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

Since Shiller did not respond, he clearly did not see any value in what you had to say.

I certainly do not agree.

All of my work follows from Shiller’s research findings. For Shiller not to find value in my work is for Shiller not to find value in his own work. And, if Shiller stopped finding value in his own work, he would stop doing it. So I feel certain that Shiller sees value in my work. It may be that, if he offered comments on my work, he would not agree with everything that I have said. That certainly seems possible and even likely. But that’s different. If he were to say that there are things that he agrees with and things that he disagrees with, he would be endorsing the national debate that I have been calling for for 17 years. That’s what matters, not his assessment of one particular participant in that debate or of one particular participant’s take on one particular issue.

I mentioned in my earlier comment that Shiller did not discuss the how-to aspects of his research findings in his own book. Does that suggest that Shiller does not support his own work? That would be an absurd suggestion. He obviously supports his own work or he wouldn’t do it. Yet it is an objective fact that he does not discuss the how-to implications of his research in his book. That would be true whether Rob Bennett ever showed up on the scene or not. This strange phenomenon has nothing to do with me. Shiller presented the world with a huge advance in its understanding of how stock investing works and the world (including Shiller) elected not to explore its implications. That’s our story.

Change is hard, Anonymous. That’s what it comes to. If we have that national debate, we are going to have to make some changes. Books are going to need to be rewritten. The courses that people need to complete to earn a Ph.D. in Economics are going to need to be redesigned. Calculators are going to need to be recrafted. People who are today big shots in this field are going to be diminished in status. People who are today little shots are going to gain in status. Showing that stock prices are set by emotion rather than by reason is a breathtaking change (an advance if this is the reality). It changes absolutely everything. Shiller’s research is like a hurricane (a benevolent one, to be sure) passing through our country. Everyone but me (including Shiller!) had had the sense to run to get out of the way of it rather than to run towards it and ultimately into it.

If Shiller endorses my work, Shiller is involved in something that he doesn’t want to be involved in. That’s the bottom line. I’ve mentioned prison sentences. I’ve mentioned civil awards and settlements. I’ve mentioned sites that have banned honest posting that obviously should not have done that. The owners of those sites obviously do not want to be exposed. If Shiller endorses me. he places himself in the middle of a hundred controversies. He would prefer not to do that. That’s what is going on here.

It is of course the same with all the others. Wade Pfau loves my work. Loves it, loves it, loves it. But he doesn’t want to see his own career destroyed because he says openly that he loves my work. So now he does not say that publicly. And he is able to go about his business. He still publishes research that has value. He just doesn’t publish the research that he knows in his heart would have the MOST value. He rationalizes the way that he is playing it by telling himself that people benefit from the work he does do, which is so, and that, if he spoke honestly about what he thinks of my work, he would not be able to find employment in this field. It’s not an entirely bad rationalization. I do not endorse it. But I see where he is coming from. That’s the basic story for lots and lots and lots of people.

The problem is that the national debate did not begin in 1981. That’s when it should have happened. There are arguments that can be made on both sides. I am obviously a firm believer in Valuation-Informed Indexing. But I don’t say that only Valuation-Informed Indexers would be making reasonable arguments if we had the national debate. There would be strong arguments coming from both directions. And we would over time learn important things as a result of the battle of ideas. That would be a very good thing. But how do we get started down that wonderful road now that the debate has been delayed for 38 years? It’s a very, very, very embarrassing situation. So we have elected to collectively put our heads in the sand and hope that somehow things work out okay without us having to engage in the national debate.

I don’t think there was evil intent when as a society we took a pass on initiation of the debate in 1981. I think that we were suffering from cognitive dissonance. It’s a real thing. It happens when you see changes this big — the human mind just cannot process them and so it tunes them out. And, once a certain amount of time had passed, it became too embarrassing to launch the debate 10 years after the logical starting date or 20 years after the logical starting point or 30 years after the logical starting point or whatever. So here we are.

Shiller doesn’t want to get involved. That’s the bottom line. He has made amazing contributions. He earned that Nobel prize. So he has gotten involved re other aspects of this in hugely important ways. But he does not want to be the one to expose the 38-year cover-up. Like lots of other good and smart people, he would like to see someone else take on that job.

I have taken it on. But I do not have the power at this point in time to get the job done. It is my belief that the next price crash will scare enough people that I will be able to get some help and then my efforts will be more effective and, once this is all written up on the front page of the New York Times, Shiller and lots of others will be willing to go on the record and then we all will live better lives from that point forward and not one person will regret our collective decision to finally move forward in our understanding of how stock investing works. But as of today Shiller and the others do not want to get involved, they do not want their names associated with this messy situation. All that I can do is to ask them for help. I have done that. And they have elected not to get involved at this point in time.

Rob

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

“The entire purpose of my plan was to shift to a form of work that I would find more fulfilling and that would in the long run produce more income than the corporate employment that I left behind.”

No, your historical posts show you had only counted on a small amount of side income. You never had a substantial business income. To win anything, you would need to have suffered damages and quantify that. Secondly, even if you had a substantial business, the Statute if Limitations have long run out.

The crime is ongoing. Greaney’s study has not been corrected to this day. The bans remain in place. The abusive posting continues. Wade Pfau remains afraid to work with me to promote our research because of the threats you made.

I’ll quantify the damages. There are millions of investors. The Bennett/Pfau research shows them how to reduce risk by nearly 70 percent. Those millions of investors would obviously have been happy to have paid a large amount of money to reduce their risk by 70 percent. If only ten million paid me only $50 for me to show them how to reduce risk by 70 percent, that’s $500 million right there.

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:

Evidence just blew up the Rob-logic in one simple post. Based on your responses, you know it too, Rob

Okay, Anonymous.

The way that I would say it is that Shiller blew up the Bogle logic in one simple book and in one simple piece of peer-reviewed research and in one simple Nobel prize.

I have the greatest possible respect for Bogle and for Fama and for all other Buy-and-Holders. So long as their ideas are presented in a civil way, I think they should be taken seriously. That’s why I spent some time approaching what Evidence said from several perspectives. I am not personally a Buy-and-Holder. But I know that there are millions of good and smart people who are and I think that their beliefs need to be taken seriously.

I don’t buy into the idea that there are two sides. There are two models for understanding how stock investing works. There are two very different sets of beliefs. But we are all on the same side. We all want the same thing — to learn what we need to learn to invest as effectively as possible.

My hope is that I will be the catalyst for setting off the national debate that we need to have re these matters. If I pull that off, people will not just benefit from things I say but from things that thousands of others (on both the Buy-and-Hold and Valuation-Informed Indexing side of the table) say once they feel free to express their sincere views openly and clearly and frankly. The leverage here is just off the charts.

That’s why I think that the work that I have been doing for 17 years now is so important. That’s why I think that I will be receiving a settlement check for $500 million when we all get to the other side of The Big Black Mountain. Our national debate re these matters should have begun in 1981,when Shiller published his amazing and “revolutionary” (his word) research findings. Once it got put off, it got more and more difficult to talk about this stuff because people got more and more defensive about the fact that the critical debate was delayed for so long. We have to get there sooner or later and I don’t see any way that it is going to happen until some more people do what I have done, just insist on their right and on the right of everyone else to post honestly and without hesitance or apology. I believe that we are a great country and that we will be able to pull it off in the days following the next price crash.

I am grateful for the comment posted by Evidence. I hope that people will take his comments seriously and that perhaps I will be seen by one or two to have added something to the discussion down the line a bit. We’ll see, you know?

My best and warmest wishes to you and yours in any event, dear 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:

You missed your calling as a stand up comedian.

Getting the numbers wrong in a retirement study is a pretty darn big deal, Anonymous.

It’s not just that Greaney destroyed the lives of thousands of people at the Motley Fool board who believed that his study was legitimate. Wade Pfau and I intended to get our research featured on the front page of the New York Times in the days before you Goons threatened him. We would have talked to the Times about the errors in the Trinity study (Wade wrote to the authors of the Trinity study about them), which was the study from which Greaney took the methodology used in his own study. There have been thousands of articles written about retirement planning that used the Trinity study as guidance. So the errors in that study put MILLIONS of retirements in jeopardy.

The comedian is the person who questions whether saving millions of people from suffering failed retirements has earned compensation of a very big multiple of $500 million. If it were only one million retirements saved, that would be $500 per saved retirement. There’s not one person on the planet who wouldn’t be willing to pay far in excess of $500 to avoid suffering a failed retirement. Getting the numbers in retirement studies correct matters. Big Time.

We are all going to need to pull together in the days following the next price crash. I have a funny feeling that our Wall Street Con Men friends are going to be looking for ways to restore credibility in the eyes of the general public to the investment advice field. I have offered to agree to a $500 million settlement to signal my willingness to help with that effort. It’s called being constructive, it’s called being cooperative. What a concept!

There’s nothing funny about a failed retirement. There’s certainly nothing funny about millions of them.

Serious Minded (When Its Comes to Retirement Planning!) Rob

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

“I will be joking around with Robert Shiller in those days. I will say “Robert, you were kind of a liar re that safe withdrawal rate question for all those years, were you not, my good friend?” And he will say in return “Touche’, Rob, but no more so than you were from May 1999 through May 2002, right?” And I will laugh and we will embrace and we will both get back to the business of helping the flawed but generally good humans to overcome the Get Rich Quick urge that resides within all of us and to invest their retirement money more effectively.”

You really believe this? You think you will actually be talking to Shiller?

I do.

Everything that has happened to me over the past 17 years is powerful evidence that Shiller is right re his “revolutionary” (his word) ideas about how stock investing works. Shiller presented the theory but held back from discussing the how-to implications of the theory. I explored the how-to implications of the theory. Good for me, you know? The theory doesn’t help anyone until people come to understand the how-to implications. The work that I have done plants Shiller’s theory in the real world. That’s a very important advance,

Yes, I believe that I will be talking things over with Shiller when we all work our way to the other side of The Big Black Mountain, in the days following the next price crash. I believed that Shiller and I would be talking things over with our good friend Jack Bogle in those days too and that we would all be enjoying working through these amazing advances together. It of course saddens me that it is no longer possible that Bogle will be a part of that exciting discussion. However, we will be giving him credit for all of his many powerful contributions and making sure that everyone knows that we couldn’t have done the work that we have done had Bogle not laid the foundation for the advances with his earlier contributions.

If you didn’t think that my work was of great importance, you never would have advanced a single death threat or a single demand for a single unjustified board banning or a single act of defamation or a single threat to get a single academic researcher fired from a single job. If you didn’t think that my work was a major advance, you would never have felt threatened by it. So deep in your heart you believe that I will be working with Shiller and lots of others in the days following the next price crash too. You just can’t bear to acknowledge that you made a mistake in thinking that it really is not necessary to practice price discipline when buying stocks. So you play a stupid game of acting like this stuff doesn’t matter. It matters. Big time.

Shiller knows that, and when he feels free to say so openly and clearly and firmly, I will be working with him to advance the ball as far and as quickly as we are able to advance it. Why wouldn’t I want to do that? And why wouldn’t he want to do that?

After the next crash, why would ANYONE not want to do that? All of the appeal of the Get Rich Quick garbage disappears after the Pretend Money has gone “Poof!”

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:

Do you think people should follow your example when it comes to planning their retirement?

Sure.

I think that people should use the peer-reviewed research in this field as a guide on how to invest. I learned that one from my main man Jack Bogle. That’s one of many re which I believe that The Big Guy was right on.

You are obviously suggesting that people should not follow my example because your criminal acts have blocked me from earning money in this field for the past 17 years. When I collect my $500 million settlement check, my setting myself up so that I could go 17 years without a paycheck is going to look very, very good. This isn’t the way that I intended to go. I obviously would have preferred you not to have engaged in criminal actions or for responsible people to have taken effective steps to rein in your criminal behavior when it first evidenced itself. But $500 million ain’t a bad payday any way you look at it.

Someone had to expose The Great Buy-and-Hold Con. It turned out to be me. I wish it had been someone else, you know? I don’t think that anyone would choose 17 years of this for any amount of money in the world. But it’s more than a little gratifying to know that my work will help millions and millions of people to plan their retirements more effectively for many years to come. I earned that $500 million. I like it that our system provides that sort of payment to people who love their country enough to put up with the sort of garbage that you Goons have directed at me.

So, yes, I think that people should aim to save effectively and I think that people should aim to invest effectively. The thing that I very much think people should NOT do is to engage in criminal acts that end up causing them to spend the last decades of their lives in prison cells. Huh? What the f? Not this boy, you know?

I’d take the cards that I am holding over the cards that you are holding every time, my dear Goon friend. And I can’t say that it’s a terribly close call either.

My best wishes.

Felony-Avoiding 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:

“To continue my efforts to open every discussion board and blog on the internet to honest posting re safe withdrawal rates and scores of other critically important investment-related topics.”

And how is that working out for you? Time for plan C?

On the content side, I have achieved a level of success 500 times greater than the highest level that I ever thought that I could achieve if everything in my life worked out in the best way possible.

On the process side, it has been the biggest and most catastrophic failure that I have ever encountered or even imagined.

Does that help at least a tiny bit?

Mixed Results 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:

Oops. I don’t think you meant to post this today. You never do two posts in one day, let alone one of them to a ValueWalk that you just posted. One thing we can always count on you for is sticking to the routine.

Unless you’re having a crisis/meltdown. Care to share?

I intended to have that post appear on March 15 and I failed to change the month in which it is to be posted from “January” to “March”. (the WordPress system uses the current month as the default choice). I have now changed the month so that it will appear when I had intended it to appear. Thanks for the assist.

You are correct to note that it is a personality trait of mine to stick to a routine. I am a cautious person by nature. I think that is one of the reasons why I spent so much time investigating the safe withdrawal rate concept during the years when I was putting together my Retire Early plan. I was not willing to go by what other people said. I wanted to be sure. So I read what lots of other people said. But when some aspect or another of the story did not seem to add up, I dug deeper until I was able to make better sense of the matter.

It’s also a reason why I find it such a big deal that the Buy-and-Hold retirement studies have not all been corrected in the 17 years since I pointed out the error in them. I assume that lots of middle-class people are like me, they are seeking accurate and honest information when they go to the internet for guidance on how to invest their retirement money. I see it as a big problem when one of the experts makes a mistake and then fails to correct it when it is brought to his attention. Mistakes made in this field hurt real live human beings in very big ways. That sort of thing bothers me on a deep level. I find it incomprehensible that someone would discover that he got an important number wrong in a retirement study and then would fail to correct the error within 48 hours. I can’t even say how shocked I am that a lot more than 48 hours has passed since I pointed out the mistake that Greaney and lots of others made in their retirement studies. My basic cautious nature is certainly a contributing factor to my feelings of shock.

No crisis/meltdown other than the one that has been ongoing since the morning of May 13 2002, when I learned that Greaney had zero intention of ever correcting his study or of thanking me for pointing out the error to him or of doing anything to compensate the thousands of people whose lives were destroyed by his error and by his long-time failure to correct it.

Please take good care, dear 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:

“But why do you put so much focus on where I rank? ”

There are so many out there with opinions. Shouldn’t we give more credence to those that are more expert than others?

Absolutely.

This is why I became a Buy-and-Holder. When I was putting together my binders to plan my early retirement, I became exasperated that there seemed be as many opinions about how stock investing works that there were people commenting on the subject. Then I found Bogle. He advocated using the peer-reviewed research as a guide. That made sense to me. That took things out of the subjective realm and into the objective realm.

An expert is someone who keeps up to date with the peer-reviewed research in the field. One upon a time, that was Bogle. Not today. Now he is 38 years behind the curve. So is Bogle an expert today or not? According to his own key principle (that one should use the peer-reviewed research as a guide),he is not. He is either wrong about the importance of peer-reviewed research or he is wrong to ignore the last 38 years of peer-reviewed research.

I would say that Bogle is an expert re all the stuff that he says that is not impacted by Shiller’s revolutionary findings of 1981. So, when he says to keep it simple, I am in. When he says to index, I am in. When he says to tune out the noise, I am in. When he says to invest for the long term, I am in, But when he says that there is no need to consider valuations when calculating the safe withdrawal rate, I am out.

I don’t consider myself an expert in this field. But Bogle is not really an expert anymore either. He was prior to 1981. But when he failed to update his investment advice to reflect Shiller’s “revolutionary” (his word) research findings, he fell out of the world of objective research and into the world of subjective opinion.

Shiller is an expert in the realm of theory. He is aces in that department. But Shiller rarely comments on the practical how-to aspects of the stock investing story. So I don’t think that he can be called an expert in that realm. That’s my niche. I take Bogle’s ideas and update them to reflect Shiller’s research. And I take Shiller’s theory and give it practical significance by addressing all the how-to aspects of the question that Shiller ignores.

So who is the true expert here? Bogle did hugely important stuff and then dropped the ball on other hugely important stuff. It’s the same with Shiller. I think that my work has huge importance. But all that I really did was build on the work of Shiller and Bogle. So I don’t feel comfortable saying that I rank higher than those two giants. I would say that all three of us have contributed something essential to solving the stock investing puzzle and leave it at that.

I don’t offer any apologies. But I don’t want to suggest that I could have done what I have done without a lot of help from a lot of others either. I filled in the spots that Bogle missed and I filled in the spots that Shiller missed. That’s not nothing. That’s a big deal. But I sure could not have done what I have done without a lot of help. That idea is laughable and I do not want to be associated with it.

Does all of that not make good sense?

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

“ I rank him as the most important investing analyst of all time. So he obviously has done a huge amount of good, for which we all should be grateful. But he certainly has not done all the good that he could do“

Since you have put all the pieces together, unlike anyone else, wouldn’t you be the most important investing analyst of all time ?

It would be better for someone else to make that assessment and for that person to do it after we have had the national debate re these matters that we need to have and after which all of the insights that I have developed over the past 17 years have been examined by lots of good and smart people. I am extremely proud of the contributions that I have made. I offer zero apologies for rolling up my sleeves and putting forward my take re hundreds of implications of Shiller’s amazing, “revolutionary” (Shiller’s word) research findings.

But I obviously could not have developed any of those insights without Shiller (and Bogle) having done their amazing work before I came on the scene. And, while I have a good bit of confidence that most of what I have put forward has great value, I would obviously feel even more confident in that assessment if every site had been open to honest posting for the entire 17 years and if we had had people like Shiller and Bogle commenting on my work all along and pointing out any weaknesses in my work product.

Shiller did his part and Bogle did his part and Bennett did his part. Why are you so focused on knowing who is going to get the most credit? It seems to me that the important thing is getting it right for the millions of middle-class people who are using our work product to plan their retirements. That’s what matters to me.

I am 100 percent happy to give Bogle the huge credit that he has merited with his work product and I am 100 percent happy to give Shiller the huge credit that he has merited with his work product. And I am 100 percent certain that Shiller and Bogle and thousands and thousands of others will be 100 percent happy to give me the credit that I have merited with my work product in the days after the entire internet has been opened to honest posting re safe withdrawal rates and scores of other critically important investment-related topics.

Why does this matter of who is going to get the credit for all of the powerful, amazing insights that we have developed over the past 17 years come up again and again? Why do you care about that so much? How about just enjoying the amazing insights and learning from them? And. in the event that you have some worry that I might have gotten something wrong somewhere along the way, how about doing what you can to get every discussion board and blog opened to honest posting by the close of business today?

I think it would be fair to say that, once we open the entire internet to honest posting, someone is going to identify any mistakes that I have made. That’s obviously what I want to see happen. If I have made any mistakes, I would be grateful to have someone point them out to me so that I can correct them. Can we work together to see that we all begin experiencing the benefits of an internet opened to honest posting on the last 37 years of peer-reviewed research by the close of business today?

That one’s got my vote..

Rob