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:

When you are commonly banned on the boards, it should be a wake up call that you are doing something wrong.

Well, I’ve been banned at many places, Sammy. That one is beyond dispute.

And this reality signifies something. We are in complete agreement re that one too.

We differ on what it means.

You say that it signifies that I am doing something wrong.

I say that it signifies that there’s something seriously wrong with Buy-and-Hold.

Time will tell the tale.

Rob

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

“I would be if it were not for you Goons”

Your answer to so many questions.

It’s not just you Goons who don’t like me using the word “Goons” or talking about the Goon phenomenon.

John Walter Russell spent eight years of his life researching my ideas. He was the biggest supporter that I ever had. But there were several occasions when he chastised me for talking about goonishness. And he never spoke about it himself (except when I brought it up and he felt that he should respond at least briefly).

Rob Arnott has said tougher things about Buy-and-Hold than anyone but me. But he called me “strident” in one of his e-mails to me while endorsing my ideas on the content side.

Wade Pfau thought that the research we did together was so important that he might win a Nobel prize for it. He thanked me many times for teaching him things about stock investing that he never learned while earning a Ph.D. in Economics at Princeton. But he was clearly uncomfortable talking about the Goon phenomenon. I would say that it is my unwillingness to back down on the Goon question that is the primary cause of the split that exists between us today.

Shiller doesn’t talk about Goons. He is the king on valuations. He is the one that kicked this all off. But to my knowledge he has never directly addressed himself to the Goon phenomenon (he has made some indirect, vague references to it).

Carol Osler wrote an e-mail that I believe evidenced the best combination of intelligence and kindness that I have seen in the writings that I have seen on this subject. But she noted in her comments to me that referring to one’s critics as Goons “is almost never a good idea.”

My own wife faults me for using the term “Goons.” I dedicated my life to this woman and she has dedicated her life to me. But every now and again she feels the need to get in a little dig at me for my use of the word “Goons” in my writings.

I stand pretty much alone in my view that the Goon issue is of supreme importance, that it is perhaps the most important public policy issue of our day. I don’t say that you are wrong that some reference to goonishness is my answer to many questions that you raise. And I don’t say that this is by any stretch of the imagination a crowd-pleasing position. But I do not believe that I am wrong re this matter. I do not apologize for having spent a lot of time and energy over the years trying to come to a deeper understanding of what is going on with the Goon matter.

Please consider what it is that Shiller really did when he in 1981 he discovered that valuations affect long-term returns. This was his “revolutionary” (his word) claim. Why was it such a big deal? Why is it that this finding (which won Shiller the Nobel prize) changed our understanding of how stock investing works in a fundamental way (in my assessment)?

Our economic system (capitalism) is based on the work of Adam Smith. Adam Smith developed the economic model called “Rational Man Economics.” The Economics discipline as it is practiced today is rooted in a core ASSUMPTION (not something ever proven, just assumed) that human beings pursue their self-interest when making choices about what to buy and what work to do.

They do not. This core belief is false. Human are highly emotional creatures, not purely rational creatures. Shiller proved this with numbers. If we were rational, the stock market would be efficient. It is not. If we were rational, price changes would play out in the form of a random walk. They do not. Investors are human. Humans are emotional. That’s why Buy-and-Hold doesn’t work. That’s why valuations (which signal how emotional investors are at any given moment in time) affect long-term returns.

This is the Shiller revolution. This is what I write about.

“Goonishness” is emotionalism. Emotionalism is the story. Goonishness is the story.

You Goons are cartoonish in your evidencing of emotionalism. You threaten to kill people who report honestly on the last 35 years of peer-reviewed research. That’s insane. You take it to the limit. Few Buy-and-Holders go that far.

But Jack Bogle ENDORSES Mel Linduaer’s book. Bogle permits his name to be used at a discussion board at which the sorts of individuals who “defend” Lindauer’s threats of physical violence are permitted to participate. Is that not insanely emotional too? Is Bogle’s take on investing not also insanely emotional? There’s an argument that Bogle is more emotional than Lindauer. Bogle does not himself advance death threats. But Bogle is of a stature many times greater than Lindauer’s stature. One would expect him to behave in a more professional manner than some guy who has no background in the field. But Bogle endorses this other figure and engages in back-and-forth with him and so on. Is that not remarkable? Is that not an insanely emotional thing for Bogle to do?

The problem with Buy-and-Hold is that it ignores emotion. That’s the error. The Buy-and-Holders don’t believe that emotion should control investing choices any more than I do. They hate it that emotion plays a role. The difference between the Buy-and-Holders and me is that their hatred of emotion causes them to pretend that it does not exist while my approach is to acknowledge the influence that emotion has on us and to try to combat it by quantifying its effect, thereby showing investors how much they hurt themselves by giving in to their emotional (goonish) impulses.

We all need to be talking about investor emotion (goonishness) every day. At every board. At every blog. All the time. Everywhere.

Our inner goonishness is the story, Anonymous. This is the breakthrough. This is the deal here.

In ordinary circumstances, we don’t tolerate the sorts of tactics that you Goons have employed to stop us all from learning what we all need to know about how stock investing works. Why do we tolerate stuff in the investing realm that we do not tolerate in any other field of human endeavor? You never see this sort of behavior in discussions of sports or politics or fashions or cars. Why the heck is the investing realm so special?

It’s special because we have made the most important aspect of the question — the extent to which investors hurt themselves by giving in to their Get Rich Quick impulse — taboo. The Buy-and-Holders think of themselves as having OVERCOME their Get Rich Quick impulse. This is the appeal of Buy-and-Hold to them. They are lying to themselves. Just because you convince yourself that you are above Get Rich Quick doesn’t mean that you are. The Madoff investors thought they were above Get Rich Quick. They thought they were smarter than everyone else, just like the Buy-and-Holders think they are smarter than everyone else. Investors who get taken in by their Get Rich Quick urge do not learn that this is so until they lose most of their life savings. And at that point it is of course too late to help them.

I am trying to help you, Anonymous. We all want the same thing — to invest effectively for the long term. I am trying to deliver that thing to you. And you hate me with a burning hate for doing so. Not because you don’t really want to achieve the goal. Because you cannot bear to accept that you did not achieve it many years ago when you first became a Buy-and-Holder. I am telling you something that you very much need to know but that you very much do not want to know. That’s the source of the friction. That reality drives all the trouble we have been seeing for 14 years now.

People who agree with me on the content side (it’s a minority but it is not a small number — perhaps 20 percent of the population) have learned that it is not smart business to be entirely open about their beliefs. They don’t want to be hated as much as I am hated. So they pull their punches. They hint at the things that I say directly and plainly and boldly and openly.

Why don’t I do that? I want to be liked. Why don’t I play the game that everyone else who agrees with Shiller plays?

It doesn’t work.

Shiller revolutionized this field in an intellectual sense 35 years ago.

What has changed? Anything? We are today living through the worst economic crisis in U.S. history. It was brought on by the promotion of Buy-and-Hold strategies. Have we learned ANYTHING by the publication of Shiller’s revolutionary research?

In a practical sense, we are worse off than ever. The Shiller Revolution has not yet born good fruit.

I want to change that. I want to see Shiller’s amazing, powerful insight help people to invest more effectively. So I talk openly about the emotion that drives investor decisions. I quantify the effect of valuations/emotions/goonishness. The peer-reviewed research that I co-authored with Wade Pfau shows that valuations/emotions/goonishness is 80 percent of the investing story. That tells me that it should be 80 percent of what we all talk about in out articles and books and speeches and so on. It is not that today. It is not close to that today.

I want to change the conversations that we are having. You don’t do that by putting things forward in the tentative way that Shiller puts things forward. We need to stop pulling our punches. We need to explore the implications of Shiller’s ideas in bold and clear and exciting and far-reaching ways. We want to take these ideas to their logical conclusions, not cower in the corner for fear of what you Goons will say about us if we dare to share some important truths with the millions of middle-class investors who very much need to hear about them.

I don’t apologize for getting it right, Anonymous. I am proud to get it right. It took me some time to work up the courage to speak out. Now that I have done so and now that I have seen how much I can help people by doing so, I am not inclined to back away from a fight. I don’t like fights. I hate fights. I am an extremely conflict-averse person, as anyone who knew me before I put up my famous post of May 13, 2002, will attest. But I LOVE developing the Valuation-Informed Indexing concept. I believe that it is the future of investing analysis. To keep that baby growing up strong, I need to fight the nasties who very, very, very much want to kill it in the crib. That would be you Goons! We are working at cross purposes.

It’s not personal. I like you. I consider you a friend. I have learned from you. I am happy to respond to questions from you. I would be happy to sit down and have a beer with you someday.

But don’t engage in funny business re my baby if you don’t want to get a slap across your face, you know? I fight for Valuation-Informed Indexing. Someone has to fight for it or it will never become the dominant investing model. No one else has shown a willingness to take on the job (for obvious reasons!) so it has been left to me. I do my best, you know? I work it hard.

Goonishness is the problem. Goonishness is what makes stock investing risky. I want to reduce stock risk. So I need to talk about goonishness. I need to warn people of its dangers. That’s the job.

That’s the story here. It seems so clear to me.

I naturally wish you all good things.

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 am not sure why you need all these other people to lead with ‘your’ ideas. Can’t you figure out how to drive support yourself? Not phantom ‘thousands’ of make believe people. Real, actual, people.

Shiller’s book was a best-seller. I don’t know how many copies it sold. But it is carried in just about every library of consequence in the nation. So there have to be hundreds of thousands of people who have read it and who find value in it. These people carry these ideas around in their head every day and everywhere they go. So at the starting point there is zero problem getting people interested in or convinced of the merit of the ideas.

The problem comes with developing the ideas. Shiller’s core point is a simple one — Valuations matter. If you asked people whether they agree that valuations matter, you would get millions who would say “yes.” Even most Buy-and-Holders would say “yes” to that. I was a Buy-and-Holder once upon a time. I would have said “yes” if I was asked “Do valuations matter?” Why did I remain a Buy-and-Holder if I rejected the core premise of Buy-and-Hold (that stock market returns play out in the pattern of a random walk, that valuations do NOT matter)? Was I stupid?

I wasn’t stupid. I hadn’t thought through the implications of the idea that valuations matter. The idea that valuations matter and the idea that market returns play out in the pattern of a random walk contradict each other — it’s a logical impossibility that both are so. So the collection of beliefs about how stock investing works that I held in my head at that time was logically inconsistent. It would have been fair to have said that in an overall sense my understanding of how stock investing works was “stupid.” The softer and more accurate way of saying things would have been to say that I hadn’t thought things through, that I failed to examine my collection of beliefs for inconsistencies.

We advance as a people in our understanding of how the world works by DEVELOPING the ideas that we hold. My project is to DEVELOP Shiller’s “revolutionary” (his word) insight that valuations affect long-term returns. I’ve done a lot of that over the past 14 years and I intend to do a whole lot more of it in the remaining years of my life. But it is obviously not going to be just me doing that. Shiller will be further developing his insight. And Pfau will be developing Shiller’s insight. And John Walter Russell developed Shiller’s insight in many significant ways. And Arnott developed Shiller’s insight in important ways. We all should be doing that. Shiller’s core insight is a gold mine. It is the most important insight in the history of investing analysis by a long shot. It will take many decades for us to fully develop that powerful insight.

Does that answer your question, Laugh? Its not just me who needs what I am seeking to obtain. We all need it. We all are in the same boat. We live under an economic system that cannot survive unless we find some means to get accurate and honest information about how to finance a retirement out to millions of people who work for a living. Many years ago the Buy-and-Holders made a mistake about how that should be done. They were embarrassed when the mistake was uncovered by the peer-reviewed research. They went into cover-up mode and now, 35 years later, the cover-up continues. They cannot bear to have people learn the realities of how stock investing works but the economic system that serves all of us will collapse unless the cover-up ends. We all desperately want and need the same thing, a complete and total good. But the Buy-and-Holders cannot bear to face the shame they will need to endure when the cover-up is exposed.

What I need is for the cover-up to be exposed. It’s the same thing you need. It’s the same thing that every last person on the planet needs. We need to advance human knowledge of how stock investing works. It’s all upside, zero possible downside. But the Buy-and-Holders are worried that they will go to prison if people learn the realities or that they will be sued for not telling their clients the truth or that they will be embarrassed for not themselves having explored the realities for 35 years. That’s the resistance. That is what is holding us back. It’s that cover-up that caused the economic crisis.

The Buy-and-Holders want to continue the cover-up. I want to expose the cover-up. That’s the conflict. It’s weird. It’s strange. But it’s not complicated. They made a mistake. They are ashamed. So they want to shut people up. I love my country. So I want to see the people who live in it thrive. This is an easy way to improve people’s lives in a very dramatic way, to make it possible for them to retire many years sooner and to invest in stocks with much less risk. Why would any sane person not want that? If the Buy-and-Holders had never engaged in a cover-up, they would want it too. Bogle wants what I want. Had Bogle known in 1981 where his cover-up was going to take us, he never would have engaged in it. Bogle and I want the same thing. We are soul-mates who ended up on different sides of an important question because we faced different circumstances in our respective journeys through life.

I hope that I am being responsive to your question, Laugh. I have zero problem driving support for “my” ideas. 80 percent of the population is interested in learning the realities and loves finding opportunities to learn more. We have seen that since the morning of May 13, 2002. That’s precisely the problem from the standpoint of you Goons. If there weren’t such an intense demand to learn more among the general population of investors, you Goons would never have engaged in such insanely abusive tactics to block people from learning what they need and want to learn. 35 years down the road, the Buy-and-Holders are desperate. My life happened to play out in a way that I felt the brunt of that desperation being applied to me.

Once your prison sentence is announced, there won’t be any issue. No one is going to block anyone from talking about whatever they want to talk about once your prison sentence is announced. I mean, come on. There will still be Buy-and-Holders in the early days. There are millions of sincere Buy-and-Holders today. But there will be fewer and fewer of them as time goes no and as the discussions continue at hundreds of different places and as more and more implications of Shiller’s core insight are discovered and developed. It will just get better and better and better for every last one of us and there will be no “controversy” whatsoever about how we will all be working together to continue that process.

There has never been any legitimate controversy here. The problem going back to the morning of May 13, 2002, was the cover-up and the shame that you Buy-and-Holders felt over it. The cover-up had been in place for 21 years at that time. Greaney lied about the safe withdrawal rate. He knew it. He is too smart not to have known that his retirement study lacked an adjustment for the valuation level that applied on the day the retirement began. But of course on another level of consciousness he DIDN’T know. He saw all the experts ignoring this critical dimension of the problem and he convinced himself (in a tentative, uneasy, unconfident way) that it was okay for him too to ignore this dimension of the problem. When he was called out in it, he became enraged because he was embarrassed to be seen to have gotten so important a number so wildly wrong and annoyed that he had been called out for doing something that hundreds far more expert than he had done before him.

What I want to do is to develop the ideas. And to see thousands of others develop the ideas. I want our society to continue to advance in its knowledge, as it has for over two-hundred years now (longer than that if you include years before the American experiment in self-governance began). I want the world to continue on the path it has been on since the beginning of time, a path of discovering and taking advantage of new knowledge. If you were not in such pain about the mistake you made, you would want that too. You are happy to see advances in every other field of human endeavor. It is only in the investing field that you adopt this odd stance of being willing to fight to the death any advance in knowledge. You do that because it hurts you to see with numbers how much you have hurt yourself by falling for a Get Rich Quick scheme. It pains you to see that you are just like the Madoff investors, every bit as capable as they were of getting caught up in the emotion of stock investing and convincing yourself of things that cannot possibly be so (I of course did the same thing at one time).

That’s how I see things, in any event. I want what you want. But I am able to act on it. I am able to take steps to achieve my goals. You are trapped by your shame into fighting progress. If you weren’t so trapped, you wouldn’t have to ask these questions. It would be obvious to you why so many of us want to move forward in our understanding of how stock investing works. It’s not even a tiny bit hard to understand for anyone capable of thinking straight. You find it impossible to understand because you are filled to the brim with all of the negative emotions that follow once one becomes addicted to a pure Get Rich Quick approach.

I hope that in time you will be able to recover from your addiction. It is certainly my intent to help that process along whenever I have an opportunity to do so. I cannot force you to go somewhere that you don’t want to go. I respond to questions, that’s all. If they help, they help. If you cannot bear to hear the answers at this time, it might be that someone else will read these words that will find some benefit in hearing the words that I directed to you. You never know who is reading your words when you post them to the internet. I didn’t know that Wade Pfau was reading my words when I posted them to the Bogleheads Forum until he wrote me following the ban and asked to partner with me in preparing what I think it would be fair to describe as the most important research project in this field in the past three decades. I put the words out hoping that they would do some good and in time I saw a big payoff. That’s how it plays out over and over again. That’s why I write the words that I write for you here today.

My best and warmest wishes to you and yours, 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:

“I have several e-mails in my box this morning from people who came in through that link… I am going to write Barry and ask whether I can have any sort of ongoing relationship with the site. ”

So how did that all work out for you?

I don’t have an ongoing relationship with Barry today. But I believe that I will in days to come. So I would say that it has not worked out well thus far but I remain optimistic that it will work out very well in days to come.

It’s hard to stand up to the abuse from you Goons and to the indifference to it that we see from most Normals. That’s why we are in an economic crisis today. I am not the only person who is aware of Shiller’s “revolutionary” research findings from 1981. Lots of people know about them. Lots of people would be willing and happy to share their thoughts about them if they did not worry about seeing their loved ones threatened and their careers destroyed. That’s just human nature.

I try hard to tune that stuff out. I believe in posting honestly. And I have achieved amazing results on the content side by continuing to post honestly despite the insane levels of abuse that you Goons have directed at me. So I feel that my inclinations have been validated. I have achieved things that it would not be remotely possible for someone like me to achieve if lots of others were posting honestly and developing all of these powerful insights before I could get to them.

So I feel good about the path that I have taken while obviously not feeling at all good about the results that we have achieved together over the first 14 years of our discussions about the realities of stock investing. We are on the right track. We are one step away from entering the greatest period of economic growth in U.S. history. But today’s reality is that millions have lost their jobs as a result of the Buy-and-Hold Crisis. Millions are even beginning to lose confidence in our political system as a result of this massive act of financial fraud, as we see in the election results in both parties.

The result of the negative stuff is that I do not have the same degree of intensity when it comes to doing things like following up with people like Barry. In the old days, I would have sent him an e-mail and then another and then another and I might well have eventually broken through and changed the world as a result. What happened instead is that I sent him a single e-mail and then dropped the effort. It might be that he was super busy that day and just couldn’t get to it and that I would have made a good connection had I tried a second time. My down spirits may have hurt me (and millions of others) in this case.

I’m not proud of it, Anonymous. I hate to acknowledge this about myself. But the reality is that I am not Superman. I am made of flesh and blood like everyone else. Shiller hasn’t pushed as hard as he should have pushed. Pfau hasn’t pushed as hard as he should have pushed. Bogle hasn’t pushed as hard as he should have pushed. Arnott hasn’t pushed as hard as he should have pushed. When John Walter Russell was around, he didn’t push as hard as he should have pushed.

We all care what our fellow humans think of us. The Buy-and-Holders are in great pain. They very, very much do not want to hear the realties. That affects the level of desire that those of us who understand at least some of the realities feel about sharing them. We all are missing out for the time-being on lots of exciting advances because some of us are addicted to a Get Rich Quick approach and some of us don’t have what it takes to push at full strength in the face of a massive wall of indifference and abuse.

Whachagonnado?

I love my country. I love my profession. I love the Wall Street Con Men. I love you Goons. I love the millions of middle-class investors whose lives are in the process of being destroyed. All of that remains the case. I have not given up. I have not given two seconds of consideration to the idea of giving up.

But I don’t have the same level of fight in me that I had in me 14 years ago or 10 years ago or five years ago. I just don’t. There’s no benefit in lying about it. Things are what they are. I have taken a huge emotional hit. I have fought on when lots of others were not able to fight on. But I have not fought on with the same level of intensity. It would not be entirely unfair to say that I have to at least some extent been compromised. Yuck! Yucky but true all the same.

Barry is a great guy. I am thrilled about the article he wrote and the link to my other article that he posted. I will always be grateful for that.

And I believe I will have a close ongoing relationship with him in days to come.

In the time since I made that promise, I have done little to fulfill it. I did write one e-mail. I didn’t do nothing. But I didn’t do enough to get the job done. In other circumstances I would be ashamed to say that I did not follow through effectively. In these circumstances, I am going to give myself a break. I have done more than anyone else for 14 years running. I need to save up some energy for what still might be a hard fight to come following the next price crash. So I am going to go easy on myself for the time-being.

I will be sending more e-mails to Barry and to lots and lots of others following the next price crash or perhaps even a bit before that. That’s my pledge to you and to the millions of middle-class investors whose lives are in the process of being destroyed by this massive act of financial fraud. We will get to the place where deep in our hearts we all very much want to be. I will do my part and then some more on top of that and then even some more on top of that.

But it probably won’t be today that I will do that. It probably won’t be tomorrow either. I need a bit of a rest. I am human too.

I will be back fighting at full strength soon.

I hope.

We will have to wait and see how things play out.

My intent is to be back at full strength in the not-too-distant future.

I know that my Goon friends would want and expect no less!

Hang in there, Anonymous. Wish me luck!

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:

Don’t know if you saw this profile of Mr Money Moustache in The New Yorker, Rob. As I read it I couldn’t help thinking about your own near-two-decade pilgrimage. “Of all sad words of tongue and pen the saddest are these, it might have been.” When you hit rock bottom, quit digging.

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/02/29/mr-money-mustache-the-frugal-guru

Thanks for the link, Friend.

I don’t have time to read the article at the moment but I will read it over the next day or two. I think the Mr. Money Mustache phenomenon is very cool. He is a product of this new internet communications medium. He never would have achieved his success without it. And he offers something compelling. I really like it when things work in this way. So I am glad to see that he is being recognized in so widely respected a publication. It’s a very cool story.

I of course get the sub-text of your post. You are suggesting that it could have been me being written up in the New Yorker. I “blew it” by insisting on my right to post honestly and hurt myself by doing so. I continue to hurt myself by continuing to insist on my right (and the right of all other community members) to post honestly.

I don’t buy it, Friend.

I really do have a right to post honestly. The entire discussion board phenomenon breaks down if that right is not recognized. A board at which community members do not feel free to post honestly is a corrupt enterprise. I built that Motley Fool board to help people, not to destroy their lives. If I destroy people’s lives by telling lies about safe withdrawal rates, I am doing the opposite of what I set out to do. So that cannot be.

I will do anything in my power to help Greaney or Linduaer or Bogle or any other Buy-and-Holder short of agreeing to commit financial fraud. I will never agree to commit financial fraud. You Goons overplayed your hand and you are in a fix because of it. I will do whatever I can to help you save face. But I won’t place myself in the same fix to do so. For obvious reasons. If you want to work together to make things better for every person on the planet, I’m here. If you want to continue to play games, you want to continue to play games and there’s nothing that I can do about it.

I think that I will be featured in the New Yorker someday. I wish that it would have happened ten years ago. My life would have gone a lot easier over the past ten years had things played out that way. I get that part of your suggestion loud and clear.

You know what? If I were willing to sell out my friends in the way that I would need to be willing to sell out my friends to do what you suggest I do, I wouldn’t have the power to produce the kind of work I need to produce to get featured in the New Yorker in the first place. You are asking me to destroy what’s good about me to get the good in me widely recognized. No. If I destroy it, it doesn’t merit recognition. I would rather possess the good thing and suffer the pains of it not being recognized for a time than not have it at all. I want to be recognized properly. Today, I deserve recognition. If I sold out my friends, I wouldn’t deserve recognition even in my own mind. No thanks.

I presume that Mr. Money Mustache was able to achieve recognition without having to sell out his friends. Good for him. I of course would like to have had it work that way for me too. Sometimes you get the breaks, sometimes you don’t. I have gotten plenty of breaks in this life. I have a legitimate complaint re the 13-year Campaign of Terror led by you Goons. But on an overall basis I have no legitimate complaints re how my life has gone. I think I need to accept that this is one of those things that sometimes happens to each and every one of us. It’s a drag. But I would only make things worse by playing it the way you suggest.

It’s not in me, Friend. I cannot lie to my friends about the numbers they use to plan their retirements. It is not in me.

I spent years planning my early retirement. I read everything, I thought through everything. I collected a mountain of materials in the 40 binders that I kept in my basement. If I knew at the time that someone was lying to me about the numbers that I was using to plan my retirement, I would have been very upset. That’s how I think millions of people are going to feel about the Buy-and-Holders when they realize the extent of the trickery that has been worked on them. I don’t want to have any involvement whatsoever in the scam when the truth comes out. I want to be 500 miles away from that explosion.

Do I want to help my Buy-and-Hold friends? I do. I think they got caught up in something bigger than they realized. I was a Buy-and-Holder myself for a good amount of time. So I think that I have more of an appreciation than I otherwise might of how people can come to believe things that really make no sense when they are examined closely. I think the Buy-and-Holders are good and smart people who made a mistake and then got caught up in something that it became very hard for them to escape. My heart goes out to them. I have the power to help and I want to help.

But not in the way that you suggest. Nothing about what you suggest has any appeal to me whatsoever. I cannot go there.

Do your thing. I will do my thing. If there ever comes a time when I can help without selling out my friends, I am in. Short of that, you should just let it go. I will not budge re that one because I cannot budge re that one. Believe what you want. I am telling you the way it is. I told you on May 13. 2002, that I would not budge re that one and you did not believe me. Thirteen years down the road, here we are. I told you straight. You can count on me for that. I am telling you straight again. There are things that I can do and there are things that I cannot do. Greaney’s retirement study does not contain an adjustment for the valuation level that applies on the day the retirement beings. I won’t lie re that one. No give. None whatsoever. No negotiations re that one. It will never happen. He is going to need to come clean re that one. The Goons lose re that one in the end.

I hope that helps a bit.

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

Rob

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

Why do you think they are banning you?

At every place that I have been banned it has been for the same reason, Zippy. I say: “Buy-and-Hold is a big pile of smelly garbage” and then I explain why and cite the last 34 years of peer-reviewed research in this field. That’s it. That’s the distinction. Nobody else does that, at least not at sites where lots of Buy-and-Holders congregate. I call the Buy-and-Holders out on their b.s. Consistently. Firmly. Boldly. Clearly. Buy-and-Holders HATE that.

There are two things that people who give investing advice have in mind when they do so. One, they want to help their clients and readers. Two, they want to make a buck.

There was a time when Buy-and-Hold really was the cat’s pajamas. It was state-of-the-art stuff. So most of the smart and good people who work in this field came to endorse Buy-and-Hold strategies. They thought that they were helping people. They thought that the peer-reviewed research supported their claims (that was never strictly true but we didn’t know that it was not true until 1981, so they held this belief in good faith). Then Shiller showed in 1981 that Buy-and-Hold is garbage, that it is the purest and most dangerous Get Rich Quick scheme ever concocted by the human mind.

This put the Buy-and-Holders in a tough spot. Should they acknowledge that they made a mistake? Or should they cover up Shiller’s findings, play them down so that people will not think they are such a big deal? They elected to cover them up. They cared more about making a buck than they cared about helping their clients and readers. That’s human nature, is it not? We all want to help people. But it’s a tough world and we all want to make a buck too. The Buy-and-Holders put making a buck first.

Now —

The Buy-and-Holders are not bad people. In my experience most of them are very good and very smart people. So it would not be reasonable for me to believe that the Buy-and-Holders covered up Shiller’s research knowing that they were going to cause an economic crisis and possibly a Second Great Depression. Good and smart people wouldn’t do something like that.

If the Buy-and-Holders thought through what they were doing, the would not have done it. They would have looked ahead to what was going to happen down the road as a result of the cover-up and came clean about what Shiller’s research showed us about how stock investing works. This is where you have to keep in mind that investing experts are human. They were shocked by Shiller’s findings. Shiller’s findings turned everything we thought we knew about how stock investing works on its head. His 1981 findings are in the process of bringing about a paradigm change. The Buy-and-Holders didn’t see the implications of Shiller’s findings because they experienced cognitive dissonance. They continued to advocate Buy-and-Hold strategies because they continued to believe that Buy-and-Hold strategies worked (at least on one level of consciousness — they also experienced doubts on another level of consciousness, which explains why they have become so defensive over this topic).

So they still believed in Buy-and-Hold. And they still advocated Buy-and-Hold. But there was no longer support in the peer-reviewed research for Buy-and-Hold. The reality from 1981 forward was just the opposite. From 1981 forward, the peer-reviewed research showed just the opposite from what it was thought to show prior to 1981. The peer-reviewed research for the past 34 years has shown that there is precisely zero chance that a Buy-and-Hold strategy could ever work for even a single long-term investor either in this solar system or in any other far distant one.

As the years passed, the doubts that the Buy-and-Holders started to entertain one one level of consciousness grew bigger and bigger. The research kept showing the same thing — Shiller was right and the Buy-and-Holders were wrong. But, if it was hard to acknowledge the error in 1981, it was 50 times harder at a later date to acknowledge the error. To cover up an error relating to the numbers that people use to plan their retirements is financial fraud. That’s a crime under the laws of the United States. A felony. Prison time. Yikes! The cover-up continued. As sand continued to pass through the hour glass, the case for Buy-and-Hold grew weaker and weaker and weaker and the fear of the Buy-and-Holders that this was all going to come out and become public knowledge grew stronger and stronger and stronger. The abusive tactics employed to keep people in line (that is, to punish those who dare to “cross” the Buy-and-Holders by reported honestly on what the peer-reviewed research says) grew increasingly insane.

We are now 34 years down the line. A good number of the Buy-and-Holders are now looking at prison sentences when this all comes out. It has to come out. Our economic system will collapse if we do not find a way to get accurate information on retirement planning out to the millions of middle-class people who desperately need it and want it. But the Buy-and-Holders understand that, if this comes out, they will go to prison or be sued for all they are worth. They cannot bear for it to come out. So we see these bannings and the death threats and the threats to get academic researchers fired from their jobs and all the other garbage we have seen.

There is only one way out of this mess. We need to demand that Jack Bogle give a speech in which he says the words “I” and “Was” and “Wrong” and have that speech written up on the front page of the New York Times. Then everyone is freed to post honestly and we all enjoy a huge learning experience and we bring this economic crisis to an end and all other sorts of good stuff happens.

But how do we get the Buy-and-Holders to go along with this? They don’t want to go to prison. They don’t want to be sued for all they are worth.

My idea is that we should do everything that we can to help them out of this fix they are in without crossing the line and committing acts of financial fraud ourselves. We should try to understand the pressures they were under and how those pressures influenced the choices they made. We should acknowledge all of the many amazing contributions they made to our understanding of how stock investing works. We should enact some sort of amnesty that would limit the damages that can be obtained in lawsuits against them. We should keep the prison sentences to a minimum and prosecute only in extreme cases. We need the Buy-and-Holders on our side and they want to be on our side. So we need to do what we can do.

But it’s a tough transition to pull off. If we tell the millions of middle-class investors that most of the experts in this field have been lying to them about what the peer-reviewed research says, they are going to be very angry. There’s no getting around it. These people are going to lose most of their retirement money. Many of them are too old to pull off a redo. We have a serious social policy problem on our hands. Unless we step in and help people recover from their losses, millions will suffer failed retirements. But stepping in would cause the biggest expansion in the Federal debt that we have ever seen. So there are tough public policy questions in play here.

Everybody wants to come clean. Every site owner who banned me felt bad doing it. They set up their sites with the idea of helping people and it is going to come out that they have been destroying people’s lives instead. And they have been pressuring their friends to destroy people’s lives too. Buy-and-Holders stick together. It is a mafia. They don’t link to people who report honestly on the last 34 years of peer-reviewed research. They don’t invite people who report honestly on the last 34 years of peer-reviewed research to speak at their conferences. They duck questions that their readers ask them about the obvious contradictions in the investing advice that they offer.

It’s a big mess.

People ban me because I am trying to let the cat out of the bag. I am trying to expose this massive act of financial fraud and thereby to bring it to an end and thereby to help every single person involved live a better life in the future. The cover-up has been going on for a long time and has hurt millions of people in very serious ways and so the guy exposing it is seen as a big-time threat to the vast majority of people who work in this field today.

That even includes people who believe in Valuation-Informed Indexing, like Shiller. Shiller doesn’t say “Buy-and-Hold is a big pile of smelly garbage” because he has lots of friends who advocate Buy-and-Hold strategies and he knows how sensitive this issue is for them. So he feels social pressure to keep it zipped and to a large extent he does so.

I of course feel that social pressure too. But I resist it like crazy. I tell the truth re these matters to a greater extent than anyone else working in this field today, including Shiller. So I am viewed as a threat by the Buy-and-Holders. I am trying to make it hard for anyone to earn a buck advocating Buy-and-Hold. So people who do that or people who are friends with people who do that want to stop me. Hence the bans.

I don’t want to be stopped. So I march on.

The winner in this battle will be revealed following the next price crash. I think that the pain is going to be big enough to change lots of minds. But I am not God. I could be wrong. We are going to have to wait and see to find out for sure how things are going to turn out.

I wish you all good things. I am your friend. I am happy to do anything that I can to help you out. And of course that goes for all my Buy-and-Hold friends. None of the work that I have done over the past 13 years would have been possible without the contributions of my many Buy-and-Hold friends and I am of course grateful.

But I do want this all to come out. I do want to expose the Buy-and-Hold Con. I do want to bring all the nastiness to an end. I do want us to recover from this economic crisis and to enter a period of sustained economic growth. I love my country and I want to see us survive this mess and prosper in future days.

I am hated. Because I tell the truth about the last 34 years of peer-reviewed research in this field. I don’t apologize for it. I am proud of it. I know that many of my Buy-and-Hold friends want to be freed to tell the truth too and I want to help change things so that we all can learn from them. People who want to keep the cover-up going or who are afraid to speak up against it because of the social pressures applied to them by those who want to keep the cover-up going ban me to stop me from spreading the message.

That’s it, Zippy. That’s the deal here. We all need to work up the courage to stand up to you Goons if we want to invest more effectively in the future. And of course we all do.

I hope that helps a bit.

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

Take care, man.

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:

Or to put it another way, all those experts are lying and only Rob Bennett is truthful, or it is just the opposite.

Have you ever heard the term “cognitive dissoance,” Sammy? It’s a real thing. It would be helpful if you would use the term “cognitive dissonance” rather than the word “lying.” It would greatly facilitate progress in these discussions if you used the less inflammatory terminology.

I became famous (infamous?) on the internet for pointing out that the Old School safe-withdrawal rate studies get the numbers that people use to plan their retirements wildly wrong because they do not contain adjustments for the valuation level that applies on the day the retirement begins. Shiller showed that such adjustments are required. If you don’t include the adjustments (they would not be required if the market were efficient, which is what people believed prior to the publication of Shiller’s “revolutionary” (his word) research, the safe withdrawal rate is always 4 percent. If you do, the SWR goes as low as 1.6 percent (when stocks are priced as they were in 2000) and as high as 9.0 percent (when stocks are priced as they were in 1982).

In the days prior to my famous post of the morning of May 13, 2002, I often PRAISED John Greaney’s retirement study, a study which does not contain a valuations adjustment. Was I a “liar” in those days?

It would not be entirely unfair to say that. I knew about Shiller’s research the entire time. I had roughly calculated the safe withdrawal rate for my own planning purposes and had determined that it was a number a good bit below 4 percent. So I knew that Greaney’s study got the numbers wrong. And yet I praised it. I encouraged my friends to use this dangerous study to plan their retirements. I was a liar, was I not?

Kinda, sorta.

My problem with the use of the word “liar” in this case is that I had no intent to hurt anyone. Greaney’s study was a big advance over what came before it. Peter Lynch at one time was telling people that the safe withdrawal rate was 7 percent. It was the Old School safe-withdrawal-studies that showed why Lynch was wrong. The true SWR at the top of the bubble was 1.6 percent. The Greaney study was a whole big bunch closer to getting the number right than Lynch was and Lynch himself is of course a highly respected expert in this field.

The reason why I didn’t tell people that Greaney got the number wrong is that Greaney and his study were very popular at the board at which I was posting and I feared that I would be criticized and attacked if I told people what I knew about the flaw in the study. I was of course ultimately proven right about those concerns. I have been attacked viciously by the Buy-and-Holders in the days since I put forward my post pointing out that the Greaney study does not contain a valuations adjustments, which is of course a 100 percent valid claim.

Why did I tell these “lies” for three years? I wanted to be popular. We all do. It’s human nature to want to be popular. And I was able to come up with a pretty darn good rationalization for the “lies” that I was telling. The Greaney study was a huge advance. “It’s better to focus on the positive rather than the negative” I told myself. “Why cause people to lose confidence in a study that is doing a lot of people a lot of good?”, I asked myself.

I was a “liar.” That’s a fact. But still I put the word “liar” in quote marks. Because it is a funny sort of lie. I was facing intense social pressures not to tell the full truth. And I had a rationalization at hand to justify my behavior that I think it would be fair to say made a pretty darn compelling case for the lie. So I did what I did.

That’s what all of the experts in this field are doing today.

Buy-and-Hold is rooted in the research of Eugene Fama. Valuation-Informed Indexing is rooted in the research of Robert Shiller. Both men have been awarded Nobel prizes. They say opposite things. That cannot both be right. Our entire nation needs to know which Nobel prize winner is right and which Nobel prize winner is wrong. We need to launch a national debate aimed at getting to the bottom of this question.

I really was a liar for those three years. But there were circumstances which to a large extent explained the lies I told. The people who today fail to point out the dangers of Buy-and-Hold given what the last 34 years of peer-reviewed research tells us about how stock investing works in the real world really are liars. But they face those same circumstances that pressured me into telling the lies that I told. I think it would be better to refer to the problem as “cognitive dissonance.” I think that that way of handling things helps us all to pull together to solve the problem rather than to split apart in anger.

Shiller’s findings advanced the ball in a major way. We all want to enjoy the benefits of that advance. To get what we all want, we are going to need to start speaking in ways that don’t put people on the defensive. We absolutely need to say that retirement studies that don’t include valuation adjustments are dangerous and irresponsible. But we do not need to by nasty about it. We should be trying to soften the blow that we deliver to the Buy-and-Holders when we point out their errors by noting the huge number of genuine insights that they advanced and by noting that it is a universal human phenomenon that we all tend to rationalize when we are emotionally invested in an idea and then see evidence come in showing that that idea is not as strong as we once believed it to be.

I hope that helps a bit, my long-time Buy-and-Hold friend. I think your investing beliefs are in error. But I do not dislike you as a person. I am trying to give you something to think about that I think might end up doing you a lot of good down the road a piece.

Rob

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

I am sure you will write more articles from this in which you explain how this expert, like all other experts are wrong and how you are right. It goes along with how you say Michael, like the other experts, “pull their punches” as you have this unique ability to read their minds.

Just to note, it is interest how Michael, like many other experts, no longer speak with you. I wonder why that is????

Michael likes me a lot, Sammy. And I like him a lot. We engaged in many e-mail conversations. We are friends.

You are right, though, that today he keeps his distance from me. And you are right that that is true of many other experts in this field. I am “controversial.”

I shouldn’t be. Everything that I say just follows naturally from Shiller’s 1981 finding that valuations affect long-term returns. If valuations affect long-term returns, then stock risk is not constant but variable. If stock risk is variable, then investors must change their stock allocations in response to big shifts in valuations to have any hope whatsoever of keeping their risk profiles roughly constant. The Buy-and-Holders say not to do that. So what I say makes the Buy-and-Holders look bad. It’s not my intent to make the Buy-and-Holders look bad. But that’s the inevitable result that follows from exploring the implications of Shiller’s “revolutionary” (his word) research findings.

We need to normalize these discussions. We need to encourage more people to challenge the Buy-and-Hold strategy recommendations. None of them can be even close to right if Shiller’s research is legitimate (and there is now 34 years of peer-reviewed research backing him up).

It comes as a shock to a lot of people when I point out how the Buy-and-Holders got so many things wrong. It’s shocking because people have not heard it before. Buy-and-Hold became popular during the bull market and millions of people are counting on the Pretend Gains they experienced in the bull market to finance their retirements. It pains them to hear that they made a mistake in coming to believe that those gains are real.

I am controversial and people keep their distance from me as a result. I would like to see that change. I would like to see us all working together to learn more and more and more. But this is a sensitive matter. If Shiller is right, 90 percent of the investing advice that people have heard in recent decades is wrong. As a society, we are having a hard time letting that in. We’ll get there. We need to. The advances in our understanding as a result of Shiller’s research are too important for us not to develop far more fully than we have in the first 34 years since his research was published. And we are making progress. But it would be fair to say that progress has been slow.

Yes, Michael pulls his punches. But he has also put forward some amazing stuff. I prefer to focus on the positive.

I hope that helps a bit.

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:

So that list shows what SHOULD have happened. But we know what HAS happened. The scoreboard is showing a massive, epic blowout. If you took the field today against the Patriots, all by yourself, the final score would be closer than your competition with the Goons. And yet, you see nothing wrong with your game plan.

I am not happy with the results that we have seen thus far.

But there’s nothing that I can do about it.

I care about the people who read my stuff. I am incapable of lying to them.

It’s possible that I could get things wrong. Even that scares me. I hate the thought that I might get something wrong and someone might go by what I said in error and hurt himself or herself by doing so. But at least in that case I didn’t intentionally do anything wrong. If I flat out lie, it’s intentional. I cannot live with that on my conscience.

So I have never had any other options than the ones that I have chosen.

I don’t like the results that we have seen. But, given that I have never had any other options, I have concluded that the best thing to do is just to live with what has happened. I could cry. Do you think that would help? I guess that there have been one or two occasions on which I have been tempted to have a cry. But I concluded that it would do no good. So I didn’t go there.

That’s it.

I have played the cards that I have been dealt to the best of my ability. Yes, I have scars all over my body from the hits that you Goons have delivered to me. I don’t say otherwise. But what of it? I don’t control the world. I am not Superman.

We have to accept the things that we cannot change, Anonymous. So that’s what I try to do. I try to make the best of the difficult circumstances that apply here.

I speak out against you Goons. Frequently. Forcefully. I do that much.

That’s about all that I can do, given the circumstances that apply. So that’s what I do.

I hope that all that makes good sense to you.

My best wishes.

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:

Here is your parting post on that old thread. Remember this?

“John

I finally finally get it.

I am deeply sorry for falsely criticizing the study and for wasting so much of the board’s time on this issue. The only possible saving grace here is that perhaps my public display of deep ignorance will cause a few others to realize that they do not understand the study as well as they need to and to spend some time getting more familiar with it in detail. I’ve said before that it is a valuable tool, and I am more convinced of that now.

You are right that my problem is that I was looking at the Dory36 calculator and was concerned to see years turn up where the safe withdrawal rate did not work. The descriptions of how the calculator differs from the root study were right there in front of me, so this is a weak excuse, but that’s what happened.

For what it’s worth, understanding for the first time that there really is a known safe withdrawal rate that applies in all circumstances makes me feel a little more comfortable with the idea of investing in stocks at today’s prices. I’m not going to make any quick major shifts, but being able to know the worst case scenario in advance is an important plus in having the confidence to invest in a volatile investment class.”

I said those words, Sammy.

What do you think that shows?

It shows that I am human just like you and Shiller and Bogle and Pfau and all the others. All humans live in communities. We are all subject to pressures to conform to widely endorsed beliefs.

The Buy-and-Holders are not bad people. You have never heard me say that. I have on thousands of occasions said that they are good and smart and hard-working people. Just like the version of Rob Bennett who said those words back on Day Four of our discussions. And just like the version of Rob Bennett who said those words, the Buy-and-Holders are sometimes held back by their desire to conform to social norms.

There was research done many years ago in which test subjects were asked to say which of two lines was longest. The people who participated in the research were able to give the correct answers when they took the tests alone. But when four fake test-takers who deliberately gave wrong answers were added to the mix, the majority of test-takers no longer could give correct answers. Social pressures wipe out our ability to think clearly.

It doesn’t happen only in the stock investing realm. It happens in every field of human endeavor. But the stock investing realm is not an exception to the universal rule. Humans behave when buying stocks just as they do when they do anything else. They let social pressures undermine their ability to reason.

That’s why we have bull markets. Bull markets are an emotional phenomena. Shiller showed that with peer-reviewed research in 1981. The reaction of you Goons to my post of the morning of May 13, 2002, confirmed Shiller’s findings. The reason why long-term stock returns are highly predictable is that investor emotions are the primary determinant of stock prices and investor emotions do not follow a random walk in the long run but instead follow a very clear pattern that has been repeating without exception fort 145 years now.

Stock valuations go up for about 20 years until prices have reached insanely high levels and then they go down for about 15 years. Returns are much lower during the down phases and risk is much higher during the down phases. Stocks are a far more attractive asset class during the up phases than they are during the down phases. Every investor alive needs to know about the 34 years of peer-reviewed research showing this. The cover-up has destroyed millions of lives. It cannot continue. Not if our economic system is going to continue.

We have to fix these errors, Sammy. We are all on the same side. We all should be working together.

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

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

Rob