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

“This matter is settled. There is no valuations adjustment in those studies. ”

Absolutely — to both statements. It is so difficult to find anything either tangible or truthful in your painfully long screeds, so it’s worth pointing out such tiny nuggets, whenever they can be found.

Rob, for the thousandth time, let me try to gently nudge you towards sanity, and perhaps even a fruitful future:

Once, long ago, steam engines ruled the earth for train locomotion. While that was underway, there came along diesel/electric power. Let us pretend you alone had the franchise for diesel electric at that moment in history. You alone thought it up, you designed it, you built a working prototype, you perhaps even patented it. Perhaps you felt, with the strength of a religious zealot, that your way — the diesel/electric way — was surely the way of the future, dooming steam to become the relic we now know it to be.

Question: would a workable way to promote it, to foster the transition, to encourage adoption be more likely to be:

a) An attack on steam as unscientific, ungodly, an evil con job, a 100% unworkable method that could never transport a single passenger or package to anywhere (though people used it every day for decades with apparently wonderful and expected results), a method promoted by nasty bigoted horrible people bent on destruction, who were harassing and threatening you, a smelly approach that needed to be buried 100 feet underground… etc, etc, etc,

OR

b) To outline the workings of diesel/electric with specificity, clarity, and brevity. To then to illustrate it’s function by using it yourself in demonstration. To develop and then promote early adopters who had similar results to your own. To focus solely and exclusively on YOUR approach, on IT’S benefits, via POSITIVE-minded and directed activities?

To be even briefer still: Why not put down your anger, your pain, and your raging ego, and instead simply try to focus on learning truth and then (if you feel the need) promoting that truth; instead of dedicating all of your energies into attacking others, and what THEY may or may not chose to do with their own freedoms and ideas?

Briefer still: If your ideas had merit, they would be adopted of their own accord.

 

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

The difference is that Todd states his opinions and they are just that. The rest of us have opinions as well.

This is an excellent post, Pink. It gets right to the heart of what the troubles are. Thanks for posting these words.

Todd agrees with me on safe withdrawal rates. We have had several long conversations about the topic at the Financial Bloggers Conferences. Todd has a hugely successful site. He is well liked by everyone. He has been asked to speak at many of the FinCon sessions. He is a successful guy and a smart guy and a nice guy.

I am OBVIOUSLY doing something very different from what Todd is doing while agreeing with him on safe withdrawal rates.

When Todd ran his long article on safe withdrawal rates at his site, he credited my earlier work on the topic. I went to the article and posted come comments describing the history of the controversy, how I had been banned at numerous sites and how you Goons had threatened to kill my wife and children and how some of the biggest names in the field were committing financial fraud by aiding the cover-up of the errors in the Old School SWR studies and so on. Todd called me up on the phone and asked that I tone it down. I told him why I didn’t think that was the right way to handle things. He strongly hinted that he would ban me from his site if I did not shorten my comments. I shortened the comments but I also told him that I thought that was the wrong way to handle things. I haven’t posted to Todd’s site since then.

I am doing something different from Todd and lots of others. And you hit it on the head as to what that something is with what you say in the words quoted above. We can use your words to make progress re this matter if you will take what I say below seriously.

Todd treats the safe withdrawal matter as if it were a matter of opinion. I do not. I treat the matter as if there are right and wrong answers. That’s why I make references to financial fraud and prison sentences. This is what makes me different. This is the sticking point.

Now –

If Greaney and all the others are willing to say that their safe withdrawal rate claims are merely expressions of their personal opinion, I am happy to take back every word in which I have argued that Greaney “got the numbers wrong.” Is that fair enough?

If Greaney was stating his personal opinion, it is not possible for him to get the numbers wrong. Yes, you are right that “the rest of us have opinions as well.” You have as much right to your opinion as Todd Tresidder has to his, Pink. I am with you 100 percent re that one.

But –

I also say that I have as much right to my opinion as Greaney has to his.

Greaney did not act as if his SWR claim was merely his opinion when I put up my famous post asking if we should be considering valuations when we calculated the number. That’s the problem.

If all SWR claims are the product of opinion, we have no problem.

If Greaney’s SWR claim is the product of peer-reviewed research (the methodology used in the Greaney study was taken from the Trinity study, which is peer-reviewed research), then I need to make the point that my Retirement Risk Evaluator is based on the peer-reviewed research of Robert Shiller, who won a Nobel prize for the work he did in this field.

If you stop saying that the Old School studies and calculators are rooted in peer-reviewed research and instead say that they are merely the product of opinion, there is no dispute. I can then state my own opinion and each community member can decide for himself or herself what he or she wants to go with. That is a 100 percent fine way to proceed, in my assessment.

But if you are going to say that there is peer-reviewed research supporting the Old School SWR claims, then I have no choice but to note that there is 33 years of peer-reviewed research supporting the New School claims and that that research DISCREDITED the research that has been cited in support of the Old School claims. And that the 12-year cover-up is the most massive act of financial fraud yet seen in U.S. history.

You have the solution to our problems being presented to you on a plate.

Are you willing to give up the claim that Greaney’s SWR numbers are the product of research and are properly understood as merely the product of one person’s opinion?

If you are, then let’s get about the business of making the world a better place.

If you are not, then I obviously have no choice but to continue to let anyone in the world who will listen know about this massive and ongoing (for 12 years now!) act of financial fraud.

I hope that helps a bit, Pink.

Rob

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

The difference is that Todd states his opinions and they are just that. The rest of us have opinions as well. With you, there is a strong agenda and you want to be the center of attention, have everyone agree with you and then to be considered some kind of financial expert to the level of someone like Bill, Jack, etc. the fact remains that you have been proven wrong time and again and this has resulted in your display of ongoing bad behavior. This behavior has been mentioned time and again, yet you persist. As such, there has been no choice but to deal with you in order to restore some level of community versus have each site filled with “hocomania”.

People have tried to reason with you, but that has never worked. You are looking for the whole world to change, when perhaps you should consider what you are doing wrong.

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

Who has been the trigger for 99% of your posting, blogging, and other non-family activities over the last 12 years?
HINT: It hasn’t been Robert Michael “Hocus” Bennett.

I presume that your point is that it is you Goons who are the trigger for my posts.

That’s so only in a direct, obvious sense, Yogi.

The laws of the United States make your behavior a felony. And the rules of every discussion board and blog to which I have posted prohibits your behavior too. My view is that those rules should be enforced in a reasonable manner. If they were, Greaney would have been kicked off the Motley Fool board when he posted his first death threat and every post that I would have made in the years following would have been in response to questions of middle-class investors who have expressed a desire to learn about the realities of stock investing.

I urged Greaney’s removal back in June of 2002. So the fact that you Goons have been able to disrupt conversations at so many venues is not my doing. We have a problem AS A SOCIETY. We have Wall Street Con Men who have become millionaires pushing the smelly Buy-and-Hold garbage. We have millions of middle-class people who are being exploited and financially destroyed. And we have site owners who are afraid to take on the powerful Wall Street Con Men because they have seen how ruthless they are in their response to anyone who dares to “cross” them by posting honestly.

My job is to solve the problem.

Part of the way that I solve it is by responding to questions and comments put forward by you Goons.

I always make clear my opposition to your most abusive stuff. I often delete your most abusive posts. So I have done nothing to encourage your acts of financial fraud. I am clean.

But I do respond to posts that contain genuine questions or comments or in some cases genuine questions or comments mixed in with fraud and abuse. That’s a good thing to do. That builds a record. That gives me practice responding to questions. Many of the questions you advance puzzle ordinary investors too, not just Goons. After the crash, when ordinary people develop a desire to see the answers to their questions, they will have a resource to come to to find them. It is a very, very, very positive and constructive and life-affirming thing for me to respond to genuine or even semi-genuine questions.

You Goons trigger my posts in the sense that you put forward the words that determine which points I am going to address on any given day. But it is not really you Goons who have determined that my words appear here rather that at the boards and blogs to which I intended to post them. You played a role in that, to be sure. It was your abusiveness that blocked the thousands of community members who expressed a desire to be able to participate in discussions of what the peer-reviewed research says. But you could not have pulled that off if there was not a huge lack of understanding of how stock investing works among the general public.

In other circumstances, large numbers of posters would have demanded that you be removed when you engaged in all of your dirty tactics. You Goons didn’t create those circumstances any more than I did. Those circumstances were in place when I put forward my famous post of the morning of May 13, 2002.

It is that human ignorance that truly has triggered everything that I have done, not you Goons. You make it harder to solve that problem of human ignorance, that’s all.

You Goons are a mountain that we all need to climb to get to the place where deep in our hearts we all want to be. It is my job to overcome you. Part of the job is to respond to your genuine and semi-genuine questions. So I do that.

The end result is that we will advance to a place so wonderful that most of us cannot fully imagine how wonderful it is today.

It all will be worth it in the end, Yogi.

50 times over.

If you want to say that you trigger my efforts, I could say the same in return — that it is my honest posting that has driven you so crazy that you are now on your way to a prison sentence following the next crash. Now THAT”S triggering!

My stuff helps you as much as it helps everyone else who reads it. I have zero problem with that. I don’t approve of your abusiveness. But I consider myself your friend. If you profit from things I have said, I think that’s just super.

And your abusive stuff doesn’t just hurt me. It hurts millions of middle-class investors too. And it hurts you. It is your abusive stuff that will be putting you in a prison cell following the next crash. So you are being triggered in a much worse way than I am being triggered.

I am dealing in the most effective way possible to the circumstances that exist. Those circumstances are not ideal. I wish that Bogle had said the Three Magic Words 33 years ago and that we all were today enjoying the greatest economic advance we have ever seen in history. But the reality is that we are awfully darn close to that wonderful place today,. The good news is 50 times more good than the bad news is bad.

The peer-reviewed research that I co-authored with Wade Pfau is the most important research published in this field in the past three decades. I think it would be fair to say that Wade is going to be awarded a Nobel prize for that research and that I will likely be awarded a Pulitzer prize for the work that went into getting it published. Was that research paper triggered by you Goons too?

Trigger me more, Yogi!

Hit me with your best shot!

A $500 million settlement payment may only last my family for 20 generations. I need to take it up to 40 generations. Please trigger me more!

I did not study investing in school. I never managed a big fund. Yet I have taken this thing to places I never imagined I could take anything in the course of this lifetime. If that’s the result of your triggering, please keep triggering me like mad.

Honest posting leads to good places. That’s the point.

I am going to continue following this wonderful Learning Together path.

I believe that the day will come when we will have responsible people (including Old Saint Jack) speaking out about you Goons and your abusive, fraudulent behavior. At that point, we will leave the ugliness behind us and will be able to achieve three decades worth of advances in our understanding of how stock investing works in a very short amount of time. I cannot wait. I can bear with a little triggering if that is what it takes to get to that magic place.

I would have preferred to have never have had to deal with you Goons in carrying out the tasks needed to get us all there. That option was never made available to me, as you Goons well know. So I did it this other way instead. The important thing is that I did what needed to be done. That’s what matters, not the Goon stuff.

My take.

I wish you well.

Rob

 

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

Here’s an article about the race-baiting of Jackie Robinson by the manager of the Philadelphia Phillies, Anonymous:

http://articles.philly.com/2013-04-08/news/38348704_1_jackie-robinson-phillies-baseball-world

Please note the part where the article reports how the commissioner of baseball eventually worked up the courage to warn the Phillies manager to knock off the funny business.

That’s what will happen here.

People may be slow to act at times. But most people have good in them. Most people are not 100 percent Goons. I mean, come on. We would not still be here if a large percentage of the population engaged in the sort of behavior that we see on a daily basis from the sorts of individuals who have put up posts in “defense” of Mel Linduaer and John Greaney.

This is a process that we are working through as a society. We all (except you Goons, to be sure!) want to see things eventually move in a positive direction.

My best wishes to you and yours.

Rob

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

Nothing will happen for you following the next price crash Rob. You might actually get into the market this time around same as everyone else who is using buy, hold, and rebalance. But who knows maybe you will be too scared or not follow your own system again. I can’t imagine you have much of a nest egg left after 18 years of 3% returns and no income unless you got an inheritance of some sort.

Meanwhile, the rest of us, who have experienced triple digit returns in the last few years will continue locking in large portions of that run up by rebalancing and making our portfolios more conservative as we age. After all you have been calling for a crash for years and it hasn’t happened so who’s to say we won’t experience a few more years of great returns and locked in profit via rebalancing before the inevitable crash.

What makes you think this time around will be any different from the last crash? Your position as nothing more than a complete laughing stock in the realm of the financial world will remain. There are plenty of other people calling for a crash without your conspiracy theory lunacy.

Why are other people calling for a crash if the “science” of Buy-and-Hold is settled, Anonymous?

Buy-and-Hold says that price changes are random. If price changes are random, you can’t predict crashes. Are these people you refer to who are saying these things doing so in defiance of the “science”?

The Buy-and-Holders had a wonderful idea of rooting investing advice in peer-reviewed research. That’s what I love about them. That’s why I was a Buy-and-Holder myself until Greaney threatened to kill my wife and children and 200 people who had long considered themselves friends of mine endorsed his post. A strategy that causes people to do things like that ain’t science. So I gave it up on that day and the rest is history.

The Buy-and-Holders were right in the early days when they were serious about the idea of using research to support their advice. They betrayed their own vision when Shiller published his “revolutionary” (his word) research and they failed to incorporate his findings into their model (That’s what Valuation-Informed Indexing is — Buy-and-Hold updated to reflect the peer-reviewed research of the past 33 years as well as what came before it). I have just taken the vision of the Buy-and-Holders to the next step. Valuation-Informed Indexing is an updated version of Buy-and-Hold, one that actually works in the real world.

There are two reasons why the Wall Street Con Men have not adopted the necessary changes. One is a phony pride. They are Big Shots and they don’t like the idea of saying the words “I” and “Was” and “Wrong.” The other is money. Al of us humans possess a weak human nature that is drawn to Get Rich Quick strategies. Buy-and-Hold is (inadvertently, not intentionally — but still) the purest and most dangerous Get Rich Quick scheme ever concocted by the human mind. So it is possesses an amazing short-term appeal and has brought in billions of dollars of profits to the Wall Street Con Men while destroying the lives of millions of middle-class investors and taking us down a path that ends with our economic system reduced to a smoking ruin.

I want no part of any of that. No part whatsoever. My dream is to become known all over the internet as the most severe critic of Buy-and-Hold who ever walked Planet Earth. I think I’ve got a pretty darn good start on success re that particular project. No?

That makes me unpopular today. So be it, you know? A field in which honesty about what the peer-reviewed research says is banned as the first order of business is a field re which I prefer to be on the outside looking in for the time being.

People lose interest in Get Rich Quick schemes when they lose most of their accumulated life savings as a result off being tricked into following them. Look at what happened with investors in the Madoff fund. They sang the guy’s praises until they lost all their money. Then they demanded that he be imprisoned for his acts of financial fraud. I think it would be fair to say that our mutual friend Jack Bogle is Bernie Madoff times 5,000 when you consider the number of human lives he has destroyed with his support for Mel Lindauer and John Greany and the individuals who have seen fit to post in “defense” of these two.

There will be hundreds of thousands of lawsuits filed following the next price crash when people learn about the trickery that was employed to separate them from their money. There will be thousands of people being led off to prison cells. I will put in a word for you. I will point out the pressures that people like Wade Pfau and Bill Bernstein and my good friend Jack Bogle faced. I will make every effort in the world to be fair and then something even a bit more than just fair.

But I ain’t interested in going to prison along with you. No friggin’ way. Find someone else, you know? It’s not on my bucket list.

I’ll help the people bringing lawsuits against you and I’ll help you too. I have sympathies on both sides and so I will put forward what words I can to help both sides. That’s how I have been playing it for 12 years now and that’s how I will continue to play it for the next 12 billion. That’s me. But I would have to change my entire personality to be able to join you in this massive act of financial fraud. That’s a change that I am not capable of considering much less implementing. Please count me out re that smelly pile of garbage, old friend.

If you really were confident that you were not going to land in a prison cell, you would not be posting here on a daily basis. You know that, I know that, and anyone with half a grain of sense in his or her head who reads these pages now or at some later date knows that or will know that.

Keep posting if you like.

Or stop if you like.

Do whatever works for you.

Please just know that I don’t do financial fraud. One of my aims today is to have thousands and thousands of posts in the files making that point so that there is precisely zero confusion re this point in the minds of every single person who comes here to check the matter out.

I wish you well, man. But that’s where things stand.

Why will the next crash be worse than the last? Because people had excess funds when the last one hit. They felt that they could get through it by tightening their belts. Now people are fatigued by the economic crisis and they feel that they have already taken all the financial pain that they can take. This one will hurt much more. That’s why the P/E10 level will drop so much lower. That’s why you and all the other Buy-and-Holders will be selling this time. It’s only when the Buy-and-Hold zealots sell that a secular bear market hits bottom and that we finally gain the ability to start turning things in a positive direction.

It’s about psychology, man. The psychology and the economics go together. Bad psychology brings a bad economy and bad economics brings a bad psychology. It all feeds on itself. In the background is the Buy-and-Hold/Get Rich Quick garbage, which starts off all the bad stuff by persuading people to believe in fantasy worlds for which there are zero support in the peer-reviewed research of the past 33 years. When a society borrows trillions of dollars from its future, it causes a big heap of pain for a big bunch of people. All of the debt taken out on all the credit cards owned in this country doesn’t match the debt we incurred as a result of the lies about the peer-reviewed research told to us by the “experts” touting the Buy-and-Hold garbage.

Please let it be noted that I do not say that you INTENDED to cause this economic crisis. I don’t believe that. I believe that on one level of consciousness you really believe in Buy-and-Hold. But you have doubts. You lack confidence. That’s why my reports of what the last 33 years of peer-reviewed research says drive you crazy.

And the same is of course true of Bogle and Burns and Bernstein and all the others. I don’t believe that Bogle is the Frank Underwood of Personal Finance. That’s why I believe so strongly that his heart will melt following the next crash. Once Jack’s heart melts, I will be working with him to set things right. And you have my pledge that I will do everything in my power to get your (and his!) prison sentence reduced to the extent possible even then.

That’s the best offer that I can make to you, my old friend. The financial fraud stuff is just not my particular cup of tea.

I hope that all helps at least a tiny bit.

My best wishes to you and yours.

Rob

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

All of your 30 redundant points can be answered by the simple fact that no one else sees one gimmicky PE10 metric as gospel for valuation. There are hundreds of technical metrics that can be used that perhaps have correlation with previous lows and highs but they don’t suggest causation and don’t ensure anything about the future value of stocks.

Even the people who came up with this metric (not you) don’t suggest using the metric to actually influence your exposure to stocks.

Your problem is you have become absolutely fixated on one metric, one bit of research, that you had an incredibly small part in like 15 years ago. The actual brains and true contributors to those things have long since moved on to further their research and careers yet you compulsively dwell on this tiny contribution you had to someone else’s long forgotten research. It is not a conspiracy to cover it up, it is just not as revolutionary as you believe and it is so bizarre that you are so attached to it since you are such an insignificant contributor.

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

If I witnessed a crime as heinous as you believe this one to be, I would call the police, the FBI, newspapers, TV stations, everyone. You just sit, waiting for other people to do something.

I’ve filed several police reports. I’ve spoken with the FBI. I’ve contacted many newspapers. I haven’t contacted any TV stations, but TV stations often look to the major newspapers to determine what is news so I think it makes sense to start with newspapers. I’ve done everything you recommend here, X.

And I will continue doing it. It is a rare day that goes by in which I do not contact someone re this matter.

You need to look at the math. The relentless promotion of Buy-and-Hold strategies caused the market to be overpriced by $12 trillion. Do you have any idea how much money that is?

That $12 trillion was essentially marketing money for Buy-and-Hold. The money wasn’t real. It was temporary, pretend money. But the Buy-and-Holders told people it was real. And they took credit for it! They told people that they could use this money to finance their retirements! That is why we are in such a mess today.

Now –

Which newspaper do you think wants to be the one to tell people that the money they were planning to use to finance their retirements is Pretend Money?

Which investment advisor do you think wants to do that?

Which policymaker wants to do that?

And, after we experience an economic crisis because of the relentless promotion of this Get Rich Quick garbage, who do you think wants to spill the beans by telling people that it was caused by the Buy-and-Holders?

The newspaper that ran articles saying Buy-and-Hold might work?

The investment advisor who advised his clients to consider Buy-and-Hold “strategies”?

The policymaker who did nothing while he saw the Buy-and-Holders promote their Get Rich Quick con 24/7 everywhere investors turned to for advice?

Everybody wanted to be on the gravy train for so long as it was running.

And now that it is not running so hard anymore few want to make the world angry at them for telling them the truth.

Get Rich Quick sells, X. It never, never, never works in the long run. But, man, does it sell! That’s why Buy-and-Hold is so freakin’ popular. The Buy-and-Holders cannot provide a URL to a single study that supports it. But millions don’t care. They love them some Get Rich Quick and they are happy to give their business to anyone who pushes Get Rich Quick extra hard. And I think it would be fair to say that no one pushes Get Rich Quick harder than the Buy-and-Holders.

Now –

There’s a snag in all this Get Rich Quick nonsense.

The snag is that Buy-and-Hold always causes financial devastation for everyone taken in by its claims. The collective losses are always large enough to bring on an economic crisis. So we all end up in the soup in the end. Some funny joke, huh?

That’s when prison sentences are announced for people like you, X.

We KNOW that Get Rich Quick is bad for us. We also know that it is insanely profitable in the short term. So we adopted laws to stop people from pushing it too hard. We made financial fraud a felony. We did that for a good reason. We did it because otherwise people like you would destroy our economic system. We wanted to create a DISINCENTIVE for the use of all the insanely abusive practices that you have engaged in over the past 12 years to stop people from learning what the peer-reviewed research really says.

You ignored those laws, X. Your bad.

The good news here is that we did not have 33 years of peer-reviewed research showing us how dangerous Buy-and-Hold is after the earlier three economic crises. We now have that. So we never have to go through this again.

There won’t be any reason for people to be reluctant to hear the truth following the next crash. Most of their money will already be gone! The abusive tactics just won’t work anymore.

Emotions will be the opposite of what they are today. Today people are desperate not to hear that they were conned. Following the next crash, they will be angry as can be. They will be looking to hang those who have advocated Buy-and-Hold strategies from a tree. The internet will supply them with the names of the people they are looking for.

Do you see?

I have spoken to the police and to 30,000 academic researchers and to all the big names in this field. I will continue to do so.

What will soon be changing is the REACTION that I will be obtaining when I tell people about this massive act of financial fraud.

I hope you understand. This is a society-wide problem and it is going to take an entire society to solve it.

Get Rich Quick is not the answer. Get Rich Quick is the problem.

We are on our way to solving that problem. The research that I co-authored with Wade Pfau shows that 70 percent of the risk of stock investing comes from the temptation to believe the Wall Street Con Men and follow Buy-and-Hold “strategies.” All that is coming to an end. No one likes a Ponzi scheme after it busts.

I naturally wish you all of the best 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:

Oh no, Rob. Please don’t make us go to prison. We are all scared. Can’t you tell?

Yes, I can tell you are scared, Pink. You wouldn’t be posting here if you were not scared.

But I am not the one who will be sending you to prison. I will tell the truth about what you have done. I suppose that in that indirect way I am playing a role in getting you sent to prison. But it is the millions of middle-class people whose lives you have destroyed who will be making the call. It is when those people demand that prosecutors take action that the ball will get rolling. And then it is the members of your jury who make the final call.

That’s how it should be, you know? That’s a good system. Perhaps not perfect in every way. But I’d like to see someone come up with something better.

I am not going to be pushing for a long prison sentence. I am not going to be walking around town with a sign saying “The Goons Did the Crime. Now the Goons Must Serve Time!”.

My guess is that I will be arguing for a somewhat shorter sentence than most of the millions of people whose lives you have destroyed. I see it as my job to put things in perspective. I believe that you Goons follow the strategies you recommend for others. I think that counts in your favor. I believe that there are lots of people in positions of responsibility who have failed us and that you Goons would not have gone as far down the dark path as you have had those people behaved appropriately. I believe that cuts in your favor as well. And I think that it is important that as a society we do what we can to put the ugly side of this matter behind us and move on to the pressing business of rebuilding our broken economy and teaching everyone what they need to know to reduce the risk of stock investing by 70 percent while also earning returns sufficiently higher to enable them to retire five to ten years sooner than they ever dreamed possible during the Buy-and-Hold years.

So I think it would be fair to say that you and I are very much interested in achieving the same goals in some important respects and that we will likely come to deepen our friendship in coming days. I certainly hope that that turns out to be the case.

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

Hang in there, my old Goon friend.

Rob

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

I see. So when your kids ask what you do for a living, and how you support them, you reply “Daddy sits back and waits for good things to happen!” You’re really instilling some good values there, Rob.

I tell them the whole story, Anonymous.

I explain that there once was a time when we knew very little about how stock investing works. Then some smart and good people came up with the wonderful, liberating idea of rooting one’s strategies in the peer-reviewed academic research. Those people were the Buy-and-Hold Pioneers. I love them and respect them and admire them because of all the breakthrough insights they provided to us. I start by telling them that because it’s not possible to make sense of the rest without first knowing the basics.

Then I note how humans are not perfect creatures and how we sometimes make mistakes. I tell them how Yale Economics Professor (and Nobel Prize Winner) Robert Shiller discovered the one big mistake that the Buy-and-Hold Pioneers made in 1981 and thereby provided us the insights we need to reduce to stock investing risk by 70 percent and to achieve financial freedom five to ten years sooner than we ever before dreamed was possible. I point out to them how Shiller’s “revolutionary” (his word) insight has far-reaching implications, implications that show us that just about everything we thought about stock investing before he came along is in fact wrong and needs to be corrected. I point out how Shiller made the Buy-and-Hold dream (creating a simple, smart and safe way for millions of middle-class people to invest in stocks) come true in the real world.

Then I explain why the Buy-and-Holders were reluctant to take advantage of Shiller’s insights, why they resisted these wonderful ideas that will someday free millions and millions of people to live richer (in every sense of the word) lives. The Buy-and-Holders believed in what they had done. They were proud of what they had done. They had built careers around their ideas. They had staked their lives on these ideas. That had made lots of money on these ideas. They had shared these ideas with friends and neighbors and co-workers and fellow community members. They felt great embarrassment when these ideas were brought to their attention. They elected (not entirely consciously — cognitive dissonance played a big role here) to COVER UP the breakthrough ideas rather than to promote them.

And Buy-and-Hold (which Shiller’s peer-reviewed research reveals to be the purest and most dangerous Get Rich Quick scheme ever concocted by the human mind) caused the most out-of-control bull market in U.S.. history, sentencing millions of middle-class people who were fortunate enough to be born at the best time in history to be a stock investor to failed retirements and impoverished golden years. And the insanity of those Get Rich Quick years made Buy-and-Hold more popular than ever. Now it was not only Wall Street Con Men making a buck from the purest and most dangerous Get Rich Quick scheme ever concocted by the human mind. Ordinary people could get in on the Get Rich Quick fun too! They could strut around proudly, mocking all those who followed more prudent strategies, laughing at any who thought that stocks might continue to perform in the future at least somewhat as they always had in the past and that the reckless and irresponsible and ruthless promotion of these “strategies” might produce yet another economic crisis, this one perhaps worse than all those that similar strategies had caused every time they had been employed in the past.

Then I tell them about the internet and how the invention of this amazing new communications medium made it far more difficult for the Wall Street Con Men to push their smelly Get Rich Quick garbage. Before the internet, the Con Men could threaten figures who tried to tell the truth with career destruction and keep everyone more or less in line. With the invention of the internet, ordinary people like their dad could expose the lies and give the millions of middle-class people who very, very much need access to honest and accurate reports on what the last 33 years of peer-reviewed research says what they require. And he could make the case absolutely air-tight by working with academic researchers and getting new peer-reviewed research published that explored the Shiller ideas in greater depth and thereby provided more and more and more powerful insights for the benefit of the entire country.

Then I explain how the internet also permits social misfits like those of you who have put up posts in “defense” of Mel Lindauer and John Greaney a power that they could never come to possess in pre-internet times. I point out to them how these losers (Greaney once told me that every person who has ever gotten to know him well has come to the conclusion that he is the biggest asshole who ever walked Planet Earth) have learned how to use intimidation tactics to frighten people like Jack Bogle and Bill Bernstein and Scott Burns and Larry Swedroe and Mike Piper and Todd Tresidder and Wade Pfau into silence about what they know about The Great Buy-and-Hold Scam. Through the use of death threats and demands for unjustified board bannings and tens of thousands of acts of defamation and threats to get academic researchers fired from their jobs, they have managed to keep the greatest act of financial fraud in the history of the United States (the cover-up of the errors in the Old School safe-withdrawal-rate studies) covered up for 12 years.

I naturally point out to them how sad this is. And I point out that it is not the Goons alone who are to blame. I explain that we ALL have responsibilities to stand up and be counted when our country is under attack. If you love something, you fight for it. The Buy-and-Holders are now so full of self-loathing that they are willing to see our economic system collapse rather than to acknowledge the vast amount of human misery they have caused with their deceptions and acts of intimidation. And that is partly the fault of people like Robert Shiller. Shiller should be speaking up more strongly. ALL Valuation-Informed Indexers should be speaking up more strongly. Every last one of us has failed our country in some way (I was afraid to point out the errors in Greaney’s retirement study for the first three years that I posted to the Motley Fool site).

I tell my boys that their dad has spoken up more strongly re this matter than anyone else alive on Planet Earth today. I suggest that they check the Post Archives in the event that they have any doubts whatsoever re this point. I share with them the files in which I keep the 30,000 e-mails I sent on The Silencing of Wade Pfau to every academic researcher listed in the Social Science Researcher Network database. And I share with them the hundreds of kind and intelligent responses I received from people who spent their lives training to do important work and now cannot do it honestly because to do so would hurt the feelings of my good friend Jack Bogle and all of the thousands of Buy-and-Holders who have aided him in this 33-year cover-up of the realities.

I explain to them that I have expressed a willingness to settle my lawsuits against those who have put up posts in “defense” of Mel Linduaer and John Greaney for $500 million and how I have offered to do what I can to spin things in a way that the prison sentences for those who have done so might be reduced a bit. I make the point that love is the answer here and that those of us trying to bring things to a successful conclusion need to keep love in our hearts at all times if we are to do so. I share with them the motto I have used to guide my actions going back to the morning of May 13, 2002 — “Be as honest as it is possible to be without crossing the line and becoming uncharitable while also being as charitable as it is possible to be without crossing the line and becoming dishonest.”

You tell yourself that the same old intimidation tactics that you have employed for the past 12 years will continue to work following the next price crash, Anonymous. I think you are wrong. I know from my conversations with thousands and thousands of interested parties that there are a lot of people who love their country who are going to take effective action following the next price crash, when it will become obvious to every last one of us that we simply have no other choice. With the end of defined benefit pensions, we have left the responsibility of financing millions of middle-class retirements to the millions of middle-class people themselves. That means that we MUST provide them access to honest and accurate reports of what the last 33 years of peer-reviewed research says. It’s imperative.

And, following the onset of the next price crash and the announcement of your prison sentence, we will. I am sure. My good friend Jack Bogle is going to be looking for a way to keep himself out of prison following the next price crash. He knows that his only hope of doing that is to come clean and to hope that memories of his many genuine accomplishments will soften the hearts of the millions of middle-class people whose lives he has destroyed. It’s the same with Bill Bernstein. It’s the same with Larry Swedroe. It’s the same with Scott Burns. It’s the same with Wade Pfau. It’s the same with Mike Piper. And on and on and on and on and on.

Your Campaign of Terror against our board and blog communities has brought on the biggest economic crisis in U.S. history, Anonymous, You have destroyed millions of middle-class lives with your deceptions and your acts of intimidation and your word games. You have demonstrated a great power to cause widespread human misery.

So the heck what?

80 percent of the members of our communities have expressed a desire that honest posting be permitted at every board and blog on the internet. Those people put laws in place to protect them from people like you long before you came on the scene. When those people realize what has been done to them, they will demand enforcement of those laws and you will be put inside a prison cell for a long, long, time to come. Once we are safe from you and the other Goons, there is nothing to stop us all from learning together what the last 33 years of peer-reviewed research says. It gets better and better and better and better.

I end up one of the richest men in the United States. And properly so. I do it not by conning people out of their retirement money but by sharing with them the benefits of the biggest advance in our understanding of how investing works ever achieved in our history. I can live with that, you know? I didn’t choose the rocky road we have travelled. I argued for a brighter, softer, higher road. But I am confident that we will all get to the desired destination regardless of what road we use to get there. And my boys and their children will benefit from the $500 million payout for many, many, many years to come.

That’s a pretty darn heartwarming story. That’s how our system works. And it’s a pretty darn good system, no matter how much you hate it. I tell my boys that story and I hope they learn from it. It’s an amazing, positive story. It’s a story of the triumph of love over hate. Those are the stories that matter most. Those are the stories that my boys need to hear. I am proud that they are able to hear one that has their dad playing the lead role.

I naturally wish you the best of luck in all your future endeavors, my long-time Goon friend.

Rob the Storyteller