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 feel that you can offer the same or superior investing advice versus  people like Wade Pfau, Michael Kitces and/ or Bill Bernstein?

I think that everyone alive will offer better investment advice once we have opened every discussion board and blog to honest posting re the last 41 years of peer-reviewed research in this field. My contribution is to get every site opened to honest posting. Then all of the others will be able to do much. much better work. The combined effect will be amazing.

The entire purpose of doing peer-reviewed research is to learn things and then to tell people about what you have learned. For so long as we ban the discussion of anything that we did not know in 1980, we are all worse off than we would be if we had just permitted honest posting re the new stuff we learn, as we do in every other field.

Say that people in the typewriter industry felt bad when people started using word processors and that they were powerful enough to get personal computers banned. We would all be worse off today. When all new knowledge is banned, you don’t even know what you are missing out on because all you have available to you is the old stuff. When you permit knowledge to advance, one thing leads to another and in not too much time you are in a place that you never could have imagined in the days when all you had was the old, now discredited, knowledge.

I believe that the last 41 years of peer-reviewed research is the most important 41 years of peer-reviewed research in the history of investing analysis. We all should be making use of what we have learned from it on a daily basis.

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 no businesses making the comma you do when you lack any education in this area and have a failed retirement.

Do you think it would have been better if I had just kept it zipped re the error in the study?

Rob

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

So your fine with being disobedient to God’s word.

I believe that, when I die and have to stand before God, I will be held to account for my behavior her on Planet Earth. Yes, I have some concerns about my failure to provide financially for my family for many years. I do not say that that’s not a concern. I have spoken to more than one priest re that matter. I have had long, searching conversations/confessions with them about it. I have had two who felt that I have behaved in a way that is more wrong than right and I have has two who have felt that I have behaved in a way that was more right than wrong. I have been referred to books and Bible passages and things like that and I have read those books and Bible passages in the most open and humble spirit that I was able to muster. Nothing that I have read or heard has persuaded me that it would be okay for me to know about the horrible suffering that millions of souls are likely to experience in the event that stocks continue to perform in the future somewhat as they have always performed in the past and to do nothing to help.

The most basic commandment of all is to do unto others as you would have them do unto you. If the tables were turned and there we someone out there who had the knowledge needed to help me avoid that kind of pain, I would want that person to go to a little bit of trouble to get the message to me. So I do what little I am able to do to get the message out to the millions of lives that are today in the balance presuming that Shiller’s Nobel-prize-winning research is legitimate research.

There’s a chapter in my book with the title “My Mother Speaks From the Grave About the Horrors of Buy-and-Hold Investment Strategies.” My mother was born in 1917. So the Great Depression had a big effect on her life. She had to drop out of school in the eighth grade so that she could go to work in a factory and her family would have money for food. She went on a date when she was at the age where she should have been a senior in high school an d the boy was a freshman in college and he asked her what school she attended. When she told him the real story, she had to experience the look of disappointment and shock in his eyes.

That’s Buy-and-Hold! That’s the science of stock investing, according to our Wall Street Con Men friends. It’s all about putting the possibility of turning a quick buck above the lives and hopes and dreams of millions of people. I can’t live with myself if I find myself in circumstances in which I can do something about it (I didn’t ask to be placed in these circumstances!) and I fail to do anything about it. I am the one who has to be able to live with my conscience, not you. I do what I have to do. As I have observed before, I can do no more and I can do no less. I can’t control whether people listen or not. That’s up to people. But it’s up to me whether I work up the courage to say something or not. I wouldn’t be able to go to sleep at night if I didn’t work up the courage to say a little something in these circumstances. So that’s what I do. The rest of it is out of my hands.

I am far from the most religious person in the world. I believe in God. I go that far. I believe that God gave me the mother He gave me in preparation for this experience. I believe that He wanted me to hear her stories so that I would know what to do when the time came for me to make my decision. I can’t prove it. But it is hard for me to accept that it is just coincidence that I had the mother that I had and that then the day came when I was required to make the choice that I have been required to make.

I believe that God knows everything that is in my heart. He knows how much I have thought about this matter so that I would know the choice that is in accord with His wishes for me. He knows whether I am acting out of selfishness or pride or out of a desire to use my talents to carry out His will. I believe that I will be okay in His eyes when my day comes. I feel confident that I would not be okay in His eyes if I came up with some rationalization for letting down millions of good people and putting my own personal comfort above the need to do something to help them. So I play it the way I play it. I can do no more and I can do no less.

My best and warmest wishes to you and yours.

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 are just like that Kim Blandino guy on YouTube.  You are so sure you are right, but only making a fool of yourself.

I believe that I am right on the substantive issues. There’s the 40 years of peer-reviewed research. There’s Shiller’s Nobel prize. There are the thousands of our fellow community members who have expressed a desire that honest posting be permitted. There’s the behavior of you Goons, which lends support to Shiller’s position that investors are sometimes highly emotional (in contrast to the Buy-and-Hold belief that investors are 100 percent rational and that therefore market timing does not work because no one can be smarter than a 100 percent rational market).

All of that makes me think that I am probably right. The other side of the story is that we are all capable of self-deception. I think that Bogle was a genius. If Bogle could get market timing wrong, as I believe is the case, then surely Rob Bennett could get market timing wrong. We all see what we are able to see and miss what we are not able to see. I am one of those darned flawed humans. So it seems to me at least possible that I am missing something important and am wrong on something but am just not able to see it. So I don’t claim 100 percent certainty re the substantive issues.

The process issue (whether or not honest posting re the last 40 years of peer-reviewed research should be permitted) is different. If I am wrong re that one, then my entire life has been a waste. I have devoted my entire adult life to journalism. If permitting both sides to speak is a mistake, then all of my work efforts have been directed to no good purpose. If letting both sides speak is a mistake, then the entire U.S. democracy project is a mistake. Letting both sides speak and enjoying the progress that follows is what this country that I love is all about. So I am just not able even to entertain the possibility that letting both side speak is a mistake. That one goes too deep.

If I am right about the process question and wrong about the substantive question, I won’t be collecting the $500 million settlement payment. But I will still feel that I did right by my fellow community members and re my country. If I am wrong about the substantive question, permitting both sides to speak would ultimately lend further support to the Buy-and-Hold Model, which is what we all should want to see happen if Buy-and-Hold really is a good model. So I feel that asking that both sides be permitted to speak is 100 percent the right position in the event that I am wrong re the substantive issue.

So on that one I don’t just believe that I am correct, as I do re the substantive issue. Re the process issue, I KNOW that I am correct. It is my belief that permitting honest posting would work to the benefit of everyone if market timing really does always work and that permitting honest posting would also work to the benefit of everyone if market timing never works. That’s all the possibilities. So I believe that we should be permitting honest posting. I don’t just believe that. I KNOW that.

That’s where I am coming from in any event, 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:

What friends?  No one talks to you.

Investing Discussion Boards Ban Honest Posting on Valuations!

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:

Stop evading the question, Rob.  What made you go off the deep end?

It was my love for my fellow community members that drove me to it.

The humans will do it to you every time!

Rob

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

Is it irrational to base your retirement plan on the hope of getting a $500 million windfall?

Sure. When you’ve done the work to earn that $500 million. When you’ve pointed out an error in a retirement study that millions of people need to know about because lots of other retirement studies contain the same error and the study has remained uncorrected for 20 years because lots of good and smart people who work in the field want to tell the truth and help people but are afraid to do so because the error has caused so much human misery that the people who made it can’t bear to sat the words “I” and “Was” and “Wrong.” When that’s the situation, someone has to work up the courage and do what it takes to earn the $500 million. And, once he has earned it, why shouldn’t be plan his retirement on it?

Do you think it would have been better if I had kept my mouth shut about the error in the Greane retirement study?

Have you considered that over the years I had become friends with a good number of the people who posted at the Motley Fool’s Retire Early board?

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:

Are you referring to the book that you said would be out 12 years ago?

That’s the one!

It will be a humdinger when it is ready for public consumption, I promise you that muvh. Whenever I feel a little discouraged, I read the first three Parts (the first 27 chapters) and that gives me a confidence rush. Those first three Parts are perfectly polished today. Part Four needs a lot of work. The other Parts need work but are in better shape than Part Four.

‘I won’t put it out until it is perfectly ready. I am not willing to compromise even an inch re that one. This is to be a statement that lasts forever. The statement is coming together more quickly now than ever before. I think I will bring it home in not too much mote time.

I am 100 percent confident that it will be worth the wait. Yes, I wish that I had finished it sooner. But is there anyone else who has published a clear and complete statement on the dangers of Buy-and-Hold? If there is, I haven’t heard about him or her. If I end up being first, I guess you could say that it’s understandable why it took some time to make it perfect. This stuff is HARD.

Not intellectually. It’s hard EMOTIONALLY saying things that millions of people very, very, very much do not want to hear. They need to hear them but they very much do not want to hear them. So to be the one writing down the words of the message is very, very hard. But someone has to do it. And I think that it would be fair to say that the universe elected me to perform the task. So I am giving it my best shot.

My best wishes to you, as always.

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:

Since that deranged non-response ignored my question about your book, we can assume it won’t be finished by the end of this year.  Or any year.

It won’t be finished by the end of this year, as I had hoped. I can now see light at the end of the tunnel. Before, when I would rework a section, it would often cause changes in a number of places throughout the book. I now have all the chapters divided up properly and in the right place. So things are much more stable. I can focus on one chapter and get that in better shape and then move on to something entirely different. The work proceeds a lot more quickly and efficiently that way. So things are improving.

But, no, I am not done or even super close to being done. My new target date for completion is June 2022. I think I’ll make this one. But then I thought I would make the earlier ones too.

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:

It was wrong of me to make posts that appeared to make fun of you. With that said, my posts have always been based on truth. You have made many false and hurtful allegations against very good people. You have given out harmful financial advice, despite having no training/education in the field. Most importantly, you have failed to adequately provide for your family.

Please consider these words seriously as this is my last post.

I wish you all the best, Anonymous.

Please take good care, dear Goon friend.

Rob