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

Rob,

I think it comes down to something as simple as this. You have stated what you think are problems. People have responded as to how they disagree. You, in turn have responded how you think people are wrong to have disagreed with you. People continued to respond in disagreement. The cycle continued on for some time. Many people grew tired of the cycle and went away. Others eventually got angry because of repetitive comments going in circles. Others decided enough was enough and had you banned.

Your jury will see the posts of the thousands who expressed a desire that honest posting be permitted.

Your jury will see the published rules of all the sites where you violated the published rules thousands of times.

Your jury will see the death threats.

Your jury will see the demands for unjustified board bannings.

Your jury will see the tens of thousands of acts of defamation.

Your jury will see the hundreds of posts in which Wade Pfau showed his growing excitement over Valuation-Informed Indexing as he did more research and learned more about it.

Your jury will see the peer-reviewed research that I co-authored with Wade, research that can fairly be described as the most important research published in this field in the past three decades.

Your jury will see the posts in which Wade expressed his growing fear that you Goons were going to destroy his career and the lack of reaction by Jack Bogle when I asked for his help.

Your jury members will have lost most of their life savings in the crash.

Your jury members will be chosen from a society of people on its way or already in the Second Great Depression, a Great Depression that could have been avoided had you honored your promise to follow the site rules at the boards and blogs at which you posted.

Your jury will be hearing testimony from people like Robert Shiller and Rob Arnott and Michael Kitces, who will be backing me up by reporting on the many acts of intimidation directed at them over the years.

Your jury will see that I was so sure of what the peer-reviewed research says that I contacted 30,000 academic researchers, knowing that none of them would be able to identify any flaws in the Valuation-Informed Indexing concept.

Your jury will hearing from the professor at George Washington University who offered effusive praise for the VII concept and said that he would be in the future teaching it in his classroom and giving me credit for the concept.

Your jury will be bearing from the professor at Columbia University who said that VII follows from Shiller’s research and that he could see how it might work out very well indeed.

Your jury will be seeing the analysis done by Schenkler (a Goon!), who said that VII looked rock-solid and important.

Your jury will be hearing from the posters at the Bogleheads Forum who said that my work challenges basic premises of Buy-and-Hold in a very serious and exciting way.

Your jury will be hearing the threats you directed to Wade Pfau that I don’t even know about yet, the ones that were made in secret.

Your jury will be looking at any e-mails that Wade sent to friends at the time he was thinking of flipping to the dark side because of the threats you made to destroy his career.

Your jury will be looking at the comments made by hundreds of posters at the Diehards Forum when you Goons became so afraid of losing control of that board as a result of your use of insanely abusive tactics that you moved the entire board community to a place where it could be controlled by Goons.

Your jury will be looking at e-mails transmitted among the lawyers at Morningstar.com at the time when you Goons were demanding that I be banned and they couldn’t find a single abusive post in my file while finding thousands and thousands put forward by you Goons.

Your jury will be looking at any e-mails sent by Mel Lindauer and other Goons to Jack Bogle and any e-mails that Bogle sent back.

Your jury will be looking at my e-mail exchanges with Mike Piper in which he said that he would like to permit honest posting but was too afraid of what his readers would do if they learned how big the difference was between the Buy-and-Hold strategy that he endorsed and what the last 34 years of peer-reviewed researc tells us.

Your jury will be looking at how you followed me from site to site, threatening to destroy any board community that permitted honest posting on the safe withdrawal rate issue.

Your jury will be looking at how you burned numerous board communities to the ground because they permitted honest posting for a time.

Your jury will be looking at how the owner of the NoFeeBoards.com site pleaded with his long-time friend Ataloss not to burn his site to the ground and at how Ataloss refused to listen to those pleas.

Your jury will be looking at how John Walter Russell was universally recognized as the best numbers guy at any of our boards by all non-Goons and at how you Goons were so consumed with hate for him once he posted honestly re the SWR issue that you laughed at him on the day he died an early death.

Your jury will be looking at the e-mails that I exchanged with John Greaney in the days before I put forward my famous post of May 13, 2002, in which I asked him to co-author a book with me and he told me that was a bad idea because everyone who ever got to know him well concluded that he was the biggest asshole who ever walked Planet Earth.

And on and on and on and on and on and on.

Good luck with getting a short prison sentence with all that and more being told to your jury, Anonymous.

I think I will stick with my decision to avoid crossing The Felony Line now and forever.

Holy moly!

Rob

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

Who makes the determination of what is “honest” .

Under our system, the jury makes the ultimate determination for legal purposes. But you obviously know this without asking me.

Also, please state specific case law that supports your conclusion that banning someone from a website is considered fraud.

There’s lot of caselaw on what constitutes financial fraud. You obviously possess the same ability to research caselaw that I possess.

This is the first case that I know of where a group of Wall Street Con Men and their Internet Goon Squads used board bannings to keep millions of middle-class investors from learning what the peer-reviewed research says. The people on your jury will be people who have lost most of their life savings as a result of your massive con. I feel pretty darn confident re how your case is going to be decided.

But I am not God. I have been wrong before. We will have to wait for the next crash to come to see how long your prison sentence will be.

Fair enough?

Rob

 

 

 

Rob,

Who makes the determination of what is “honest” . Also, please state specific case law that supports your conclusion that banning someone from a website is considered fraud.

 

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

“I’m not shutting up, Anonymous.”

But we’ve already shut you up, Rob! You’ve been removed from the conversation.

You can squawk here, but it will only be for the entertainment of us goons. You can publish vanity books, but no one will buy them. You can send out 50,000 emails, but you won’t make any buddies. Etc etc.

I don’t like being shut up.

And I don’t like seeing others shut up.

It goes against the basic principles of the nation that I love. I want to see everyone working together in a great learning experience. I see that as more positive and life-affirming than any of this Goon stuff. I see that as the future of the investing advice field.

I don’t believe that even the Wall Street Con Men want this stuff anymore. Or even you Goons. I think that, if we could go back to 1981, Bogle would give an “I Was Wrong” speech or perhaps an “I’m Not Sure” speech and everything would be great from that point forward. I think that, if we could go back to the morning of May 13, 2002, Greaney would correct his study or at the very least add some language noting that there are two schools of academic thought re how stock investing works and then link to the materials that people would need to see to know what the Valuation-Informed Indexers believe the safe withdrawal rate to be.

Nobody has a magic wand. So we have to do it this other way.

It’s a pain. It’s stupid. We’re seeing lots of human suffering and we all want to take steps and we feel trapped. Yuck!

But whachagonnado?

We have to get to the other side of The Big Black Mountain. That one is not optional. It’s imperative.

The good news here is 50 times more good than the bad news here is bad.

So I think the sensible thing is to build a record and then step up and let millions of people put it to use following the next price crash, when the case for us all pulling together to follow the laws of the United States and to see that even the wealthy and powerful Wall Street Con Men follow them will be even stronger than it is today. I can’t see any other way to go.

The thought of joining in on the massive act of financial fraud is horrifying to me. I told my good friend Wade Pfau that I thought he was “insane” to do that. That’s strong language. I used that language because my repulsion for that idea is that strong. I cannot imagine taking a path that I told my friend Wade he would be “insane” to take.

Anyway, we have as a nation gotten ourselves out of tight spots in the past. We survived the Civil War. We survived 911. We survived the Nixon resignation and the Clinton impeachment/non-conviction. We survived Disco. And on and on and on. We are a strong people and a good people. I believe that somehow we will survive John Greaney’s unwillingness to correct an important number that he got wrong on the retirement study posted at his web site. Call me madcap.

There are things that people cannot do. I cannot post dishonestly re the numbers that my friends use to plan their retirements. It’s not in me. A cat can’t bark, a dog can’t meow and Rob Bennett cannot post dishonestly re what the last 34 years of peer-reviewed research tells us about safe withdrawal rates.

It doesn’t follow that I don’t care about you Goons. I care.

I wish you all good things.

Rob

Set forth below is the text of a post that I recently put to another blog entry at this site:

“We need to overcome you Goons.”

That’s easy. Just delete 100% of the Goon comments (a small increase from your current 90+%.) Since you post nowhere else anymore, the Goons can no longer reach you. Problem solved. Then watch as your fans slowly crawl out from under their beds and start posting honestly here.

If you fail to take this simple step, one has to wonder what your goal for this site is. Or if you even have one.

I delete a lot of Goon comments, X. That much is so.

But I do not see how any good purpose would be served by deleting all of them.

You Goons make a lot of good points.

You have put up a lot of posts pointing out that few investors follow pure Buy-and-Hold strategies and few follow pure Valuation-Informed Indexing strategies. Most follow Strategy C (a non-dogmatic approach to Buy-and-Hold) or Strategy D (a non-dogmatic approach to VII). Those posts helped me understand this aspect of the question better than I did before. I think they were good stuff.

You put up a number of posts arguing that part of the reason why Buy-and-Hold advocates ignore the effect of valuations is because they put a heavy emphasis on keeping their investing advice simple. I believe that there is good deal of truth to those observations. I think those comments were helpful.

Our recent discussions re the Efficient Market Theory were helpful. I obviously do not agree with the Goon position re this one. But there are many, many good and smart people who believe that the market is efficient. I like having that point of view represented here. It is possible that I will change my mind over time. I sure ain’t going to change it if I never hear the other side of the story. Again, I am grateful for your contributions.

There have been lots of other cases in which you Goons have made positive contributions. The ultimate case is Greaney’s SWR study. That study has caused thousands of failed retirements. But it also represents a big advance over what we had in days before the Old School studies were published. Peter Lynch was once saying that the SWR is 7 percent! You don’t hear anyone saying that today. We have advanced in our understanding of retirement planning and you Goons have played a role in that.

I could go on and on.

I don’t like the nasty stuff that you Goons put forward. But the full reality is that we ALL have some goonishness inside us. I was a Buy-and-Holder for a number of years. How can I explain that given my intense opposition to the Buy-and-Hold concept today other than to acknowledge that I possess Goonish tendencies just like everyone else? You Goons have humanity inside you. You are capable of good and you have indeed done good on numerous occasions.

I DO delete a lot of your posts. I will continue to do so. That’s my job as site moderator.

But I do not feel comfortable banning any of you. Not Lindauer. Not Greaney. Not Bogle. Not anyone. The lifetime ban concept has never made sense to me. We learn from talking to people who have different perspectives. There is no group of people who Planet Earth who have more of a different perspective than me on how stock investing works than you Goons. I like you. I consider you friends. I have learned from you. I want to continue learning from you. I must delete some of your posts to avoid turning this site into a corrupt enterprise. But I do not feel comfortable in adopting any outright bans of PERSONS. So I do not expect to go down that dark path.

If you Goons do not want to reach me anymore, you are free not to do so. I cannot force you to post here. But you are welcomed to do so for so long as you are willing to take time out of your days to share your thoughts with us. I will continue to delete the truly ugly and even criminal stuff. But I will also continue to engage you on the stuff that you put forward that has some value. And it is not true that I delete 90 percent of your posts. I think it is probably 50 percent or less. So I see the value proposition as being a good bit stronger than what you are suggesting with your words here.

I would VERY much like to see my fans crawl out from under their beds and start posting regularly here. That would turn everything around. That would be wonderful. It hasn’t happened as of today. So I can’t say that I expect to see it happen anytime real soon. I have hopes that it will happen following the next price crash. But I of course am not able to look into the future. So we will just have to wait and see. I would be grateful if you would keep your fingers crossed.

My aim for the site is to make it the #1 personal finance site on the internet. I have hopes of working with Jack Bogle and all of my other Buy-and-Hold friends to spread their word about Valuation-Informed Indexing all over the internet. I believe that Jack is a giant. I believe that he is a good man. I believe that he is going to flip following the next crash. As you know. If he does, I see things getting better and better and better for each and every last one of us. If he doesn’t, that would be very, very, very bad. I would rather focus on the good that I think we are likely to achieve here than on any possible negative outcomes. Does that not make good sense?

I hope that helps a bit.

I hope that you continue to contribute. I hope that you contribute in a more positive way in the future than you have in the past.

It would not surprise me if you elected not to continue posting here. I certainly would understand such a decision.

If you elect to take your leave of us, please understand that I will always have warm feelings towards you and that I will always wish the best for you regardless of what investing strategies you elect to follow. Thanks for all the fish, man!

Rob

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

Rob, this prison sentence talk is just smelly garbage.

I don’t agree with you, Sensible.

The laws against financial fraud are part of our political system. Prison sentences are part of our political system. When I say that I love my country, I am saying that I think that our system is a good one. There is a reason why we have laws against financial fraud and there is a reason why we have prison sentences. It is to protect us from situations like this.

We should be enforcing our laws and putting people who violate them in prison. We should have started doing that a long time ago. Had we done that, we all would be in a much better place today.

Everything changed in 1981. If men were angels, Bogle would have given his “I Was Wrong” speech within a few weeks of when Shiller published his revolutionary research showing that valuations affect long-term returns. Bogle was working in this field. It’s hard to imagine that he didn’t hear something about this amazing research. He’s a very smart guy. So it is hard to imagine that it didn’t strike him that Shiller’s findings constituted a major challenge to the model for understanding how stock investing works that he had been promoting.

So he should have gotten up on a stage and said “I Was Wrong” or “Perhaps I Was Wrong’ or “It’s Beginning to Look As If I May Have Been Wrong About Some Things” or at least “I Don’t Really Think I Was Wrong But You Certainly Need to Know About This Research That Points in That Direction and We All Need to Be Exploring the Implications of This in Coming Days.”

He certainly should have said SOMETHING along those lines. Had he done so, lots of smart people would have gone to work and explored the question. Maybe the questions would have been resolved quickly, maybe not. We certainly would not have found ourselves in a situation where some guy whose only expertise in the field is that he figured out how to post stuff to the internet would on the morning of May 13, 2002, put a post to the Motley Fool site noting that John Greaney’s retirement study did not contain an adjustment for the valuation level that applied on the day the retirement began and we would have seen a nuclear explosion of abusive posts in response that would continue for 12 years to come.

So Bogle messed up. Big time.

Fine. But it wasn’t just Bogle who messed up.

Why didn’t journalists DEMAND that Bogle make some sort of speech?

Why didn’t economists put forward their own takes?

Why didn’t thousands of investment advisors integrate Shiller’s findings into their recommendations and write articles explaining why the new research changed our assessment of every strategic issue?

Why didn’t people develop new calculators?

Why didn’t the authors of the Trinity study include a warning in their retirement study that their calculations were all based on the pre-1981 research and that calculations done on the post-1981 research would yield very, very different numbers?

That’s the issue here. It wasn’t one guy who messed up. It was an entire society. Bogle messed up and most of us went along for the ride. Why?

Because there was so much freakin’ money to be made by doing so.

The Buy-and-Hold Lies generated $12 trillion in Pretend Money. That provides for a whole big bunch of marketing efforts. Every time another dollar of Pretend Money was created, someone was there to claim “credit” for it. “Hey, you have that dollar in your account because you believed the Lies that I told you! Stick with me, I’ll tell you even more Lies as time goes on and you can enjoy even bigger Get Rich Quick fantasies!” Those were the unspoken words spoken to millions of middle-class investors over and over again by the hustlers who continued to advocate Buy-and-Hold strategies for years and even decades after the peer-reviewed research showed that there is precisely zero chance that a pure Get Rich Quick approach could ever work for even a single long-term investor.

Humans are weak. Dangle $12 trillion in free marketing before their eyes and there is a good chance that they will do the wrong thing and rationalize away their ethical concerns. How does a society protect itself against something like that?

We protect ourselves with laws against financial fraud, Sensible. We protect ourselves with prison sentences.

That’s the wonderful role they play in our system. When we send people off to prison for massive acts of financial fraud, we help lots of people. We obviously help the millions of middle-class investors who need access to honest and accurate reports as to what the peer-reviewed research says. But those are not the only people we help. We help all the economists because we make it possible for them to do honest work. We help all the journalists because we make it possible for them to do honest work. We help all the investment advisors because we make it possible for them to do honest work. We help all the web site owners and bloggers and policymakers because we make it possible for them to do honest work.

We even help the freakin’ Goons! You Goons don’t want to go to prison. Had Motley Fool kicked John Greaney out on his rear end when he advanced his first death threat, John would not be on his way to a long stay in a prison cell today. He would have been banned from our community for six months. At that time, I would have put forward a post suggesting that we give him another chance to play nice and everyone would have agreed and that would have been that. Instead, he is in this horrible place today where he is going to prison himself and where a lot of his friends are going to prison with him. Huh? That’s a good development how?

That’s the magic of prison sentences announced at the proper time, Sensible. Prison sentences are our friends. They are an important part of our system. Prison sentences protect us from our darker, more goony selves. Prison sentences are like “You’re out!” calls in baseball. They send a signal that you are doing something wrong and that you had better change the way you play the game if you want to win the World Series. Take “You’re out!” calls out of baseball and you ruin the game.

Take prison sentences out of the investing advice game and you find yourself flooded with investing advice that constitutes financial fraud and an economic crisis that darkens life for millions.

Thousands of our fellow community members have expressed a desire that honest posting on the last 33 years of peer-reviewed research be permitted at every discussion board and blog on the internet. Their voices are going to be heard. They are going to get what they want. I am going to see to it.

They are going to get what they want through the magical power of prison sentences. Prison sentences are wonderful stuff in the right circumstances. The announcement of your prison sentence will permit millions of good people to learn what they need to learn to enjoy far higher returns than they ever imagined possible while taking on far less risk than they ever imagined possible. That’s amazing, life-affirming stuff. We couldn’t do it without our laws against financial fraud and without our willingness as a society to send you and your Goon pals off to prison for a long, long time.

That’s the system that I love. That’s the country that I love.

Prison sentences for Goons smell very, very, very sweet.

It is goonishness and Buy-and-Hold strategies that are the foul smelly stuff causing so much human suffering. Yucko!

We’re on the one-yard line. Perhaps another year. Perhaps two.

Patience, Grasshopper! We’re all going to be famous! It’s all going to turn out for the best, just as John Walter Russell predicted many years ago! With every day that passes we inch a bit closer to that final wonderful paragraph of the story at which I peeked before working up the courage to advance that famous post of the morning of May 13, 2002.

Three Cheers for Prison Sentences! Three Cheers for Putting You Goons Away for a Long, Long Time!

Hang in there, man. It gets better. A LOT better. Yes, even serving your time in prison is better than living out the rest of your days with the prospect of a future prison sentence handing over your head.

My take.

Rob

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

I am not able to produce anyone else who will say publicly that those who continue to promote Buy-and-Hold strategies today are guilty of financial fraud, X. You have me re that one.

There was a time when it was not possible to produce one doctor who would say publicly that bleeding patients was not an effective treatment.

The Buy-and-Holders are not bad people. They are frightened people. They want to help their clients and readers. They want to talk out these issues and thereby figure out what they got right and what they got wrong.

But we all know that investing is an important topic. Intuitively, you would think that would make us more cautious about what we say on this subject. In reality, it has done just the opposite. We know how terrible it would be to get something wrong. So we have become highly reluctant to acknowledge mistakes. We all know that Fama’s findings cannot be squared with Shiller’s findings. Most of the articles that reported on the awarding of the Nobel Prize to both of these men commented on the weird reality that they say opposite things about how stock investing works. But we pretend that we believe that it is okay that all investors hear is the model based on Fama’s research and that discussion of the implications of the model based on Shiller’s research has been suppressed for 33 years.

We need to move on. We need to open the internet up to honest posting re what the last 33 years of peer-reviewed research says re safe withdrawal rates and re scores of other critically important investment-related topics.

If you don’t think that you are going to prison, then you don’t think you are going to prison. Don’t worry, be happy, you know?

I think you are going to prison. I could be wrong. I’ve been wrong before. It could be that it is happening again. If it were, I probably would be the last to know. Feel free to believe that I am wrong, okay?

I care about you. I think of you as a friend. A true friend doesn’t want to see his friend land in prison. So I am going to continue to do what I can to persuade you to get off of this awful, dark path on which you now find yourself.

But please feel free to continue walking that path if that is what floats your boat. It’s your life, not mine. You have the responsibility of running it, not me. Fair enough?

I don’t want it on my head that I failed to speak up when I had a chance to do something to get your prison sentence shortened a bit. So I am going to continue playing it the way that I have long been playing it. I have the responsibility to run my life. And I don’t feel comfortable even thinking about playing it any other way. I hope that is okay by you.

You are correct that there is no one else saying today that continued promotion of Buy-and-Hold is financial fraud. I absolutely believe that. Fama made a mistake. Shiller revealed the mistake. Bogle should have walked to the front of a room and acknowledged the mistake within 24 hours of the time he first heard about Shiller’s findings.

He didn’t do that. I don’t fault him too much for not doing it in the first 24 hours. Shiler’s findings were universally perceived as shocking. In these sorts of circumstances, these sorts of things have been known to happen.

The tragedy is that it got harder for Bogle to say The Three Magic Words with every 24-hour time-period that passed him by. There is now a mountain of evidence supporting Valuation-Informed Indexing and zero evidence supporting Buy-and-Hold. Buy-and-Hold has now caused an economic crisis. So it is really, really, really important that Bogle say The Three Magic Words by the close of business today. But it is a harder step for him to take than it has ever been before.

I didn’t create that reality and you didn’t create that reality. Bogle created it. But even Bogle didn’t create it with full knowledge of what he was doing.

We cannot change any of that.

We all live in the same country. We all are suffering from the economic crisis that Bogle caused. We all very, very much need to figure out how to bring that economic crisis to an end.

I love my country. So I am doing what I can.

I don’t pretend to be able to force you to do anything. I urge you to come clean. But that’s as far as I can take it.

I will continue to say that I believe that you will be going to prison following the next crash and I will continue to say that Bogle is at risk of going to prison following the next crash. Because that’s what the laws of my country say. And I believe that we should be applying the laws of our country to help us with the problems we face. That’s why we enacted those laws in the first place.

If you end up not going to prison, you end up not going to prison. That follows, right?

So don’t worry about it so much.

If you ever start to worry that you might end up in prison, please just let me know and I will do anything in my power to help you out.

If you continue to feel confident that you won’t be going to prison, please just enjoy that warm feeling with my blessing, old friend.

Is all of that fair enough for you?

It sure sounds fair enough to my ears.

I hope that helps a bit.

I naturally wish you all the best things that this life has to offer a person regardless of what investing strategies you elect to pursue.

Rob

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

Hyper-technical, as opposed to in any way a legal sense.

Anyone who continues to say that Buy-and-Hold is a research-backed strategy 33 years after the peer-reviewed research in this field showed that there is precisely zero chance that it could ever work for even a single long-term investor is guilty of financial fraud in the legal sense, X. I don’t think that those who held back from engaging in intimidation tactics will be prosecuted. But under a strict reading of the statute they are guilty of the crime.

You have stated precisely, on countless occasions, that Pfau, Bogle, Greaney, and all Goons everywhere are all going to prison.

I would say that Greaney and the members of his Goon Squad are at extremely high risk of going to prison. It is barely possible for me to imagine a scenario in which those who have posted in “defense” of Greaney on numerous occasions would not go to prison.

Pfau is at some risk. But I think there is a very strong chance that he will NOT go to prison. He was the first expert in this field to request corrections in the Old School studies. I believe that most people are going to feel sympathy for Wade when they hear his story.

I would say that Bogle is at more risk than Pfau but at less risk than the Greaney Goons. He is a giant. He is a hero to the middle-class. He has done more positive stuff than just about anyone else alive (I would rank Bogle second only to Shiller re the good he has done). But he also has permitted his name to be used at a board that permits posting by the sorts of individuals who have posted in “defense” of Lindauer and Greaney. My guess is that Bogle will not go to prison but I see it as a much closer call than it is with Pfau. I think that in the long run Bogle’s reputation will be restored and that he will go down in history as one of the true greats. That will certainly be the case to the extent that I am able to exercise any influence re this matter.

Rob

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

Yes, I agree. People should end the hate and stop calling people goons and telling them they are going to prison. That is smelly rotten garbage.

It’s not, Anonymous.

The sooner we get the word out about Valuation-Informed Indexing, the shorter your prison sentence will be.

We cannot go back in time. So eliminating your prison sentence altogether is not in the cards.

But it is the millions of middle-class people whose lives you have destroyed who will be demanding that prosecutors bring cases against you Goons. And it is 12 of the people whose lives you have destroyed who will be sitting on your jury. Do you not see that helping those people out helps you out too? The more we help those people out, the less angry they will be. The less angry they are, the shorter your prison sentence. Does that not follow?

If we don’t open the internet to honest posting, we will be seeing a price crash of 65 percent within the next two years. If we DO permit honest posting, it will become impossible for the P/E10 value to drop below 15 (the fair-value level). That means that the price crash will be less damaging and we will not go into the Second Great Depression. Do you not see how that helps you?

You have one big card to play — the fact that we are the luckiest generation of investors ever to walk Planet Earth. You should be playing that card. You can’t play it without coming clean. So I think you should be coming clean. Perhaps I shouldn’t be giving strategy tips to Goons. But I think of you as a friend. And that’s my sincere take re this one.

I want to focus on the substantive stuff. That’s what people care about. That’s where the real action is. They key to getting to the substantive stuff is getting your prison sentences announced. Once your prison sentence is announced, there won’t be one person advocating the smelly Buy-and-Hold garbage. So we will all be freed to post honestly re the last 33 years of peer-reviewed research. Do you see?

I am your best friend in the world. You don’t see it today, but that’s so. I am going to try to argue that you have been suffering from cognitive dissonance. That’s your best defense. There is tons of material at this site supporting that claim. So I am better positioned to help you out of your jam than anyone else alive on Planet Earth today.

If I agree to commit financial fraud myself, that hurts my credibility. That means that you lose out on the help that I can provide you. Huh? That makes sense from your standpoint how exactly?

You may have seen the story in the Washington Post today showing that the woman who claimed rape at UVA was lying about a lot of the claims she made. Stories like that travel fast on the internet. Say that we really do experience a 65 percent crash sometime over the next two years. And say that lots of people get angry about the losses they have experienced when they are too old to make the money back. And then say that a big paper like the New York Times runs a story about what you did to Wade Pfau.

How many web sites do you think will pick up that story? How many links do you think there will be to my site then? How much credibility do you think Jack Bogle will have then? How many lawyers do you think will be setting up shop to spend the rest of their lives bringing legal actions on behalf of the millions of people whose lives you have destroyed?

Guess who will still be speaking up on your behalf on that day? Old Farmer Hocus will be. No one else.

But how much effect will my words have at that time? I’ll do what I can do. But I will not be able to do then even a small percentage of what I can do today. People will be too angry to listen to my words in defense of you. Do you see how this works? To win people’s sympathies, you have to come clean BEFORE the next crash. I am sure.

I don’t tell the truth about these matters solely because I want to see your prison sentence reduced. I want to bring the economic crisis to an end. I don’t want to see us fall into the Second Great Depression. I want to get that $500 million check into my grubby hands and take my family on a trip to DisneyWorld. There are lots of reasons. But ONE of my reasons for telling the truth is that it helps you Goons, whom I have always thought of as friends and whom I have always treated as friends.

The hand of kindness is outstretched, Anonymous. I am open to anything that does not involve me committing a felony under the laws of the United States. I won’t post dishonestly on the numbers my friends use to plan their retirements. Not in 12 years. Not in 12 billion years. For obvious reasons. Outside of that crazy insane idea, I am open to pretty much anything you can name.

I hope that all makes good sense to you.

I naturally wish you all the best in your future life endeavors regardless of what investing strategies you elect to pursue.

Rob

Set forth below is the text of a comment that was posted to another blog entry at this site:

What you fail to acknowledge, Rob, is that many people, like myself, just don’t agree with your conclusions and we have explained why over and over again. However, you have chosen not to just let people have a difference of opinion. You decide to take over threads and fill it up with comments that you have made already and when people grow tired of your tactics, they ultimately decide that they have no choice but to ban you since you won’t listen.

Here are two clear facts on your two primary issues:

1. Buy, hold and rebalance has worked for many of us, is backed with long track records and we do not see any reason to switch to a timing scheme. We are all big boys and girls and can decide for ourselves as to what we feel will work.

2. SWRs- we have seen the studies and we understand what the studies say. You post from 2002 is famous only in your mind. Wade Pfau has done the best job to explain why we disagree with your comments.

Your points have been addressed so many times in the past 12 years that people have grown sick of hearing you repeat the same things. Making prison threats and other outrageous comments merely drive people to the conclusion that all of this stems from mental issues.

Set forth below is the text of a comment recently posted to another blog entry at this site:

I have to question whether you wrote that guest post. Your name appears nowhere on the page, you didn’t claim authorship of Wade’s paper, and most telling of all, you didn’t reply to the comment.

I had lunch with the author of the MoneyCrush blog and with the author of the Budgeting in the Fun Stuff blog at the Financial Bloggers Conference (FinCon14). The topic was: What to Do About the Goons So That We Can Get More Bloggers Writing About Valuation-Informed Indexing.

Their idea was to ignore you Goons. I have heard this advice from hundreds of people, including my wife. I’ve never seen the tiniest bit of evidence that it works. The Goons and the Normals are working at cross-purposes. The Normals want to see investing advice that is research-based and that works in the long run and the Goons want to never, ever have to say the words “I” and “Was’ and “Wrong.” It’s pretty darn hard to see how those two desires can be reconciled without working through some conflict.

So I did not think too much of the advice that they were giving me. But I thought that they were kind to meet with me and I thought that they were being sincere in the advice that they were offering and I thought that I should be open to doing anything that at least did not look like it would do harm.

They said that it would be better if I didn’t respond to Goon comments and challenged me to test the idea. They also said that it would be better if my name did not show up on Guest Blog Entries because then you Goons wouldn’t be able to find the Guest Blog Entries with Google searches. I said that I would go along with the tests even though I didn’t see how doing these things would help.

So we did that. We exchanged a number of e-mails following the posting of the two Guest Blog Entries. Eventually, we just stopped sending e-mails back and forth. We never reached agreement on what should be done. There was no hostility. They stuck with their position — that I should ignore the Goons, that I should give short answers, that I should say what works and not point out what doesn’t work. I stuck with my position — that we should all unite in opposition to stuff that it is so abusive that it constitutes criminal behavior under the laws of the United States, that we should encourage Buy-and-Holders to say what they believe because we can learn from them but that we should not tolerate death threats and other insanely abusive stuff, that all bloggers should be doing what is best for their readers and not just what is popular and what makes them a quick buck or earns them an easy link.

The comment was real. They said that it was okay to respond to real comments under this experiment, just not to respond to Goon comments. But they said that the responses should be short. I wrote a short response. The woman who owns the site said that she had no problem with my response. I think she may have just forgot to approve the comment. Probably she turned the moderation on because she was thinking you Goons might show up and then, after we got into the long e-mail exchange, either she forgot to approve the comment or perhaps it seemed like a trivial thing because of the other issues that came up in our discussion and that remain unresolved.

Rob