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

“Your abusive and even criminal posting behavior has blocked access to the information that those of us who want to buy stocks to support our old-age retirements need to perform the job that we need to perform for the market to do its job of setting prices properly. ”

You are referring to your banning at the various financial boards, correct? Therefore, your assumption is that if you could post whatever you wanted at any board, the stock market would behave much differently.

Obviously.

When my right to post honestly is recognized, EVERYONE’s right to post honestly will be recognized. We will as a nation tap into the benefit of 36 years of powerful research-based investing insights in the space of about 24 hours. And these last 36 years of peer-reviewed research is no ordinary 36 years of peer-reviewed research. The last 36 years of research is BY FAR the most important 36 years of research in our nation’s history.

There will be no stopping us at that point. The way that I often stated it is that: “The good stuff that applies here is 50 times bigger than the bad stuff that we have seen here.” It would not surprise me to see that, after we turned our economic system around, we declared the day that prison sentences were announced for you Goons a national holiday. People use retirement studies to plan retirements. They need accurate and honest studies to be able to plan in such a way that there long-time hopes for financial freedom are realized. I am very much looking forward to working with both my Valuation-Informed Indexing friends and my Buy-and-Hold friends to take us all to a far better place than where we reside as a nation today. I mean, what’s the freakin’ downside, you know?

The entire point of doing research is to make positive changes to the world. It’s a darned shame that we have denied ourselves these benefits for over three decades now.

Good question, Anonymous.

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:

“Robert Shiller is the one who published peer-reviewed research in 1981 showing that valuations affect long-term returns. If Shiller’s research is legitimate (he was awarded a Nobel prize), then the market is not efficient and Buy-and-Hold (which is rooted in a belief in an efficient market) is indeed a lie. Shiller doesn’t say it that way.”

Schiller doesn’t say it that way because he is not a mentally ill internet troll. Rob Hocus No 2 Step Bennett is.

What I add is that I say things clearly and simply and firmly and boldly. Everything that I say is rooted in Shiller’s “revolutionary” Nobel-prize-winning research finding that valuations affect long-term returns. But, yes, I say things differently.

I have advanvced the ball in a very important way by doing that. People need to know the practical, how-to stuff. They need to know whether they have saved enough to retire. They need to know what stock allocation they should be going with to keep their risk profile stable. They need to know what caused this darn economic crisis. Shiller hints at the answers to those questions but pulls back from stating the answers in way that most investors can understand the practical import of his message.

I certainly don’t apologize for advancing the ball in a major way, Long-Time. Everyone who has doubts about Buy-and-Hold should have started doing this 36 years ago. We would all be in a lot better shape if they had. There obviously can never be any downside to exploring new ideas. Everyone who is exposed to the ideas in clear form has the option of accepting them or rejecting them. So this is a win/win/win/win/win.

Buy-and-Holders perceive a downside because hearing the ideas expressed clearly stirs up their own inner doubts about the long-term merit of their investing strategy. Shiller showed that it is investor emotion that causes bull markets, not the economic realities, and the Buy-and-Holders show just how emotional investors get during bull markets in the reactions they offer to clear statements re the implications of Shiller’s research findings.

We need to work through this process as a society, Long-Time. We cannot make the journey from a place where most of us believe in Buy-and-Hold to a place where most of us believe in Valuation-Informed Indexing without passing through a place where lots of Buy-and-Holders are going to experience upset that they for a long time followed a gravely flawed investment strategy. If this could be done in way that didn’t cause any pain to Buy-and-Holders, I would do it that way. But I am not sparing my Buy-and-Hold friends pain by keeping my mouth shut, not if the last 36 years of peer-reviewed research is legitimate. If the last 36 years of peer-reviewed research is legitimate, the Buy-and-Holders need to hear the case for Valuation-Informed Indexing stated as clearly and simply and firmly and boldly as it can possibly be stated. Then they need to have the opportunity to ask questions. They they need time to ponder the new ideas and to determine for themselves whether or not to integrate them into their thinking about how stock investing works in the real world.

I am your best friend in the world, Long Time. You don’t see it, but I am. I paid a price to achieve benefits for you that no one else was willing to pay. I put my neck on the line so that you could learn something new. That cannot possibly hurt you. It could possibly help you in a huge way. But there’s zero chance that it could hurt you. If I am wrong re every single thing that I have ever said about stock investing, you would have ended up ahead had you permitted me to speak on the same terms that every other community members speaks because you would have been able to see Buy-and-Hold survive a challenge that it has never faced before and to see it survive that challenge and that would have given you added conference in a strategy that must inspire confidence in those who follow it if it is to work in the long term.

Every word I write benefits you. If you let it. You have to be willing to let the words in for them to have their desired effect. But that part is out of my hands. My job is to always screw up the courage to put the words forward in a clear and simple and firm and bold way. Once I have done that, I have done all that I can do. Once I have done that, I have done something very important and loving.

I was a Buy-and-Holder on the morning of May 13, 2002. I thought that the errors in the Buy-and-Hold retirement studies were going to be corrected once I pointed them out. It never occurred to me that what happened could possibly happen in this country, in which we and have laws protecting us all from this sort of thing. When the Greaney Goons came after me and my fellow community members, I looked on the internet for sites where the implications of Shiller’s revolutionary insight of 1981 were being explored on a daily basis so that I could ask some of those people to visit the Retire Early board at Motley Fool and help us all out. I learned that there are no such sites! What the h?

Shiller holds back from talking about the how-to aspects of his Nobel-prize-winning research. And no one else has picked up the ball in 36 years. Why? Because Valuation-Informed Indexing is very, very, very different from Buy-and-Hold. They both claim to be research-based strategies and yet one leads to one set of strategic recommendations and the other leads to a very different set of strategic recommendations. It is upsetting for Buy-and-Holders to hear that they are walking down a dark path, that they may be hurting themselves rather than helping themselves, that they may be hurting their friends to whom they recommend Buy-and-Hold rather than helping them.

None of that is my doing. I wasn’t around in 1981. I cannot even speak with any certainty as to why the people who were around at the time made the choices they made. What I can say is that they made a choice to delay the national debate that we very much need to have to determine once and for all whether Fama is right or Shiller is right. And, 36 years down the road, the result has been 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. This is what we have become as a result of the 36-year cover-up. The 36-year cover-up was not a good thing. This ain’t the way.

It is my job to take it the other way, the American way, the ‘the other fellow gets to have his say as well” way. That way is best for every single person involved. I love my Buy-and-Hold friends. I want to help my Buy-and-Hold friends out in every single way available to me. Lying to my friends about the numbers that they use to plan their retirements is not one of the ways available to me. For obvious reasons. It is my job to search for things OTHER THAN THAT that I can do to make the lives of my Buy-and-Hold friends easier.

I can’t do it by myself. We have 15 years of Post Archives showing that. I need at least 10 good and strong people who will stand with me to get this job done. I believe with 100 percent certainty that I will have that in the days following the next price crash. That’s Door One.

Or the Buy-and-Holders themselves could elect to act in a way that would make life better for every single person involved. That’s Door Two. A better and quicker door. It makes all the sense in the world for us to collectively choose Door Two. But it would be an exceedingly non-Goonish thing for us to do. I don’t think we will do it. Not after what I have seen. But the door remains standing before us. I can point out the opportunity to my Buy-and-Hold friends, knowing that the odds that they will choose the life-affirming door are something less than great.

And that’s it. Those are the two doors, Long Time. Door One opens for me regardless of what you do. Door Two requires your cooperation. So the odds are strong that it is going to be Door One. But there is something about the fact that you show up here on a daily basis week after week, month after month, year after year, that tells me that you feel some unease about going through Door One. Good for you. Door One is a terrible door. For all of us. But for you in particular.

If you want to choose Door Two instead, I am with you 100 percent. I think that would be super.

But please don’t ask me to join Shiller and all the others in talking about his “revolutionary” (his word), Nobel-prize-winning insights in the guarded and hesitant and fuzzy and cautious way that most others talk about them. This decision not to risk upsetting the Buy-and-Holders was no doubt motivated by a feeling that it is the charitable way to go. I have 15 years of Post Archives showing me that there is nothing even a tiny bit charitable about it. It is not the charitable way to go, it is the cowardly way to go. The 36-year cover-up is killing us all. The 36-year cover-up of the implications of Shiller’s 1981 research finding that valuations affect long-term returns was the primary cause of the economic crisis that in turn was the primary cause of the political frictions that we have been seeing on both the left and the right in recent years. Not this boy. Please try to find somebody else, you know?

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

Rob

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

Respectful behavior is what is required, Rob.

I have the greatest respect possible for the PEOPLE who advocate Buy-and-Hold, Sammy. I sing their praises all the time. Every Buy-and-Holder whom I have ever met is smart and it appears to me that just about all of them are top-notch people in a more general sense too. The Buy-and-Holders have made huge contributions to our understanding of how stock investing works. I have learned many, many important things from them. I rank Jack Bogle, the king of Buy-and-Hold, as the second most important investment adviser of all time.

I do NOT endorse the strategy. I believe that the strategy needs to be updated to reflect the 36 years of peer-reviewed research showing that valuations affect long-term returns. I believe that the failure to update the strategy has put millions of middle-class retirements at risk of failure and has served as the primary cause of our economic crisis. I advocate Valuation-Informed Indexing, which is Buy-and-Hold updated to incorporate the findings of the last 36 years of peer-reviewed research in this field.

What does that add up to, Sammy? I LOVE the people. I consider them friends. I want to interact in a friendly way with them. But I do not want to pretend in any way that I believe that it is okay not to consider valuations when developing investing strategies. I believe strongly that valuations must always be considered by the long-term investor (since valuations affect long-term returns).

It is my view that I SHOW my respect for my Buy-and-Hold friends by pointing out to them things that I believe they got wrong. I would want my friends to help me out by pointing out my mistakes. So I do for my Buy-and-Hold friends what I would like them to do for me if the tables were turned. So my view is that my behavior is 100 percent respectful.

Is your of what constitutes respectful behavior different from that in some way?

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 earned the $500 million, Anonymous.”

Who says you earned this? I think I have earned $2 Billion for my work. Does that mean I will see it?

I have the laws of the United States on my side. That tells me something.

I have seen thousands of my fellow community members say that the debate that I launched was the most important debate that we ever saw on our boards. That tells me something.

I have my name on the most important piece of peer-reviewed research published in the past 30 years. That tells me something.

I had a fellow who was universally recognized as the smartest numbers guy in our community decide to devote eight years of his life to exploring the implications of my ideas knowing that he would not receive a penny of compensation in return. That tells me something.

I have had investing advisors call me on the phone and talk to me for hours because they want to learn more about Valuation-Informed Indexing and how it can help their clients. That tells me something.

I have had several college professors include links to material posted at my web site as part of the required reading for their courses because they felt that the material was so important and could not be found elsewhere. That tells me something.

I have had you Goons reduced to making 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 for the “crime” of doing honest work. That tells me something.

I have had many of my fellow bloggers come up to me at Financial Blogger Conference events and tell me that they find great merit in my ideas and that they hope that the day will come when the entire blogging community can talk them over in a civil and reasoned way without you Goons around. That tells me something.

I have seen Robert Shiller awarded a Nobel prize for his “revolutionary” (his word) research findings.

I saw the economic crisis that was predicted in a book published by Shiller in March 2000 come to pass and destroy millions of middle-class lives and even undermine the confidence of many on both the left and the right in the political system that permitted this to take place. That tells me something.

Everything that I have seen since the morning of May 13, 2002, tells me that we did the right thing as a society when we elected to make financial fraud a felony, a crime punishable by a prison sentence. Nothing that I have seen cuts the other way. So, yes, I have come to the conclusion that we got that one right and that we are going to see reasonable (and I hope charitable) enforcement of our laws in the days following the next price crash, when as a society we come to realize that the harm done by Get Rich Quick schemes that is so evident in the long run is often hidden from most of us in the short term.

I have earned $500 million and a lot more from my work of the past 15 years, Anonymous. It is very, very, very important work. I am humbled to have been handed the assignment that I have been handed. I will do everything in my power to carry out the assignment in a way that works best for every single person involved. And that’s that. I will solider on with love in my heart for you Goons but also with love in my heart for the millions of middle-class investors whose lives you are in the process of destroying with your nasty and ugly, and, yes, criminal abusiveness. The motto that I call to mind with every post I advance is to be as honest as possible without crossing the line and becoming uncharitable while also being as charitable as possible without crossing the ling and becoming dishonest. I hope that works for you.

If it doesn’t, it doesn’t. I don’t have it in my powers to make you happy about it. I need to accept that reality whether I like the idea or not.

I wish you all good things. If that helps, I can deliver that much.

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 you this is an open-and-shut case. To everyone else, it’s madness. Yes, literally everyone else, including Mrs. Bennett.

Does it ever occur to you that you might (gasp!) be wrong?

In the early days, I thought it was possible that I was wrong. On the morning of May 13, 2002, my confidence level was 90 percent. That’s a high confidence level. But it certainly left open the possibility that I was wrong.

My confidence level shot up to 99 percent on the evening of August 27, 2002, when Greaney advanced his first death threat and 200 of my fellow community members endorsed it.

My confidence level can never get to 100 percent. That’s not possible for a human. We are flawed creatures. We often are blind to our own flaws. I am saying that that is so of lots of very smart and very good people. I had better acknowledge that it is so of me as well.

I could be wrong, Anonymous. I am not saying different. I am insisting that I am sincere. I know that with 100 percent certainty. I believe what I am saying. If every single person in the universe said that I was wrong, it would still be dishonest for me to say something other than what I believed. I can never go there. I have zero problem with the idea of having a note added to the bottom of every post I write saying “this fellow acknowledges that it is possible that he is wrong in every single thing he has ever said about investing.” That would be a healthy step, in my assessment. I feel that that message is there implicitly even today. It;s certainly a true statement. But adding that statement is a far cry from me saying things that I don’t believe. Saying things that I don’t believe crosses the line into financial fraud. Not this boy. That one is so far out of the question that I cannot describe how far out of the question it is.

I believe that the Buy-and-Holders are sincere too. I recorded a podcast a number of years back where I examined the question of whether Scott Burns could pass a lie detector test on whether the Buy-and-Hold retirement studies are accurate. I said that I thought he could. But I added that I do not believe that he could pass a lie detector test if the question was “Are death threats appropriate in discussions of investing?” and he answered “yes.” He knows that your Goon behavior is wrong. Bogle is in that same camp. Bogle knows that your Goon behavior is wrong and he does nothing about it. I believe that Bogle believes that Buy-and-Hold is a good strategy but I do not believe that Bogle believes that Mel Lindauer’s abusive behavior is even a tiny bit appropriate.

My wife doesn’t say that my work is madness. She has told me that she is 100 percent confident that I have achieved big advances in this field. She is afraid of you Goons. She wants me to be able to write on every discussion board and blog on the internet. She has allowed you Goons to intimidate her. She does suggest at times that I had something to do with causing the intimidation tactics. I deny that 100 percent and challenge her to check out the Post Archives to find out for sure but she refuses to do that. I believe that she needs to tell herself that I had something to do with the bad stuff or she would lose her faith in humanity but that she doesn’t want to check the record because she suspects that it would back me up. But she acknowledges that I have made important contributions to the field. There is no question in her mind re that one.

I think that she is pretty darn representative of how other people think about these matters. We have never seen this level of corruption in any field of human endeavor in the United States. The realities here are pretty darn shocking. So people have a hard time letting it in. What distinguishes me is that I say that that reality tells us that we had better figure out what is going on. WHY have we seen a level of abusiveness and corruption never seen before? It’s not because investing is so darn trivial that no one bothers to enforce the law. It is because everyone understands that investing is so darn important that we cannot bear to face up to what we have done to ourselves by going along with this 36-year cover-up. The irony is that, the more lives we destroy, the harder it becomes to do anything to fix the problem.

If I am wrong, then the foundations on which we built our economic system and our political system are wrong. Our systems are rooted in the belief that there must be a marketplace of ideas, that any idea whatsoever can be challenged and that it is up to the individual to decide for himself or herself which idea to follow. You believe in Buy-and-Hold. That’s your business. But you have zero right to deny access to discussions of the last 36 years of peer-reviewed research to the thousands of our fellow community members who expressed a desire to be able to talk this stuff over in peace. You crossed an important line when you endorsed Greaney’s first death threat. I love my country and so I am bound to say that you are wrong when you attack the foundational principles on which my country was built.

I think that I am right on the substantive issues. But I know with absolute certainty that I am right re the process issues. I would give up my life for my country. I would tell my boys to give up their lives for their country if they were put in circumstances in which they were asked to do so. That feeling runs deep. I cannot see that one changing in 15 years or in 15 billion years. That feeling is the core of everything I am. That one can never change. At least not for me.

My best wishes to you.

Rob

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

Sigh. Obviously my point was that you were given the explanation. Not that you agreed with it.

I get that your one uncompromising principle in life is “he who defines the question wins the argument.” You barrage people with this nonsense until they ban you or just give up the hopeless attempt to reason with you. To you, this is victory. So good for you, you win again. Hope it makes your day.

I like the part where you say that my one uncompromising principle is that “he who defines the question wins the argument.” I wouldn’t state it quite that strongly. But the general thrust of that statement is on point.

Buy-and-Hold makes perfect sense to anyone who believes that the market is efficient, that investors act in their own self interest. It all follows from that. If you believe in the premise, the strategy is ideal.

Valuation-Informed Indexing is for people who believe that humans are emotional creatures, that they are often their own worst enemies and that the job of an expert in this field is to steer people away from Buy-and-Hold strategies, to point out their dangers.

The only difference between the two sides is the starting-point premise. If you believe that investors pursue their self-interest, you tell them to look at their portfolio values and to applaud themselves for keeping up their confidence in stocks even when it was questioned by events or by the voices of doubters. If you believe that investors are destroying themselves by pricing stocks so insanely high, you tell them to consider where they will be following the next price crash and to take steps now to protect their financial futures.

People believe different things. And, yes, whoever defines the question wins the argument. Buy-and-Holders see evidence everywhere that Buy-and-Hold works. Valuation-Informed Indexers see evidence everywhere that Buy-and-Hold is dangerous.

You say that Buy-and-Holders “give up the hopeless attempt to reason with you.” Putting forward death threats is not “reasoning,” Dan. It is bullying.

I accept that there are lots of Buy-and-Holders who will never be convinced by anything that I say. I have no problem with that. I could be wrong. I don’t want the responsibility that would come with knowing that people were going along with what I said just because I said it.

My problem with you Goons is that your nastiness makes it impossible for the thousands of community members who have said that they DO want to hear what I say and take it into consideration to do so. Those people have a right to be able to hear both sides and to use what they hear to make informed decisions. The tactics that you have employed for 15 years now to block productive discussion at hundreds of places has hurt millions of good people. You are off base with the abusive stuff.

You say: “To you, this is victory” (referring to times when Buy-and-Holders have banned me because they see that many people find great value in my stuff and they see that as a threat. Yes, I do consider the bannings a kind of victory. They are sad sorts of victories because every board or blog that bans honest posting renders itself a corrupt enterprise by doing so. But, yes, the fact that my Buy-and-Hold friends have demanded that I be banned shows that my arguments are too strong for them to feel that they could prevail in reasoned debate and that certainly is a win for the case that I am making.

I would prefer to have fewer such victories and more reasoned debate. That helps everybody. But I am proud to be able to say that I am on the side that has never in 15 years put forward a single abusive post. I even permit people who have threatened to kill my wife and children to post daily at my blog and I always wish them well and often pick up valuable insights as a result of my interactions with them. I love that sort of thing. I live for that sort of thing. I believe that it is because the U.S. culture generally encourages that sort of thing that we have become such a great country. And I believe that in the end our belief in free discussion will win the day even in the investing realm and that my work will be seen by the millions of people who want to see it before making decisions about what to do with their retirement money.

I would say that I have won every discussion that has been held on the merits and lost every discussion that has been held in the process realm. I always make strong arguments that get banned because the Buy-and-Holders who own the sites are threatened by the excitement they see among their readers when these ideas are advanced. I don’t want to be banned and I always urge my Buy-and-Hold friends not to give in to the urge to silence those posting about the last 36 years of peer-reviewed research. But, yes, when they break down and ban me in desperation, I view that as a win for Valuation-Informed Indexing and as a loss for Buy-and-Hold.

If Buy-and-Hold inspired confidence in those following it, we would never see this sort of thing happen. And if Buy-and-Hold does not inspire confidence in those following it, what are the real chances that the Buy-and-Holders are going to stick with their high stock allocations after suffering devastating losses in the next stock crash? The behavior of the Buy-and-Holders is not the only thing that causes me to doubt the merit of the strategy. But it certainly is a persuasive reality, in my eyes.

My best wishes to you.

Rob

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

Seriously, Rob. It is like saying you look forward to joining Lebron James in winning an NBA championship. Your life is just an internet fantasy.

You’re entitled to your opinion, Sammy. But I would by lying to you if I told you that I share it.

I have had many big names tell me how important my work has been to them. Wade told me that he learned many things from me that he never learning getting his Ph.D. in Economics at Princeton. Somebody doesn’t just say that for no reason. Rob Arnott told me that my site was top notch. He is a giant in my eyes. Again, there would be no reason for him to say something like that unless he meant it. John Walter Russell though that my ideas were so important that he devoted eight years of his life to doing research to showing that the historical data supports everything I say. How many people have ever given up eight years of their life to research your ideas, Sammy? John was the most respected numbers guy in the history of the Retire Early community and he thought that his stuff was gold (and he came to that conclusion only after doing lots of skeptical research that won him over).

There are lots of others. Carl Richards LOVED my stuff. He banned me from his site because his readers were complaining that my stuff was so different from what they had been told by the Buy-and-Holders and yet so well-argued and so well-researched that it was upsetting them. But he told me that personally he thought that my web site was the #1 investing site on the internet. How often does that happen, that someone gets a fan letter from a site owner who has banned him? There’s something odd going on when something like that happens.

Lots of bloggers have told me similar things. Mike Piper is the biggest Buy-and-Hold fan that there could be. But he thinks that my stuff is of HUGE value. He banned me too. But he hated, hated, hated doing it. He came close to agreeing to let me post one article a month at his site. He wanted his readers to know about my work because he thought it was so important. But he was losing readers by letting me post at his site because my stuff was just too threatening to Buy-and-Holders, which comprise his entire readership.

Bill Schultheis is another one. When he discovered my site, he was raving about it. He too is a big Buy-and-Hold guy. But in a way that makes him a natural for Valuation-Informed Indexing. He learned at the Bogleheads Forum that i am “controversial” and then he got quiet. But on an intellectual level the guy just loved learning new stuff and, until it was made clear to him that there would be a price to be paid for expressing his sincere views, he couldn’t help but say how grateful he was to learn some new realities.

I could go on an on and on, you know? You already know most of what I am saying. You were there too for most of it. And of course you also testify to the importance of my work with every harassment post that you advance. You wouldn’t do that if you didn’t see Valuation-Informed Indexing as a threat to your beliefs about how stock investing works. What makes you see it as such a big threat? It’s the fact that it is the first true research-based strategy, the first strategy that incorporates both the pre-1981 research (as Buy-and-Hold does) AND the post-1981 research (that the Buy-and-Holders have elected to ignore so that they don’t need to acknowledge the possibility that they are humans and thus capable of making a mistake).

This is a big deal, Sammy. There are millions of middle-class people who need to provide for their retirements somehow. They need access to accurate and honest reports of what the peer-reviewed research in this field really says about how stock investing works. I provide it to them. The peer-reviewed research paper that I co-authored with Wade shows that by the simple act of becoming open to changing their stock allocations in response to big valuation shifts, investors can reduce the risk of stock investing by nearly 70 percent. If I had showed investors how to reduce investing risk by 10 percent, I would be on the cover of Time magazine. The problem with showing them how to reduce risk by 70 percent is that it makes the Buy-and-Holders look bad. That’s the only “problem” with what I have done, I showed the way to too big an advance in our understanding of the realities. What a bad, bad boy, you know?

I wish you all good things, Sammy. But come on.

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 regret quitting your job?

I do not, Anonymous.

That’s not a decision that I made lightly. In Chapter 12 of my book (Passion Saving: The Path to Plentiful Free Time and Soul-Satisfying Work), I examine the possibility that worse could come to worse and that I would not be able to provide for my family. I say that, in those unlikely circumstances, one has to conclude that that was what was meant (by God or by Evolution or by The Fates or by whatever you believe in — I believe in God) to be and that my wife and my children have to learn whatever lesson they were meant to learn from the experience.

Tolkien was an orphan. He could have given up on life when he lost first his father and then his mother. He didn’t. He put his loneliness to a good purpose. He developed the fantasy world that became Lord of the Rings many years later, a trilogy that some list as the best novel of the 20th Century. I don’t believe that those sorts of things happen by accident. I believe that Tolkien was meant to write Lord of the Rings. The opportunity to develop the special skills needed to write it were presented to him when he lost his father and mother. He could have said “no” to the assignment, just as Frodo was tempted to say “no” to his assignment. He said “yes” and that changed history (as did Frodo in the imaginary world in which he said “yes” as well).

I wouldn’t have been able to develop the Retire Early board into the most successful discussion board at the Motley Fool site had I stayed at my corporate job, Anonymous. I wouldn’t have been able to write “Passion Saving.” I wouldn’t have met all the wonderful people that I met at the Retire Early board and learned from their stories. I never would have been put in circumstances in which I had to work up the courage to stand up to Greaney. I never would have met John Walter Russell or Wade Pfau or Rob Arnott or any of the others. I never would have developed the five calculators at this site or have written the hundreds of columns or have recorded the hundreds of RobCasts or any of the rest of it.

I was meant to leave that job at that time. I was meant to remain there for nine years accumulating the assets that permitted me to do all the wonderful stuff that I became empowered to do as a result of leaving that job. But I was not meant to remain there until age 65 or whatever and to collect a pension. Taking that path would have killed me or turned me into an alcoholic. I am sure.

Now —

Being sure doesn’t mean that one never has doubts. What makes life hard is that, even when one is sure, one can entertain doubts from time to time. There is no instruction booklet for life that we are handed when we are born and can follow to reach a successful conclusion. We have to figure it out as we go along. So I won’t say that I never stop and think about the question you asked.

What I say is that every time that I stop to think about it, I reach the same conclusion — it was the right thing to do and I do not regret the decision. That’s what I mean when I say that I am “100 percent sure.”

I hope that helps a small bit, my old friend.

Rob

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

You have the right to behave as you wish on your board, but you do not have the right to misbehave on someone else’s board.

I see it as my job to see to it that every citizen of this country feels 100 percent free to post honestly re the last 36 years of peer-reviewed research at every investing discussion board and blog on the internet. No exceptions. Not one. Not ever. Not anywhere.

If you don’t think it can be done, please feel free to watch events play out as time passes. Elvis Presley said in the song Mystery Train, that: “If you don’t believe I’m going, you can just count the days I’m gone.” That’s the spirit re my conviction re this matter, Anonymous.

I wish you all good things. I wish you the best of luck with things from your end of the table. None of this is personal. I like you and I care about you and I look forward to the day when we can get together and down few cold ones and laugh about the old days.

But it would be cruel of me to understate the level of my conviction re how things are going to end up. If it means you ending up in prison, I can live with that; that’s how the laws of the country I love stipulate that a matter like this will be brought to a successful close for every single person concerned and I defer to the wise judgment of the smart and good people who wrote those laws — if prison sentences are what it comes to, then prison sentences are what it comes to. I will never do anything to increase the length of your prison sentence. All of my energies will be directed to keeping your prison sentence as limited as it is possible to make it given the circumstance that apply. But I accept the laws of the nation I love as they were written. I certainly am not going to violate them myself, and as much as I would like to keep your prison sentence somewhat limited, I think that I have to accept that others of the millions who have been hurt very seriously by this massive act of financial fraud may have some other ideas that need to be taken into consideration and respected.

That’s where I am coming from in any event, my good friend.

My best and warmest wishes to you and yours.

I look forward to having those cold ones when we are able to talk things over in more friendly circumstances when we both are standing on the other side of The Big Black Mountain.

Hang in there, man. It gets better. A lot better. I am sure.

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:

Clearly your responsibility to the world (as you see it) is equal or higher priority than your family responsibility. This is a point of view that we ordinary family guys just cannot grasp. If people in Syria are suffering, that’s a shame. But I can’t help them and it doesn’t directly affect me. If my wife is suffering (for an hour, let alone 15 years) that is my immediate top priority.

Could you try to explain your position in terms that we simpletons can understand?

I’ll offer a somewhat briefer response coming at it from a somewhat different angle.

My mother grew up in the Great Depression, brought on by an earlier try at seeing whether doing the opposite of what the peer-reviewed research (which wasn’t available at the time) teaches us we should do. She had to leave school when she was in eighth grade so that she could work in a factory to put food on the family table. My mother loved school. That hurt her a great deal. She talked about that pain until the day she died.

Does that matter? Do the experiences of the millions of children who will have to be taken out of school in the Buy-and-Hold Crisis matter? What can of world will my wife be living in following the next price crash if it causes a Second Great Depression greater than the first one (the P/E10 level went much higher this time around). What sort of world will my boys and my grandchildren be living in if we do not find some way to provide access to accurate and honest reports on what the last 35 years of peer-reviewed research says to millions of people? What if our political system collapses as a result of this massive act of financial fraud? Does that change the calculus at all?

I don’t feel comfortable posting dishonestly about these matters. That’s the bottom line. I could write a book going through all the reasons why. The bottom line is that it feels wrong because it IS wrong. There is no justification for a ban on honest posting re a matter so important to so many. None whatsoever. Someone had to step up to the plate. I was elected. So I have given it my best shot.

I care about my wife. And I also care about my mother. And about my boys. And about my unborn grandkids. And about the millions of other wives and mothers and kids and grandkids. I care about all of it. The same force inside me that makes me care about my wife makes me care about all the others too. I wouldn’t want to have to walk past a burning building with kids inside it because I was too afraid that if I ran in to help I might get hurt and not be able to earn as much for my wife. There are things that you cannot do and the still be able to live with yourself afterwards. This is one of those things.

Rob