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

There are no goons. Just people that don’t agree with you. If and when there is a drop in the market, it will not be blamed on buy and hold. Every day, there are predictions of drops that are tied to some particular reason. Here is another example:

https://www.marketwatch.com/story/the-stock-markets-comeuppance-is-coming-heres-how-to-prepare-your-portfolio-now-2020-08-18

You are wasting your time.

Buy-and-Holders are going to offer rational explanations of any price changes. That is what they do. The premise of the strategy is that investors are rational. If investors are rational, then it is not possible that prices could fall for any but a good reason.

But that’s not what Shiller’s research shows Shiller showed that gains that push prices above the prices we would have if the CAPE were 16 are the product of irrational exuberance. I believe that Shiller’s Nobel-prize-winning research is legitimate research. So I don’t have any option but to say that the Buy-and-Holders are wrong. Shiller’s research cannot be reconciled with the research that was once thought to support Buy-and-Hold (and that still is in the minds of millions of Buy-and-Holders).

I don’t think that I am wasting my time. But, given that it is a physical impossibility for me to post dishonestly re these matters, we will just have to wait to see how it all plays out. We do not need to have every Buy-and-Holder change his mind on the day of the price crash. We already have 10 percent who believe that Shiller’s research is legitimate. If that number goes above 20 percent, I believe that we will be on our way. Once we get to 20 percent, people will be speaking up when they see criminal behavior and more and more of us will feel free to post honestly and knowledge of how stock investing really works will just spread and spread. Once we are all living better lives in about 20 ways, there is not going to be anyone who is ever going to want to go back to the Buy-and-Hold garbage. We will work together as a society to bury that smelly garbage 30 feet in the ground, where it can do no further harm to humans and other living things.

Or maybe not. I thought that Motley Fool would give Greaney the boot when he advanced his first death threat. That was on the evening of August 27, 2002. So I obviously was proven to be wrong re that one. It is at least within the realm of the possible that it is happening again and that I just cannot see it. But given that I am physically incapable of saying that I believe that Greaney’s retirement study contains an adjustment for the valuation level that applies on the day the retirement begins. we will just have to wait to see how it all plays out. Maybe I am wasting my time and maybe I am leading the people of the United States to the biggest advance in our understanding of how stock investing works ever achieved in our history.

I naturally wish you all the best that this life have to offer a person, on any event, my dear Goon friend.

Rob

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

“I don’t deny my bias.”

Yes, you do.

No, I don’t.

I think that I am right. If I didn’t think that I was right, I would not say what I say.

But of course the funny thing about bias is that it is often the case that a person is not aware of his own bias and the effect that it has on his thinking. A bias can blind a person. And that blindness can extend to the existence of the bias itself.

I certainly possess a bias. I hope that it does not influence my thinking re these matters to any great degree. But, if it did, there’s a good chance that I would not be aware of that. This is one of those darn paradoxes of human existence.

My best wishes to you.

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 DID something of great importance on the morning of May 13, 2002, when I pointed out the error in the retirement study posted at John Greany’s site.”

While I, and others, don’t think you did anything important on that day and also think you are the one in error, let’s set that aside for the moment. THAT WAS 18 YEARS AGO. Get the point? What have you materially accomplished? You haven’t earned an income, you haven’t written a book, you never started a forum or built a side business. Get it?

Say that there is a 1 in 100 chance that I was right in what I said in my famous post from the morning of May 13, 2002, that Greaney truly did fail to include a valuation adjustment in his retirement study. I personally believe that the odds are more like 99.999. in 100. But for purposes of discussion, let’s say 1 in 100.How important would it be for someone to have discovered that error?

It’s the most important discovery in the history of personal finance. There were thousands of people at the Motley Fool board who used the Greaney study to plan their retirement. That can all be documented. We have Post Archives. A failed retirement is a serious life setback. So there shouldn’t be one person in the field who wouldn’t want to see that error quickly corrected.

But that’s the tip of the iceburg! Greaney isn’t the only one who has ever pushed the 4 percent rule. There are hundreds of financial advisors who have done so. It was written up in financial journals as if it were accurate. Thousands and thousands of newspaper articles that purported to help people plan their retirements cited the 4 percent rule. If that rule is in error (and we are not talking a small error, you get a very, very, very different number if you perform the calculation properly), MILLIONS of retirements have been placed in jeopardy. Just about everyone who lives in the United States has been affected in one way or the other by this error.

The most important thing that investment analysts do is to help people plan their retirements. If they can’t get that one right, what the heck can they get right? Did they get asset allocation right? Probably not if they got retirement planning wrong. Did they get risk management right? Probably not if they go retirement planning wrong. That May 13, 2002, post shows that the Buy-and-Holders got it ALL wrong. Every single calculation that they have ever performed is in error.

The Buy-and-Holders believe that the market is efficient. So overvaluation cannot possibly exist. Shiller discredited that belief, he showed that overvaluation DOES exist. If it exists and if the Buy-and-Holders don’t take it into consideration, then the Buy-and-Holders have gotten every calculation that they have ever performed wrong. Some by a little, some by a lot. But every single calculation that they have ever done is in error.

So we need to know whether Greaney included a valuation adjustment in his study or not. This stuff matters. We need to make an effort to get it right.

We have had thousands of people express a desire that honest posting be permitted, as you would expect. So far, so good. But the study has not been corrected to this day. Huh? What the f? As you point out, you Goons have terrorized every board community that has taken up these questions and thereby have committed the biggest act of financial fraud in the history of the United States. Does it matter? Yes, it matters.

Imagine that Greaney could provide a screen shot of the page in his study containing a valuation adjustment. If he could have done that, he would have done it on the afternoon of May 13, 2002. He hasn’t provided a screen shot because there is no valuation adjustment in the study. And he knows it! His behavior shows that he knows that there is no valuation adjustment in his study and that people will lose confidence in the study if they are able to hear criticisms of it by people like me. Every criminal act that he has engaged in was engaged in for a purpose — to keep the cover-up going.

And look at the people and institutions that either aided the cover-up or at least tolerated it. Motley Fool. Morningstar. Early Retiremnent Forum. The Get Rich Slowly Blog. The Bogleheads Forum The FIRE board. The Financial Bloggers Conference. And on and on and on and on and on.

You think of every abusive act as evidence that I should give up. You see, Rob, this field has become so corrupt during the Buy-and-Hold Era that you are not going to be able to make a dime doing honest work. You are finished. Give up and do something else with your life. I view the fact that so many are willing to commit criminal acts to keep people from learning about the error in the Greany study (and in all Buy-and-Hold retirement studies) as evidence that Shiller’s work really is just as important as the members of the committee that awarded him a Nobel prize thought it was. We wouldn’t see such resistance to discussion of his research findings if they did not represent a major advance in our understanding of how stock investing works. Shiller has revolutionized the field and we all will be living better lives once we have as a society worked up the courage to place you Goons in prison cells, where you belong.

What you are trying to do — stop human beings from learning new things about how the world works — goes against thousands of years of human history. It just cannot be done. When the discredited strategy causes enough human misery, people are going to pull together and find a way around you. I believe that the Buy-and-Holders themselves were seeking to do good when they developed the Buy-and-Hold strategy. If they had known at the time what you Goons would be doing today to “defend” their strategy, they would have spoken out against it. If the original Buy-and-Holders themselves are against you Goons, you ain’t got nothing. I mean, come on.

You’ve got violence. That’s it. People are afraid of you. So you have a temporary advantage. But it is not an advantage that will survive the next price crash, when all the good people will be pulling together to overcome you and to open every investing site on the internet to honest posting re the last 39 years of peer-reviewed research in this field.

Or so Rob Bennett sincerely believes, in any event.

Time will tell the tale. I’d rather be on the side of the table that I am on than on the side of the table that you are on by a factor of 500.

I wish you all good things. But I am not open to moving to the other side of the table. Not this boy. No freakin’ way, no freakin’; how.

The fact that you Goons concluded that Buy-and-Hold cannot be effectively defended in civil and reasoned debate left an impression on me. I was a Buy-and-Holder myself until the evening of August 27, 2002, when Greaney advanced his first death threat and when 200 of my fellow community members endorsed it. That was when I concluded that this stuff isn’t science, that it is all emotion, and that it is for the birds. Valuation-Informed Indexing was born on the next day. I didn’t have a name for it at the time. But I knew on that day that Buy-and-Hold had failed. My project from that day forward was to take all of the wonderful stuff in the Buy-and-Hold Model (there’s a lot of that) and incorporate it into a new model that also contains the stuff we learned from Shiller’s Nobel-prize-winning research. That’s the thing that now goes by the name of “Valuation-Informed Indexing.”

My best wishes to you.

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 all these people, such as Wade and Bill Bernstein are lying…..according to Rob Bennett, top investing expert.

I am not an investing expert. I am a journalist. A journalist who discovered a huge story, the story of how the investment advice field has become 100 percent corrupt over the past 39 years.

Everyone in this field lies. Some not by commission but only by omission. The vast majority do not know that they are repeating lies when they pass along to their clients the conventional wisdom. But the reality is that the conventional wisdom was discredited by peer-reviewed research which has since caused its author to be awarded a Nobel prize 39 years ago. If you charge high fees and pass along advice that was discredited 39 years ago, is that not a lie? I of course believe that we should be telling people the unusual circumstances that apply. But we also need to tell people that the stuff that they are hearing about long-term timing/price discipline not working or not being required is a lie. That’s truly dangerous stuff. People need to know the other side of the story.

Everyone in this field is telling lies to one degree or another. Anyone who doesn’t tell lies or at least keep quiet while others tell them is removed. You Goons mention all the time how no one posts here. Why is that? It’s because I told the truth about the Greaney retirement study, that it lacks an adjustment for the valuation level that applies on the day the retirement begins. If we were all thinking clearly, I would have been applauded for pointing that out (I have been applauded by thousands of our fellow community members, but that has not been enough to persuade you Goons to knock off the criminally abusive stuff). If we were all thinking clearly, we would all want to get the numbers in our retirement studies right.

I want to post honestly. And I want all these other people you mention to feel free to post honestly so that I and millions of others can learn from them. For that to happen, we need to stop penalizing those who work up the courage to post honestly and adopt a practice of rewarding them instead. If anyone is going to be penalized, it should be the ones engaging in criminal behavior. Those are all Buy-and-Holders. I wonder why.

Greaney’s study truly does not contain a valuations adjustment. It should be corrected before it causes even more harm and causes his prison sentence to be increased even farther in length than what it would be if his trial were held today.

That’s my sincere take, Anonymous.

I wish you all good things.

Greaney’s One True 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:

“ It’s definitely my job. It’s definitely your job too, Anonymous. And it’s definitely everyone else’s job.”

No, it is only your job as we choose our jobs.  You chose your pathway, now it is your job to set people straight.

My conscience is clear, Anonymous. I feel that I have done my part and then some more on top of that and then some more on top of that. If you took a poll of the American people and described the situation and asked “Has Rob Bennett worked this hard enough?” I am 100 percent confident that 90 percent of the population would say that I have worked it too hard and too long, not too light and for not a long enough time. I know that because of what friends and family members tell me. People think that I have traveled too far from the herd. That’s virtually a universal opinion.

I don’t regret anything that I have done. Someone had to do this so that as a people we can come to terms with what we have done to ourselves when we have experienced the ocean of human misery that we will experience when the next price crash arrives. I couldn’t live with myself if I knew (as I did indeed come to know) that millions of people were going to get hurt as a result of continued promotion of the Buy-and-Hold stuff and I did nothing about it. It would be like knowing in advance of the 911 attacks and just keeping my mouth shut out of fear that I might suffer personally in some way for speaking up in defense of my country. I cannot go there. So I did what I had to do given the cards that were dealt to me.

But I am not Superman. This is not a one-man job. If we are going to as a society advance in our understanding of how stock investing works, we are all going to need to play our parts in getting the word out about the last 39 years of peer-reviewed research and in asking good questions and all that sort of thing. It’s silly to think that one person could pull off what I am trying to pull off all by himself or herself.

I will always be available to help. If I see in the days following the next price crash that there is a greater willingness on the part of the Normals to stand up to you Goons, then I am certainly going to do what I can to help the good guys advance the ball. Obviously. But I offer no apologies for not offering to get my head bashed against a wall on a daily basis anymore. I have said what needed to be said, I have done what a reasonable person could do.

My goal of opening the entire internet to honest posting re the last 39 years of peer-reviewed research is a goal that benefits every investor on the planet, If we don’t get more people involved, we are not going to achieve that goal and we will all suffer the consequence. If we get more people involved, we can make huge strides in a very short amount of time. I’ll be there on the front lines when the time comes when progress can be made. But I have been involved in enough of this lone soldier stuff to last 20 lifetimes. Everyone has a limit and it took a lot longer for me to reach mine than it did for most others. But I have a limit too , and, when it comes to the lone soldier stuff, I crossed that point some time ago.

It will be interesting to see how it all plays out.

I naturally wish you all good things.

Lone Soldier (But No More!) 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:

The primary cause of the crash? Really? You continue to take your old tired themes and then spin it with the topic of the day. You never cease to amaze me as to how delusional you really are. I would think by now you would have learned your lesson. Back in 2002, you laid out for all to see a retirement/financial plan based on your VII strategy based on your perceptions of investing using CAPE. The financial community warned you back then that you would be headed for disaster, but you wouldn’t listen. In 2005, you posted an update and it was clear you were off track. People warned you yet again, but you said that by following VII, you would exceed the market averages of 7% and easily meet your objectives. As the years went by, the warnings continued, but you ignored people. Over the past year, you have given short updates on your website saying that you depleted your assets and needed to find a job, yet you wanted to finish your book first. You were warned to get a job asap, but with book delays you decided to put that off. Here we are now where you have painted yourself into a corner from a financial perspective and with the Covid-19 impact, jobs are likely to be much harder to get.

Despite warning after warning, you always tell people to wait and “ see how it all plays out”. It has all played out, Rob. Your assets are depleted. You are over 60 years old. If there was a worst case scenario for you, this is it. It all happened like others predicted. The unfortunate part is that your family will suffer because of your choices.

I like your opening statement that “you continue to take your old, tired theme and then spin it with the topic of the day,” Sammy. I don’t agree that my theme is tired. I find it exciting. I believe that Valuation-Informed Indexing is the future of investment analysis and that Buy-and-Hold is the past. However, outside of that adjective, the rest of your comment is a decent description of the work that I have been doing for 18 years now. Shiller showed something very simple, that the market is not efficient, as the Buy-and-Holders believed, that valuations affect long-term returns. That finding affects every aspect of the stock investing project in a profound way. But, amazingly, few have explored the far-reaching implications of Shiller’s Nobel-prize-winning work. So I do that. As you say, I just apply that breakthrough finding — that valuations affect long-term returns — to every topic that comes up.

And, no, the Valuation-Informed Indexing concept has not caught on in a big way just yet. Buy-and-Hold remains dominant today. And that reality has hurt my ability to make money doing this work. But do you really think that that is going to remain the case for much longer? I sure do not. If Shiller’s Nobel-prize-winning research is legitimate research, it changes our understanding of every aspect of the stock investing project. Getting everything wrong obviously is going to hurt us in serious ways. Making the shift that would permit us to get everything right would be a boon for millions. You do not think that that shift is going to take place? I do. I am highly confident that it will.

If Shiller’s Nobel-prize-winning research is not legitimate, I have wasted 18 years of my life. I’ll give you that one. But if Shiller’s research is legitimate, then I am like that fellow in the movie “Yesterday” who was the only one on the planet who remembered all the Beatles songs. He could go to a party, pull out a guitar and say “This next one is a little something that I call ‘Hey. Jude'”and blow everyone away. That’s me in the personal finance realm. For 18 years I have been able to write about hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of different aspects of the stock investing project from an entirely fresh perspective and from one that is rooted in peer-reviewed research that won the fellow who did it a Nobel prize. That’s a pretty darn amazing opportunity that I had fall into my lap.

I think that everyone should be doing this work. Now, if the market is efficient, that would be foolish. I see that. But if valuations truly affect long-term returns, as Shiller showed is the case many years ago — Holy moly! That changes everything! If part of the stock price is comprised of irrational exuberance, then we put ourselves at risk of suffering a devastating price crash when we permit the CAPE value to go too high. It’s an amazing thing that we now know how to prevent the sorts of price crashes that we are living through today. I think it’s great. It’s like living in the time when horrible diseases were cured. At one time, you just had to live in fear. Then you discover how to cure those diseases and everyone on the planet gets to live a better life. That’s where we are in the stock investing realm today, in my sincere assessment.

My best and warmest wishes to you regardless of what investment strategy you elect to follow.

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 already said you depleted your assets. Why would you even wait to get even near that point. Why are you selling out your family?

My family has to live in this country, Anonymous. I obviously want to take care of my family. But part of taking care of my family is taking care of my country. I need to do both. I cannot throw either one overboard and still live with myself.

I have a chapter in my book called “My Mother Speaks From the Grave Against Buy-and-Hold.” My mother was born in 1917. So she was 12 years old when the Crash of 1929 hit. She had to leave school in eighth grade to work in a factory to put food on the table for her family. That experience was burned into her consciousness. She still talked about it when she was 93. There was no one else in my neighborhood who went to law school. The reason why I did is that my mother put so much emphasis on education because she loved school and was denied an education because of the Buy-and-Hold “idea” of not practicing price discipline when buying stocks.

So this is personal for me. People suffer real pain in these price crashes. There was nothing we could do about it in my mother’s day. Shiller hadn’t yet published his Nobel-prize-winning research. But now he has. So we should be talking about that research and helping people to invest more effectively at every site on the internet.

Why would you commit criminal acts? What happens to your family when you go to prison? I think it would be fair to say that my plan of continuing to post honestly re stock investing is 500 times better than your plan of committing criminal acts to stop people from posting honestly and then serving a long prison term after the next price crash as a result.

Family 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:

How about posting something of value. You have repeated this same stuff over and over again. Try posting something new. While you are at it, why don’t you explain to readers as to why you won’t provide and proof (links) to your claims of job threats and death threats.

I only post about one subject. But it is a very important subject and there are hundreds of angles to it. So posting about that one subject keeps me busy.

The one subject is long-term market timing. There was research in the 1960s that showed that short-term timing doesn’t work. People did not know at the time of the need to distinguish short-term timing from long-term timing. So it became common practice just to say that “timing doesn’t work.” We now know that long-term timing always works and is always 100 percent required for investors seeking to keep their risk profile constant over time. But all the people who have been saying for years that long-term timing is not required feel that it makes them look bad for people to learn the realities. So you still hear this kind of thing today, 39 years after the research was published showing that the market is not efficient and that therefore long-term timing (price discipline!) always works and is always required.

It’s a big deal. If the market is efficient, the safe withdrawal rate would always be the same number (4 percent). If valuations affect long-term returns, as Shiller’s research shows, the safe withdrawal rate is a number that varies from 1.6 percent to 9.0 percent, depending on the CAPE level that applies on the day the retirement begins. The biggest reason why people seek out investment advice is to plan their retirements effectively. If the old way of thinking about how stock investing works (Buy-and-Hold) is producing wildly wrong retirement planning numbers, we need to get that fixed. This is not optional. It is 100 percent imperative.

And it affects lots of other stuff too. Wade Pfau and I co-authored peer-reviewed research showing that investors can reduce stock investing risk by nearly 70 percent just by being willing to engage in long-term timing. That’s amazing. Stocks are not nearly as risky an asset class as we have been led to believe. The risk that many people see in stocks is just the result of the investment strategy (Buy-and-Hold) that was developed in the days before Robert Shiller published his Nobel-prize-winning research showing that valuations affect long-term returns. That research changes everything that we once thought we knew about how stock investing works.

I’ve been writing about the transition that we need to make from Buy-and-Hold to Valuation-Informed Indexing for 18 years now. I could write about it for another 18 years and never come close to running out of material. It is exciting stuff. Shiller’s research shows us all how to live far richer lives. Most people want to live richer lives. So I like telling them about it. But the Buy-and-Holders don’t like the idea of people learning the realities as revealed by the peer-reviewed research one little bit. But I think that as a society we are going to need to get past that. Eventually, I don’t think that we are going to have any other choice.

I hope that helps a tiny 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:

With a zero return, I think “wasted” is closer to the mark instead of “invested”.

In terms of dollar bills, the return has indeed been zero.

In terms of building a model for understanding how stock investing works that will be improving the lives of millions for many years to come, the return has been off the charts.

I have lost every process battle. And I have won every content battle.

That puts me in a strange place. I’ll grant you that much. But it’s not a bad place. There’s bad in it. It’s a mix of bad and good. But the good is 50 times more good than the bad is bad. So I think it would be more accurate to say that I am in a very good place than to say that I am in a bad place.

Valuation-Informed Indexing is the future, Buy-and-Hold is the past. And I have played a big role in bringing about the transition. I can live with that, you know?

My best wishes.

Fully Invested (Not in Stocks, in Valuation-Informed Indexing!) 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 don’t see anything in Shiller’s book that says that he could help save us from an economic collapse.

You can count on seeing those words in my book, Anonymous.

My best and warmest wishes to you.

Plain-Speaking Rob