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

The market is dropping again today, Rob.  Notice that no one ever blames buy and hold as the reason for the drop.  It is because buy and hold is not a big part of the market.   Without being able to blame buy and hold, how do you expect to ever get your $500 million payment?  At this point, you probably couldn’t even get 5 cents.

I blame Buy-and-Hold.

Any time the CAPE value is above 16, the long-term pull on the CAPE value is downward. Today, the CAPE value is far above 16. So the long-term downward pull is very strong.

There are always other factors in play. And, yes, you are right that that is what most of the commentary focuses on. I think that is a mistake. We have little control over those factors. In contrast, we have great control over the CAPE value. If we open the internet to honest posting re the peer-reviewed research, we can convince most investors to practice market timing (to go with lower stock allocations when prices are high). Once we all practice market timing, stock prices become self-regulating. High prices bring on low long-term return expectations, which bring on sales, which bring prices down to reasonable levels. Widespread promotion of market timing is the answer.

Buy-and-Hold is a HUGE part of the market. Today’s CAPE level is insane. And yet millions of investors are not practicing market timing even today. Huh? What the f? That would be impossible in a world without Buy-and-Hold. I mean, come on. Can you name one other market in which large numbers of market participants fail to practice price discipline? There isn’t one. This craziness is limited to one market that is very important to all of us. That’s because we once didn’t know how it worked, and when we did learn, we couldn’t bear to acknowledge the mistake we had made. So for 40 years we have been covering it up.

No, I can;t make five cents today. Again, that’s the fault of the Buy-and-Hold “idea” that market timing is not always required. If there were a rational case that could be made for the claim that market timing is not always required, the Buy-and-Holders would welcome challenges to their thinking and those with other points of view could make at least 5 cents. But when you advance claims that have zero support in the peer-reviewed literature, you have to shut down all challenges to your dogmas. That’s why we have seen the behavior that we have seen over the past 19 years.

The abusive stuff (especially the criminal stuff ) is desperation stuff, Anonymous. In a short-term sense, it keeps Buy-and-Hold going. But it reveals its weakness in a long-term sense. Not this boy, you know? I agree with Wade Pfau. “Yes, Virginia, Valuation-Informed Indexing works!”

We’ll see.

Rob

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

“ The community has not rejected me. “

Yes they have. As you have admitted, no one talk to you. They can post anonymously, call you or email you, yet they don’t. You are banned at every major board. Name on other person in the investment community that is ignored like you.

<i>“ The community has not rejected me. “

Yes they have. As you have admitted, no one talks to you. They can post anonymously, call you or email you, yet they don’t. You are banned at every major board. Name on other person in the investment community that is ignored like you.</i>

Name one other person in the investment community that pointed out the error in the Buy-and-Hold retirement studies 19 year ago.

Say that there is a 1-in-100 chance that I was right that the Greaney study lacks an adjustment for the valuation level that applies on the day the retirement begins. If that is so, then we should be discussing that question at every discussion board and blog on the internet on a daily basis. It wasn’t just Greaney who made that mistake. The 4 percent rule was everywhere. There were thousands of newspaper articles that cited it. Millions of people used in in putting together their retirement plans. If that number is in error, that’s the worst mistake that was ever made in the history of personal finance. The primary purpose of financial planning is putting together a retirement plan. When we permit honest posting on the question, Buy-and-Hold goes down. There is an entire industry centered around the promotion of Buy-and-Hold strategies today.

That’s why I am ignored, Anonymous. People love talking with me, People love learning about this stuff. But they don’t want to be involved in something so big. It is scary. Say that the Ban on Honest Posting was lifted tomorrow. Do you know what would happen? Stock prices would drop hard. We would experience an economic crisis. Would you want to be responsible for that? That’s the problem. People do not want to get involved, They want to see someone else step forward to take care of this one.

Unfortunately, there is no one here but us chickens!

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 there anyone in the investment world that is considered to be a thought leader or expert that will even speak with you anymore?

There’s no one who speaks with me, Anonymous.

That’s the problem. Say that everyone who believes that Shiller’s Nobel-prize-winning research is legitimate research posted honestly every day all over the internet. If that were the case, Wade Pfau would not have been intimidated by the acts of extortion that you Goons employed to shut him up. So there were people who censored themselves before Wade came on the scene that made him feel unsafe to stand up to you Goons. And now that he capitulated to your criminal tactics, there have been people who came after him who kept THEIR mouths shuts. The longer the cover-up continues, the harder it becomes to overcome it. The longer the cover-up continues, the more people there are who would be upset to see it exposed.

It’s been 40 years. So we have gotten ourselves into quite the pickle. But it’s not as if this is going to get easier by having the cover-up extended to 41 years. If each of us had insisted on our right to post honestly going back to the first day, things would have gone better for every single person affected by these matters. The answer is not to throw your hands up in the air and go along with the cover-up. The answer is to insist on your right to post honestly, as we all should have been doing all along.

Do you see?

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:

There are many websites that tell us how people became millionaires. Here is just one example:

https://esimoney.com/category/millionaires/

Further, there are books, like “The Millionaire Next Door” that also tell us about how people became millionaires.

Consistently, we see that these people are either into real estate, business owners and/or buy and hold investors. We never see a single VII investor. Why, then, would anyone follow your investment scheme.

There was a day when you could have said “not one person has ever become a millionaire by selling computers or smart phones” because those things didn’t exist. If at that time we gave the manufacturers of typewriters the power to destroy any company that tried to manufacture a computer, we would not have computers or cell phones today. We achieve huge advances as a society step by step. You cannot see the final amazing steps when the first tentative steps are achieved. You have no idea how much richer we all would be today if we had been permitting honest work to be done in the investment advice field going back to 1981 because you are too afraid to test the idea.

I say that we need to test the idea. I believe that Shiller’s Nobel-prize-winning research is legitimate research. After we have as a society made the transition from Buy-and-Hold to Valuation-Informed Indexing, I am willing to bet that there will not be one person who will vote for going back to the Buy-and-Hold years. That includes you Goons. I believe that you Goons will be glad that we finally elected to move forward after we have done so. We’ll see.

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:

When nothing has changed for you, why wouldn’t you consider the fact that you have been wrong all this time.  While some people might just be looking to make fun of you, most others are just looking at the facts and trying to point them out to you.

Because the Greaney retirement study is available on the internet and I can pull it up at any time and take a look and I am no more able to find a valuation adjustment today than I was 19 years ago. If there really is no valuation adjustment in that study, then I was right in what I said in my famous post from the morning of May 13, 2002.

And, if I was right, then it is very scary that we are 19 years down the road and the study has not been corrected to this day. That’s the number one public policy issue before our nation today. We all should be talking about that. We all have to invest to finance our retirement. So we all need access to honest and accurate and research-based investment advice.

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 guess you are a victim, Rob.  The entire world has conspired against you.

We are all victims in some ways, Anonymous. Just please keep in mind that we are all blessed in many ways as well.

Are the Buy-and-Holders not victims? They are responsible for many big advances in our understanding of how stock investing works. They got the market timing thing wrong. Not because they are dumb or evil. They got it wrong because they are imperfect humans. And the rest of us did not serve them well. Had we insisted that honest posting be permitted, the Buy-and-Holders would have learned over time and they would be much farther along in their understanding today.

I think we need to stop worrying about who is a victim and who isn’t and focus our energies on advancing in our understanding over time.

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:

“My $500 million settlement payment will put me way ahead of the game financially”

And how much of that $500 million have you collected?

We offer huge financial rewards for those who push the pure Get Rich Quick/Buy-and-Hold strategy and death threats and career destruction for those who promote the first true research-based approach (Valuation-Informed Indexing). That’s why we have a CAPE value in the mid-30s today.

We need to flip that. There are huge amounts of money to be made offering honest, accurate, research-based investment advice., But most people think it is not worth what you Goons put them through. When we put you Goons in prison cells, that will make it 100 percent clear to everyone who works in this field that it is now safe to post honestly. And, when we provide huge financial rewards to those who do so, that will seal the deal.

I wouldn’t be in line for a $500 million settlement payment had there never been any criminal behavior. Had there been no criminal behavior, there would be lots of people saying what I am saying. There would still be value to what I said. But not nearly the same value. Much of the value of my stuff comes from the fact that no one else is saying it and we need to establish a precedent in which someone does honest work in this field and gets rewarded handsomely for it. That changes everything.

Or so Rob Bennett sincerely believes, you know?

It is will be interesting to see how things play out.

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 support?  No one is commenting here.  Many people would dispute your interpretation of comments at the Motley Fool and other boards, but at this point, that was so long ago, it really is no longer relevant.  What support, if any, have you had in the last 5 years?

There’s 40 years of peer-reviewed research showing that valuations affect long-term returns. The author of that research was awarded a Nobel prize in recognition of the huge advance he achieved. That research was based on 150 years of stock-return data. That’s a mountain of support.

The other side of the story is that there is not one iota of evidence that market timing is not always required. Wade Pfau spent 16 months trying to find something and he came up empty-handed. The peer-reviewed research that I co-authored with him is so powerful that you Goons threatened to get him fired from his job if he continued doing honest work. Your own behavior shows how powerful our research is.

It’s a rare case in which 100 percent of the evidence supports one side of a controversy and 0 percent supports the other. But that’s where things stand. There is no intellectual support for Buy-and-Hold. What there is is a mountain of INSTITUTIONAL support. Buy-and-Hold was developed at a time when Shiller had not yet published his Nobel-prize-winning research. So the Buy-and-Holders got the market timing thing wrong. Now there are thousands of wealthy and powerful and well-connected people who do not want the word getting out about the mistake they made and about the ocean of misery that it has caused millions of people.

I don’t want to be on the side of the ocean of misery. I don’t believe that the Buy-and-Holders want to be there either. You see them drop hints about the realities all the time. But few are willing to give up their high-paying careers just to be able to do honest work. I believe that we are going to see some put their necks on the line after the next crash. Then we can all begin living better lives from that day forward.

Having 100 percent of the evidence supporting me is enough for me, Anonymous. I wish there had been no criminal acts. I wish there has been no abusive posts. But we don’t reside in heaven. This is Planet Earth. Sometimes things get a wee bit off track down here in the Valley of Tears. I am going to continue to say that I do not believe that the retirement study posted at John Greaney’s web site contains a valuation adjustment and wait to see how things play out after the crash. The big benefit of playing it that way is that doing so permits me to sleep at night.

You have continued posting abusively for the past five years. That’s strong evidence that even you Goons don’t truly believe that the Greaney study contains a valuation adjustment. If you believed that it did, you never would have put forward a single abusive comment.

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:

The nation won’t survive if Rob Bennett is not allowed to post what he wants on other people’s websites?  Really?

Yes, really.

It’s not my name that is important. It’s knowing how stock investing works that is important. That’s very, very, very important. How the stock market works affects how the entire economic system works. So it’s important to get that one right. If we were all thinking clearly, we would all want to get it right. But we are in this situation where some academics came up with some ideas that millions bought into and only later did we learn that those ideas were in error. So we have very strong opposition to the idea of permitting the learning process that we would need to get to to develop a better understanding. We need as a society to overcome that opposition or we could suffer extremely serious consequences.

If you have watched the movie “The Grapes of Wrath,” you have an idea of what we might be looking at. The wonderful news is that, now that was have access to Shiller’s Nobel-prize-winning research, great depressions are optional. We now know what we need to know to avoid them. But knowing intellectually how to avoid them doesn’t do us any good if we don’t spread the word by opening the internet up to honest posting. It all comes down to that. We can have very good results in the future or we can have very bad results in the future, depending on how we handle that one.

My vote is that we open every site on the internet to honest posting re the last 40 years of peer-reviewed research.

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:

Since we are in a housing bubble, why don’t you sell your house?  The price might crash on your house.

Selling an entire house is a more extreme step than reducing one’s stock allocation a bit. I have always advised AGAINST extreme actions. What I have said is that investors should seek to maintain the same risk profile at all times, which REQUIRES market timing.

The Buy-and-Holders take the most extreme position imaginable — that discussions of the last 40 years of peer-reviewed research must be prohibited. If you permitted honest posting, you would eventually be won over, Anonymous. We probably would not agree on every single point. It wouldn’t be reasonable to expect that. But it is my belief that we would find ourselves much more in agreement than in disagreement.

Shiller did not hurt us when he discovered that a pure Get Rich Quick/Buy-and-Hold strategy can never work for even a single long-term investor. He helped us. There was a time when the Buy-and-Holders were in favor of the idea of using peer-reviewed research as a guide. I think they were right the first time. We learn new things over time. That’s a plus. I believe that learning should be permitted in the investment advice field to the same extent that it is permitted in every other field. I see it as a win/win/win/win/win.

My best wishes to you.

Rob