down and thereby put the ugly stuff behind us and move on to all the wonderful stuff that has been opened to us.

But I do object to the one-sidedness of your comment. We have had many interactions over the years and so you of course know how deep my respect and affection for John Bogle goes. Why not tell that part of the story as well? You don’t do it because your motive is not to bring things to a good conclusion but simply to stir up trouble. That’s very unfortunate stuff.

Bogle is a Hero to the Middle-Class Investor. I’ve said that since the first day and that will always remain true. There would be no Valuation-Informed Indexing without Jack Bogle’s many positive contributions. And, yes, he has committed act act of financial fraud 500 times bigger than what Bernie Madoff did by continuing to promote Buy-and-Hold for 35 years after Shiller showed in peer-reviewed research that valuations affect long-term returns and by making use of abusive tactics to keep people from spreading the word re the many far-reaching implications of Shiller’s “revolutionary” (his word) research.

I naturally wish you all the best that this life has to offer a person, my long-time Goon friend.

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:

How many people do you think believe your comments on prison and actually believe that it will actually happen?

Your question is a good one, Anonymous. I like the way you worded this one in a non-inflammatory way.

There are two ways to answer it that yield very different responses.

The straightforward way is to say that I have never received a single endorsement of my position. If you go by that, you would conclude that I am the only one who believes that those who have posted in “defense” of Mel Lindauer, John Greaney and Jack Bogle are at serious risk of being found guilty of financial fraud following the next price crash.

The more psychologically astute (in my view!) way is to say that no one engages in discussion of the realities that are behind my claim. It is a simple objective fact that Greaney did not include an adjustment for valuations in the retirement study posted at his web site. And it is a simple objective fact that Nobel-prize-winning economist Robert Shiller showed in peer-reviewed research published in 1981 that a valuations adjustment is required in all investing calculations. So the fact that a massive act of financial fraud has been committed is no secret. It has been conducted out in the open and is well-documented. Bernie Madoff was sent to prison for a much smaller act of financial fraud. So it is more than a little hard for the rational human mind (for mine, in any event!) to imagine why there would not be many people sent to prison over this.

When no one engages, there is something holding them back. There are many people who I have spoken to and whose statements I have documented here who are aware of the problem. There are academic researchers who have told me that the historical data supports my positions on investing. There are university professors who have told me that they have incorporated things that they learned from reading my work into their classes on stock investing. There are thousands of ordinary investors who have told me that they love my stuff and who have begged you Goons to permit honest posting so that they could learn more. There are bloggers who have told me that they think that my site is the best investing site on the internet and that the only reason why they have banned me from their blogs is that their readers get so upset to learn how they have been misled by the Buy-and-Holders that they threaten to stop visiting those sites unless I am banned from them. This is strange stuff. The same basic story has played out thousands of times at hundreds of different sites over 14 years. There is obviously something odd going on here.

The name used in the psychological literature for that something odd is “cognitive dissonance.” You can learn all about it by running a Google search. It is a 100 percent real phenomenon. Probably the best way to describe its power in a concise way is to refer to the Asche research from the 1950s in which study participants were not able to properly identify the longer of two lines when they first saw other study participants who were plants get the question wrong. Humans are social creatures. When everybody around is telling us that “these bull market prices are real,” we believe it regardless of what the peer-reviewed research says.

Cognitive dissonance is hard to overcome. There was another study where researchers joined a cult to see what would happen when a cult leader who took all of these peoples’ money via a claim that the earth was going to be invaded by space aliens was discovered to be a fraud. The researchers were shocked when the con man told the cult members that he had persuaded the space aliens to let the world continue a bit longer because of their belief in them and the marks fell for it! We don’t like to be played for fools. So our inclination is to remain fools for a longer time period rather than to acknowledge that we have been played.

But the investors in the Madoff fund turned on him when his fund collapsed. I think that is what is going to happen when the retirement accounts of the millions who have been taken in by the smelly Buy-and-Hold garbage collapse. You are of course free to believe otherwise. You won’t upset me if you tell me that you believe otherwise. But I feel compelled to post honestly re these matters. I think people are going to be pissed off that so many Buy-and-Holders told so many lies to cover up a mistake that was revealed by the peer-reviewed research 35 years ago. I think that a good percentage of the millions whose lives have been destroyed are going to demand prison sentences in cases in which insanely abusive acts like death threats and threats to get academic researchers fired from their jobs are in evidence.

If you think about it a bit, you will see that it couldn’t be any other way. This is a huge crime, the biggest crime of a financial nature in our nation’s history. And it is extremely well-documented. You wouldn’t need more than a small number of people talking about it on the internet to get it written up on the front page of the New York Times. Once it is written up, you will be in prison and not in any position to ask questions of me at this blog. So the very fact that you are able to ask the question shows that the cognitive dissonance has not been broken as of today.

But what happens when it IS broken?

That’s what matters, Anonymous. You pretend that you cannot imagine that day ever coming. I am confident that to some extent you have persuaded yourself that that day is not ever coming. If you fully let in to your consciousness your fear that that day is indeed coming, you wouldn’t be able to sleep at night. So it seems evident to me that you have at least partially persuaded yourself.

I wish you luck with it, you know? I certainly am not going to do anything to cause your prison sentence to extend longer than what it absolutely must be given the circumstances that prevail today. It is my intent to do just the opposite. I don’t see how I could possibly bend any further in a pro-Goon position than to work my butt off trying to get your prison sentence reduced a bit. And I of course have already been doing that for years. So I truly do not know what it is that you want from me.

I believe that you are going to prison, Anonymous. I like you. But I don’t want to go to prison myself and I don’t want your prison sentence to extend any longer than it has to and I don’t want anyone who is thinking of becoming a Goon today to think that there will not be serious consequences that will follow from that. So I say what I believe. I don’t see that I have any other realistic option.

What do you think will happen? Do you think that everyone who lost most of their life savings is just going to say “oopsie, what a shame!” I do not think that it is going to play out that way. But I suppose that anything is theoretically possible. That one just doesn’t persuade me for some crazy reason.

Please remember that this is the first Buy-and-Hold Crisis for which there was peer-reviewed research going back to the first day of the bull/bear cycle showing that Buy-and-Hold cannot work. The Great Depression was a horrifying event and I am certain that many, many people would have gone to prison had there been a 35-year cover-up of research that could have been used to avoid that life destroying event. But Shiller didn’t publish his “revolutionary” (his word) research until 1981. So of course that didn’t happen. But Shiller’s research is publicly available today. It has been publicly available for a long time. Lots of people have heard of Shiller. He won a Nobel prize in Economics.

I suspect that lots of people have thoughts similar to my own who are not willing to go public with them. We have seen a mountain of evidence that people are afraid to speak out on these issues going back to the first day of our discussions. People are afraid because the tactics employed by the Buy-and-Hold Goon Squads are so insanely abusive. I had never seen anything like these tactics prior to the morning of May 13, 2002. I know that, had the pre-May 13, 2002, version of myself been called to serve on a jury and saw evidence of what I have seen in the past 14 years, I would certainly convict those who played the Goon role in the story to long prison sentences. I believe that most people are like the pre-May 13, 2002, version of myself. Most people love their country. Most people hate the tactics that you Goons employ. Why would we even have laws against the use of them if we did not as a nation feel strongly about these sorts of matters?

I wish that everyone were speaking out publicly about the prison sentences, Anonymous. I obviously wish that. But if you think about it a bit, you will see that that’s a logical impossibility in a world in which the crash has not yet hit. Had people spoken out one year ago, you Goons would be in prison today and there would be honest posting at every site and prices would today be at fair-market-value levels. We are not at anything close to fair-market-value price levels. Knowing that, you know the answer to your question. People OBVIOUSLY have not been speaking up. The P/E10 value tells us that.

I think that people will speak up when the P/E10 level goes down. I don’t want to go to prison when that happens. So I am speaking up today. I don’t want your prison sentence to be one day longer than it must be. That’s another reason why I am speaking up today. I love my country. I want the losses to be as small as possible given the circumstances that apply today. That’s another reason why I am speaking up today.

Did you think that the market price was going to remain insanely inflated FOREVER? Really?

It doesn’t work that way. Obviously. Buy-and-Hold always ends in tears. There is no other possibility that the rational mind can process. There weren’t prison sentences in earlier times because we didn’t have peer-reviewed research proving how this all works in those days. But now we do. Now we are going to see prison sentences for those who destroyed the millions of lives as well as the destruction of the millions of lives. No? It sure seems so to me. It seems to me that one follows naturally from the other. Isn’t it often the destruction of human lives that leads to prisons sentences in many other realms?

The bottom line is that we are all just going to have to wait to see how it all plays out. Having a policeman come to your house and take you away in handcuffs is the only thing that is going to get through to you at this point. I am very close to 100 percent sure re that one. Fair enough?

I hope that helps a bit.

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

Hang in there, my old friend.

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 do you propose that I do, keep my mouth shut about the corruption that I have uncovered?”

If you have proof of illegality, you tell the proper authorities. If they fail to act, you move on with your life. It’s the “moving on” part that you can’t seem to grasp.

What you’re doing is revving and rocking the family car to get out of a snowbank, long after it’s obvious you are stuck. You could listen to your wife and call a tow truck. Instead, you stubbornly insist on ruining the tires and burning out the transmission.

I’ve notified the proper authorities and they have not acted, Anonymous.

You say that I should “move in with my life.” In the event that the last 35 years of peer-reviewed research is legitimate, the failure of the authorities to act is going to put us in the Second Great Depression. It would be fair to say that there are a lot of good and smart people who have managed to rationalize “moving on,” as you put it. I cannot. I love my country. I care about my fellow community members. I cannot go there.

I can wish you all the best if that helps at all. I can wish the best to all of those who know that Buy-and-Hold is a big pile of smelly garbage but who have rationalized not speaking up. That’s as far I can go. I like those people, I respect those people, I sympathize with the plight in which those people find themselves. I like you Goons. So all of that is on the right side of the line, so far as I am concerned.

But, no, I cannot “move on” and thereby fail to speak up about the biggest act of financial fraud in the history of the United States. Not when it is in the process of bringing on the Second Great Depression. My mother lived through the First Great Depression and told me stories about what that meant for her. I don’t want my boys to live through something like that. I dare say that you wouldn’t want your children or your neighbors’ children to live through something like that if you were capable of overcoming your cognitive dissonance and seeing that it was the Buy-and-Hold “idea” that caused the First Great Depression and that is in the process of bringing on the Second Great Depression. I believe that there will come a time when you will come to see that we have never been as far apart re these matters as you have long believed or at least pretended to believe we were.

If you see a child trapped in a burning building and you are afraid that you might burn to death yourself if you try to help, do you “move on”? I would call the proper authorities, as I did in this case. What if the proper authorities do not arrive on the scene until you realize that you are the only one in a position to save the life of the child? What do you do then?

I am not telling you what to do, Anonymous. I am not even saying that I would certainly run into a burning building to save the life of a child if I was the only one who could help him or her. I like to think that I would. But I am not sure that it is a good idea to make flat statements about such a thing until one has been put to the test.

I think that there are times when one has to put one’s self at risk. I can say that much. There are times when a person has to run into a burning building to save a child. There are times when a person has to speak up for civil rights even though he knows that it may get him killed. There are times when a person has to run in front of enemy fire to save the lives of the rest of the guys in one’s unit. There are times when a person has to block home plate knowing that it may cause a concussion because the World Series is on the line and it is up to you to take a stand no matter what the consequences.

You have to live your life and I have to live mine. I love my wife and I am going to help her out in any way possible. God didn’t make me to protect home plate or to speak out in favor if civil rights at a time when it was hard to do that. God made me to be the one who worked up the courage to challenge John Greaney’s safe withdrawal rate claims at the old Motley Fool board and then to follow the story of where that led us all wherever the story went. That’s my job.

Dylan wrote:

Life is sad.
Life is a bust.
All you can do
Is to do what you must.
You do what you must do
And you do it well.

That’s me. That’s why I do what I do. I don’t have a choice. I love my country. I care for my fellow community members. I do what I must do given what follows from that.

I always will. It would be cruel of me to suggest that there is anything more than a zero chance that that could ever change.

If my wife ends up destitute, that would make me very sad. But not as sad as it would make me if she learned that the man she married was capable of selling out his country to turn a quick, smelly buck telling more Buy-and-Hold Lies. God has a plan for my wife, you know? He gave her a good husband (as he gave me a good wife). He has a plan and he will take care of her in some way that perhaps neither you nor I can imagine today. Perhaps my boy will take over the site when he finishes college and he will make millions and he will take care of his mom and his decrepit old dad just fine.

We’ll see. Time will tell the tale.

My job is to do what I must do and to do it well. That’s my plan. That’s my intent. That’s my strategy. That’s what I get excited about each morning when I hop out of bed and fire up the old MacBook Pro. That’s what it is all about for me. You do your Goon stuff, I do that. We are different in many ways but alike in that we both do what we rightly or wrongly feel a need to do. Fair enough, old friend?

I think things will work out. I think that it will all turn out 50 times better than any of us can imagine today. I think that Jack Bogle and I will be working together and will be famous friends following the next price crash. The stuff that people learn then will take his reputation to places it has never been taken before and he will look back and wonder why he ever got involved with the sorts of individuals who are capable of putting up posts in “defense” of Mel Lindauer and John Greaney. We will all meet to have a nice cold one and to laugh about the craziness of the first 14 years of The Great Debate. Anonymous is invited. Greaney is invited. Lindauer is invited. It will be a happening.

Let’s wait and see what happens following the next crash before making any rash decisions to “move on” and thereby leave you Goons to even LONGER prison sentences, okay? A true friend doesn’t let his friends arrange even longer prison sentences for themselves. It’s just not done.

My sincere take.

Rob

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

You cannot commit financial fraud by giving unsolicited, unpaid, and un-expert theories on the Internet with zero direct control over actual client assets. To say otherwise is demented.

Which of your friends specifically was ruined?

I say that destroying the lives of millions of people by engaging in the behavior that Greaney and those who posted in “defense” of him engaged in is financial fraud, Laugh. You can say 10,000 times (and you have) that it is not and you are not going to convince me otherwise. And I say say 10,000 times that it is (and I have) and I am not going to convince you.

But you know what?

It doesn’t matter in the end what you say OR what I say. It is what the jury says that will matter in the end. To find out what the jury is going to say, we are both going to need to exercise a little patience. That’s where things stand. I will continue saying what I believe because conscience compels me to do so given that you are a friend. But please understand that I am under no delusions at this point in the proceedings that my words will have an effect on you.

Everyone who lives in the United States was affected by your massive act of financial fraud. The ones that I am making specific reference to are the ones who posted at the Motley Fool’s Retire Early board from the years 1999 (when I put forward my first post there) through 2003 (when I was banned). I got to know those people and I got to care about those people and it became impossible for me to lie about the numbers that Greaney was putting before those people and that those people were obviously using to plan retirements. I worked up the courage to tell the truth and I don’t regret it and it is impossible for me to imagine that I ever will. That’s that. Everything that can be said about that aspect of the question has been said many times over at this point in the proceedings.

We don’t know with absolute certainty what the jury will say. I have my opinion and you have yours. I believe that you are only pretending to have your opinion, that on one level of consciousness you know perfectly well that you are on your way to prison and that you say different only because you don’t want to acknowledge the awful reality of what you have done to yourself. But I of course understand that you can say the same thing back to me and so there is no point in pursuing any further discussions re this aspect of the question. The members of your jury will decide the matter and there is not going to be a jury appointed until we all experience the next price crash and we are not there yet as of 5:21 a.m. on the morning of September 25, 2016. So be it, you know?

I worked up the courage to “cross” Greaney because of the people that I got to know and care about at the Motley Fool board. In the days and weeks and months and years since I put forward that fateful post, I have come to care about thousands more. And of course in a less intense sense I care about each and every one of the millions whose lives have been destroyed. They are all my friends in a limited sense. I care about each and every one of the millions whose lives have been damaged as a result of the Buy-and-Hold Crisis. I will continue to think about the effects on those millions every time that I dare to push the “Submit” button re a new post.

And I care about you.

You too enter into the calculations that I do each time I advance a post. So my offer to do what I can to put forward some words aimed at getting your prison sentence reduced a wee bit remains on the table and will always remain on the table until the jury gives its verdict. I won’t commit financial fraud, obviously. The idea that I ever would is of course insane. But I think it would be fair to say that you get that loud and clear at this point in the proceedings. So, again, saying the same words over and over again doesn’t add much.

I believe that you will be going to prison following the next price crash.

For a long time.

I believe that action taken today could get that prison sentence reduced a wee bit. But I don’t believe that there’s anything that anyone can do today to get that prison sentence eliminated altogether.

And so I don’t believe that there’s anything that I can do to persuade you to come clean prior to announcement of your prison sentence. You don’t want to go to prison AT ALL. So you are not motivated to say words and take actions that would bring this crisis to an end. It is what it is. We are all in the soup together.

I will do what I can and I will not do what I cannot do, you know? It’s pretty simple when you reduce it to its essentials.

I have never had any options. I very much don’t want to go to prison myself. So it is unimaginable to me that I would ever commit any felonies. The error that Greaney made in his retirement study is so easy to understand that a five-year-old could grasp the essential point — leave out the most important factor and you are going to get the numbers wrong every damn time. I have to post honestly re that one or I cannot do work in this field and my entire life has been devoted to accumulating the skills to do effective work in this field and so I am not turning back re the core project. And there you are.

I’ll do my thing. You’ll do yours.

I am obviously not God. I have obviously been wrong about this sort of thing before. It is of course possible that I am getting it wrong again. If knowing that gives you comfort, I am happy that my Goon friend can enjoy that comfort. That’s nice for you (if you really feel comforted, which I personally doubt in my possibly wrong-headed understanding of where things stand).

I still like you, Laugh. I will send you a postcard when you are in prison. I will meet up with you after you get out and have a beer with you and laugh about all the craziness that went down in the good old days.

If that helps, good. It makes me happy if that helps. Because that is something that I can do.

The lying about the numbers that my friends use to plan their retirements is not something that I can do. You know, the financial fraud thing. Not this boy. Find somebody else.

But you knew that.

You knew that a long, long, long, long time ago. For at least 12 years now (since John Walter Russell declared The Great SWR Debate over and showed with numbers why that was so), you knew that.

You can continue, if you please. But there is no law mandating it. You are free to just to just wait it out and spend your time and energies doing more fun stuff. You have my permission and encouragement, for what that’s worth.

Anyway, I naturally wish you all the best that this life has to offer a Goon.

Hang in there, man. It gets better. A LOT better. Yes, even for those headed to a prison cell following the next crash.

Prison sentences come to an end. We tend not to see it that way before they are announced. But if you read the great philosophers, I think you will come to agree that the consensus view is that even long prison sentences, as feared as they are in the time we are seeking to avoid them, eventually come to an end and new things then rush in to fill our lives with joy and hope and fulfillment.

My take.

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:

Is there anyone, other than you, that knows how stock investing works?

There are thousands of people who know bits and pieces of the story, Anonymous. Shiller is obviously the leader; all of my work is rooted in his Nobel-prize-winning research. Bogle obviously knows a lot; Bogle developed every aspect of Valuation-Informed Indexing with the exception of the need to practice price discipline that follows from Shiller’s research. Bernstein has the safe withdrawal rate right — he said that you need to subtract two points at times of insanely high valuations; he’s just afraid to say that it is 2 percent because he knows what you Goons will do to him if he “crosses” you by posting honestly. Wade Pfau said that he was not able to sleep at night because he was so excited to learn about Valuation-Informed Indexing. Larry Swedroe posted tons of honest stuff; he won’t use the words “financial fraud” to describe Buy-and-Hold because he doesn’t want to see you Goons destroy his career. And on and on and on and on and on.

The better question is: Is there anyone working in this field who doesn’t know that Buy-and-Hold is a con?

If there was someone who thought that Buy-and-Hold was a legitimate strategy, that person would be embarrassed by the behavior of you Goons and would insist that you knock off the funny business. Thousands have asked you in one way or another to do that. But how many insist on it in the face of your death threats and your threats of career destruction? Has anyone but me done this?

I won’t post dishonestly, Anonymous I flat out refuse, So, yes, I am today 14 years ahead of anyone else. I have spent the last 14 year developing the first true research-backed strategy. I refuse to waste time pretending to believe in a strategy that was entirely discredited 14 years ago. I have too much self respect to waste my time and energy that way.

I am not stopping anyone else from posting honestly. I encourage it. And I am working to get prison sentences announced for you Goons. That helps all the thousands of people who want to talk the realities but who today are afraid to do so.

It’s not that this stuff is intellectually difficult. I certainly am not smarter than Bogle or Shiller or Pfau or any of the others. The difference is that I care too much about my readers to betray them in the way that these individuals have betrayed their readers. I am certainly unique in that regard. There is no one in a close second place. Even you Goons have commented on that thousands of time.

Someone had to move first. There is always someone who moves first. There is no other means by which change can be achieved.

When I get my $500 million settlement, that will send a signal to thousands of others that it pays to do honest work in this field. You won’t have a hard time finding people saying what I say today then. People will be running from Buy-and-Hold when your prison sentence is announced and people will be running toward Valuation-Informed Indexing when my $500 million settlement is announced.

It wasn’t my plan to be the first to stand up to you Goons. I just posted honestly on a single subject of great importance to my readers (safe withdrawal rates) and everything else followed from that. I invited thousands of others to join me. Not surprisingly, many people don’t like to see their loved ones threatened and many people don’t like to see their careers destroyed. The key is getting your prison sentence announced. Then everything flips.

Is there anyone who has enough confidence in Buy-and-Hold to insist that you Goons permit honest posting? Why not? Is there any other field in which we see this sort of behavior?

There is not. Investing is important. There is 35 years of peer-reviewed research showing that Buy-and-Hold is the purest and most dangerous Get Rich Quick scheme ever concocted by the human mind. Every ethical person wants to find a way to provide access to honest reports on what the peer-reviewed research says. But as of today no ethical person is permitted to earn a living in this field. Gee, I wonder if there will be long prison sentences announced following the next price crash. Some of this stuff is so darn hard to figure out!

I am no genius, Anonymous. I am a guy of perhaps slightly better than average intelligence. If I can see that this is a scam, so can Jack Bogle. And he obviously DOES know. There is no way in God’s green earth that he would permit his name to be associated in any way, shape or form with Mel Lindaauer’s if he believed that there was even a 1 in 10,000 chance that Buy-and-Hold could survive a discussion in which honest posting re the last 35 years of peer-reviewed research was permitted. If Jack Bogle is that certain that Buy-and-Hold is a big pile of smelly garbage, how much confidence in it can anyone else really possess?

No one believes in Buy-and-Hold today, Anonymous.

Lindauer’a behavior shows that he lacks confidence in this “strategy.” Greaney’s behavior shows that he lacks confidence in this “strategy.”The behavior of all those who have posted in “defense” of these two insanely abusive individuals have shown by their behavior that they lack confidence in this “strategy.”

No one believes in the strategy. Lots and lots of people follow the strategy. It’s a pretty darn sad situation.

There are good reasons why we enacted laws against financial fraud. Those who stand to make gobs of money by exploiting our weakness for Get Rich Quick strategies are always going to be tempted to endorse Buy-and-Hold. We need to enforce those laws, get prison sentences announced and then get about the important business of rebuilding our broken economic and political systems.

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

Please mark me down as OPPOSED to the 14-year cover-up. Please mark me down as SUPPORTIVE of reasoned enforcement of the laws against financial fraud.

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 guess you are holding back on the usual comments of goons and prison threats that you liberally use on your own site.

The natural order of things is that we all learn new things over the course of time. In the investing realm, we learned something very important in 1981. We learned that valuations affect long-term returns. That is, that the market is not efficient, that risk is variable rather than static, that a Buy-and-Hold strategy can never work. We should have been using the past 35 years to explore all of the many far-reaching implications of that “revolutionary” (Shiller’s word) finding.

It didn’t happen. The advance was so big and the subject matter so important to so many people that cognitive dissonance stepped in to delay our ability as a society to process this new knowledge. As time went on, it got harder and harder to acknowledge the mistake because it was hurting more and more people. Eventually, valuations rose to levels never seen before. So the damage resulting from our failure to teach investors the importance of practicing price discipline grew to levels never seen before too. Eight years ago, we experienced the second biggest economic crisis we have ever seen. And still valuations are at insanely high levels. So those who understand what the new research says are expecting another huge price drop in days to come.

What do you think is going to happen when millions of retirements are wiped out, Sammy?

I didn’t cause any of this to happen. I pointed out the problem in a post that I put to a Motley Fool discussion board on the morning of May 13, 2002. Hundreds of my fellow community members applauded me, saying that my post kicked off the most important discussion ever held at that forum. But you Goons stepped in with your nastiness and your trickery to block the discussions. Then you followed me to scores of other places to do the same.

I don’t have any special knowledge of whether there are going to be prisons sentences or not. I certainly believe that there will be. There were prison sentences in the Bernie Madoff case. This case of financial fraud affects 500 times more people. How could there not be prison sentences when this all comes out? It all happened on the internet, so there are time-stamped Post Archives documenting every one of the many hundreds of thousands of posts.

I want there to be as few prison sentences as possible and I want whatever number of prison sentences there are to be as short as possible. So I want to see this matter brought to a close as soon as possible. I want this written up on the front page of the New York Times so that we can put all the nasty stuff behind us and get about the business of exploring all of the many truly exciting implications of Shiller’s work.

How do propose that we go about getting to that magic place, the place where deep in our hearts we all want to be? If I could sign a piece of paper getting us all to that place without there being any prison sentences at all, I would sign it in two seconds. I know that you would too. But I do not have access to a time machine and neither do you. So we are left with the prospect of seeing whatever prison sentence you will get if you come clean today or whatever prison sentence we will see if you come clean or are exposed at some point later than today.

The logical choice for every single person concerned is that you come clean today. But you do not want to come clean today. So you are going to continue with your nasty garbage. And there is not a thing in the world that I can do about it.

You have yourself to blame for your prison sentence. You are responsible for your own actions. Or you can blame all the journalists and investing experts and economists and researchers and policymakers that have kept this matter hushed up for 35 years now. They all played a role (this group includes me — I held back on posting that Motley Fool post for three years because I was afraid of what the Buy-and-Holders would do to me if I spilled the beans). But placing blame doesn’t solve the problem. Only coming clean solves the problem. Only getting everything out in the open solves the problem.

I am doing what I can. I do not want to see you spend one day more in prison than what is absolutely necessary at this point in the proceedings. But I cannot change things that have already happened. I have offered to write any words that I am able to write to get your prison sentence reduced or, if it is possible, to get it eliminated altogether. It is up to the people of the United States and ultimately to the members of your jury to determine the length of your prison sentence. I am happy to use any persuasion skills that I possess to make the case that they should go easy on you because of the amazingly unique set of circumstances that applies here. I have been saying all along that I am happy to do that.

What else can I do? What do you want from me?

To say nothing, to do nothing, makes matters worse. That’s the one thing that I cannot do in good conscience. I want to help the millions of middle-class investors who need to know how to invest according to the last 35 years of peer-reviewed research. I want to free the academic researchers who have told me that they would like to be able to prepare honest research without seeing their careers destroyed. I would like to see the journalists who would like to tell this amazing and exciting and life-affirming (there is 50 times more good here than bad) story without seeing their readers become enraged with them for doing so (it upsets people to learn that their portfolios are not worth what they believed they were worth, and that is what Shiller’s research is telling us is the case at times of overvaluation). I want to help you Goons avoid prison or at least avoid very long prison sentences. I want to help everyone.

Please tell me what you would have me do to help everyone. Please do not say that I should let the 35-year cover-up extend to 36 years. I know with absolute certainty that that is not the answer. As you of course know as well when you are being even a tiny bit honest with yourself.

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:

Rob,
I have left you a lot of caustic response messages over the years. While I still feel you are wrong about so much, mostly your approach to them but also on the facts, something totally unrelated has just happened in my life that made it clear how petty it has been to hold a running anonymous argument with someone on the internet for a decade about personal choices on approaches to retirement funding! You have a right to be wrong, and to still state your views all you want. Always have, of course. But I do hope you find the peace that would almost certainly come from not having this crazy obsession in your life any longer. Anyway, while I do think your claims of illegality for those who wrote in opposition to your claims, snarkily or not, politely or not, are not just unsupportable but ridiculous, I would like to offer you an apology for any psychic pain my own barbs might have caused you. I’ll give you this, Rob, you are one exasperating son of a gun, but after all that, I still do hope you find your own personal peace and happiness. I’m going to go seek to perfect my own, now. Take care.

I am grateful to you for posting those words, Anonymous. I knew all along that you had a soft spot hidden away somewhere deep inside of you!

You are an exasperating son of a gun as well! I mean that in the way that I believe you meant it when you directed those words to me. You believe in what you are saying and you believe that you are helping by making the strongest possible case for what you believe. I have learned important things as a result of your persistence in making your case and I am grateful.

I am being entirely sincere when I say that I wish you the best of luck in all your future life endeavors, my old friend.

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:

Rob, prison overcrowding is a serious issue today. Given that most Goons are non-violent offenders, do you see a scenario where they just wind up on probation after the next big stock crash? Or are we looking at real prison time, in your view?

I don’t think it’s possible to say. There’s never been a situation like this before. People are going to be very pissed off to find out that they have lost most of their life savings and that it was all 100 percent unnecessary. I know that I would be very pissed if that happened to me. So I am not going to say anything to make light of the justified anger that millions of middle-class people are going to feel towards you, Anonymous.

Concerns over prison overcrowding didn’t keep Madoff out of prison. I don’t think you can count on that sparing you.

But I do think it’s important that we pull together as a society and put the negative stuff behind us and do all we can to understand why you Goons did what you did and to be as forgiving as possible. I will certainly be arguing the case with whatever energies and skills I am able to direct to the project. So I am not going to say that I believe with 100 percent certainty that there will be actual prison sentences either. If things go the way I would like to see things go, there will either not be actual prison sentences or at least there will be prison sentences that will be a lot shorter than the ones you would ordinarily expect to see in such circumstances.

We will have to see how it goes. The biggest factor is going to be the level of people’s anger. I have worries that people are going to be very angry. I say that because the level of emotion that we have seen over the past 14 years has been off the charts. The greater the extent of the irrationality we see during a bull market, the greater the extent of the irrationality we should expect to see during the bear market that follows. People don’t like to be tricked out of their retirement money. So I can easily see us experiencing an explosion of hate toward you Goons.

But my job is to keep things from getting out of control. In the days before the crash, that means doing what I can to bring the con to a close so that the hate does not get so out of control. In the days following the crash, that means helping people to understand the pressures and fears that drove you Goons to do what you did. My hope is that clear-thinking people will step forward and that we will see prison sentences on the shorter end of the spectrum of possibilities.

I obviously cannot guaranty anything. It may be that my voice will count for as much in the days following the crash as it has in the days leading up to the crash — that is, not too much at all. We are in uncharted waters. I think the key here is the comment that you made a little while back, that perception is everything. People will look at the Post Archives and form a determination as to how much you Goons were responsible for what happened to them.

I wouldn’t want to be in your shoes, it would be fair to say that much! But I do not personally believe that it would be fair to put all the blame on you Goons. What happened is largely due to human ignorance; as a society we truly did not know how stock investing worked until 1981 and in the grand scheme of things not so much time has passed since then. And lots of institutions had to fail us for you Goons to do what you did — journalists failed us, bloggers failed us, economists failed us, policymakers failed us, academics failed us, and on and on. Our own freakin’ human nature failed us!

If people take all that happened into account, I would think that there would be actual prison sentences but perhaps not terribly long ones. But I do not feel that I can say with any confidence at all how things are going to play out. People may strike out in anger without taking all of the realities into account. We will have to wait a bit to find out together how it all plays out.

I naturally do wish you all the best with it regardless of any differences that we have re the investing matters.

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, followed by the response of one of my Buy-and-Hold Goon friends:

We’ll have to wait and see how it all plays out, Sammy.

Shiller published his “revolutionary” (his word) research findings showing that valuations affect long-term returns in 1981. When a revolutionary advance is achieved, all existing strategies need to be updated. Can you name 20 changes that Bogle made to his Buy-and-Hold strategy upon his discovery of Shiller’s findings? Can you name 10? Can you name 5? Can you name 1?

We need to update Buy-and-Hold to reflect the last 35 years of peer-reviewed research in this field. This is important. Millions of people’s retirements are riding on it. When you update Buy-and-Hold to reflect the last 35 years of peer-reviewed research, you’ve got Valuation-Informed Indexing That’s the updated version of Buy-and-Hold that I have been writing about for 14 years.

When Bogle acknowledges the need for an update, all of the nasty stuff that you refer to above goes away. It is only the Buy-and-Holders who engage in this behavior. And there is no need for the behavior once the update is made.

We are all on the same side, Sammy. We all want the same things. We all believe in using the peer-reviewed research as a guide to how to invest. We all should be urging Bogle to make that update so that we can all begin enjoying the benefits of those last 35 years of research.

This is my sincere take re these terribly important matters, in any event.

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

Rob

We have already seen it played out. Your retirement plan failed. Your predictions of a stock crash didn’t happen. Moving the goal posts is not a strategy. You are now close to 60 and getting a real job, instead of trolling the Internet, will be very difficult.

Bogle, and his followers, have had successful strategies. Your fairy tales won’t change history.