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

“Actually, I cannot recall anyone other than me ever saying things quite that way. “

That should be a red flag for you. There are many well educated and well informed people out there that can all do critical analysis. Further, they are actual “numbers” people. When you find yourself standing alone for two decades, at some point you have to self reflect and stop drinking your own Kool-Aid.

I agree with the point that you are making. It is absurd that I am the one making many of the claims that I am making. The Trinity study had been around since the mid-1990s. So there should have been lots of people pointing out the error in that study and in all the studies that followed from it (including the Greaney study) long before I came on the scene. It doesn’t take an I.Q. of 140 to check whether a retirement study contains a valuation adjustment or not. So, yes, in ordinary circumstances, the fact that I am the one making many of these claims should be a huge red flag. And I am certain that many take it as that and that that is why I have not been able to get my message out to millions of people.

These are not ordinary circumstances. That’s the thing. The idea that market timing does not work is rooted in a belief in the Efficient Market Theory, which in turn is rooted in a belief that investors are 100 percent rational. Shiller showed in 1981 that they are not. So the Efficient Market Theory has been discredited and the Trinity study along with it. Take those things out of the picture and there never would have been any conflicts whatsoever. We all would have been enjoying a great learning experience going back to the morning of May 13, 2002.

Why are there people who still talk about the Efficient Market Theory as if it were a real thing? There is no intellectual reason for doing so. There is an INSTITUTIONAL reason for doing so. During the time when it appeared that the Efficient Market Theory was a real thing, thousands and thousands of people built careers promoting Buy-and-Hold as if it were a legitimate investment strategy. Those people don’t want to give up their high-paying careers and they don’t want to give up their reputation as “experts.” So there is huge institutional resistance to the idea of people being permitted to post honestly re these matters. Valuation-Informed Indexers must be destroyed. That’s why Wade Pfau was threatened when he published research showing that in fact market timing always works and indeed is the key to long-term investing success.

The Buy-and-Holders would all be better off making the shift to Valuation-Informed Indexing. All of the people who promoted Buy-and-Hold strategies would love to be able to get back to doing good and honest work that helps people, which is what they intended to do when they entered this field, But they cannot do that. Their careers will be destroyed if they do. They have families to feed. So they pretend that they don’t understand what is going on. They fail to speak up about the death threat and the acts of extortion. And millions of people are misled into believing that there is some sort of mystical, magical research somewhere showing that market timing is not always 100 percent required and that Buy-and-Hold is a sound strategy.

There is not one person in the world who benefits from this massive cover-up. Opening every site on the internet to honest posting re the last 40 years of peer-reviewed research would be a boon to us all. But who the heck is going to stick his neck out and get the ball rolling, given the penalties that apply today for those who do so? That’s the job for a journalist. Which is what I am. So I do what I can.

People should be skeptical. This is a crazy story. Skepticism is justified. But there is an easy way for anyone who wants to get to the bottom of things to find out for himself or herself whether there really is funny business going on in this field, as I maintain. Pull up the Greaney study and see if you can find a valuation adjustment in it. If it is lacking one, as I have maintained since the morning of May 13, 2002, then this 40-year cover-up has put millions of retirements at grave risk of failing. That’s a matter of huge public policy significance.

We all should be working to overcome you Goons and to open every site on the internet to honest posting. I believe that we will be in the days following the next price crash, when it will be crystal clear to everyone how dangerous it is to persuade millions of stock investors that market timing (price discipline!) is not 100 percent required for every stock investor on the planet. The idea that it might not be is the worst mistake ever made in the history of personal finance and we need to get it corrected. Opening every site on the internet to honest posting re the last 40 years of peer-reviewed research in this field is the first step.

My sincere take.

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:

Name just one person that agrees with you about Wade being threatened and show us the link.

I’ve spoken to many people about what happened to Wade Pfau. Everyone who I told the story to found it shocking. No one has ever questioned whether I was telling the truth.

I sent e-mails to 30,000 academic researchers telling them what happened to Wade. Several wrote back that this was below any acceptable ethical standard.

There’s a difference between knowing that something is wrong and wanting to get involved to fix it. The price for getting involved re this matter is very high. Shiller published his research in 1981. So the cover-up has been going on for 40 years. There are a lot of powerful and wealthy people who do not want the general public to learn what has been going on.

But what happens after the next price crash? If Shiller is right, many trillions of dollars of irrational exuberance will disappear into thin air. People will not be able to spend when they have lost that much money. Hundreds of thousands of businesses will go under. Millions of people will be thrown out of work. Political frictions will worsen. Will there be a few brave and good people who will work up the courage to speak out then? I think there will be.

We are a good people, Anonymous. We are not perfect or we would have got to work rewriting the textbooks soon after Shiller published his research. But we are basically good. That’s why we have laws against extortion, That’s why we have laws against threats of physical violence. We will as a society do the right thing in the end.

Or so this Rob Bennett fellow believes, in any event. There’s always that one-in-a-hundred possibility that I am wrong, We will just have to wait to see how things play out to find out for sure.

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:

“Because, if someone says that one of the things that I say is right, they know that they will be led by logic to saying that all of the things that I say are right. “

And to the opposite, when we see you say several things that are clearly wrong, then we look at everything you say with suspect and doubt.

Of course.

But there has never been one time in 19 years in which you have shown that I got something wrong. The only point you make is “well, other people don’t say these things.” That’s so. But you never consider the insane level of hostility you show when people do say these things (and there have been many, many occasions in which they have). The hostility silences people. You were hostile from the moment that I pointed out that the Greaney retirement study lacks a valuation adjustment. Insanely hostile. And entirely without cause. I have been proven 100 percent correct in my claim that that Greaney retirement study lacks a valuation adjustment. But it has not been corrected to this day. And the hostility has continued. If anything, it has increased. So we don’t have people saying it all the time. People are afraid to do so. But on every occasion on which someone has calmly looked at the study to determine whether or not it contains a valuation adjustment, the person has discovered that I was right all along on a very important point.

There has never been any intellectual debate. Every piece of evidence that we have looked at has lent support to the claim that market timing is always required. But, no, you don’t often hear people say that. The problem is not that it is not true or that the truth is not a terribly important one. The problem is that we have thousands of people who have built careers around the idea that market timing is not required or might not even always work. So there is huge institutional pressure to keep Shiller’s Nobel-prize-winning findings covered up.

The other side of the story is that, if Shiller is right that more than half of the value of today’s market is just irrational exuberance with no lasting economic substance, we are as a society going to get killed in the next price crash. We are going to see millions of retirements fail and hundreds of thousands of businesses go under and millions of people thrown out of work and a big increase in political frictions. And all of this will have been 100 percent unavoidable. All that we needed to do was to apply the same laws that apply in every field of human endeavor other than the investment advice field in the investment advice field as well and none of this bad stuff would have taken place. Permitting honest posting re the last 40 years of peer-reviewed research in this field is good stuff piled on top of good stuff piles on top of good stuff.

The “idea” that there might be some mystical, magical alternate universe in which market timing (price discipline!) is not always required for all investors is the worst mistake ever made in the history of personal finance. The amazing thing is that even our Buy-and-Hold friends would very, very, very much like to be released from the trap in which they find themselves so that they could direct their human energies to doing good for people rather than destroying their lives. But how do we get there? Tell the truth today and you make the Buy-and-Holders feel very bad about the 40-year cover-up. The only way out of the trap is coming clean and the cover-up has already gone on so long that coming clean is going to hurt some people terribly.

My answer is to do everything we can to make the Buy-and-Holders feel better about the mistake they made by pointing out the dozens of powerful insights that that they developed and shared with us all while being 100 percent unwilling to continue engaging in criminal behavior to keep the cover-up going. It will be interesting to see how it all play put.

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:

You are nothing like Galileo.  We live in a world in which we have all the information that we need at our finger tips.

Having access to information and making good use of it are two different things. Smokers know that smoking causes cancer. Alcoholics know that drinking is ruining their lives. They have information coming out of their ears. What they need is to develop the emotional calm to make use of what they know.

Investors know that they are hurting themselves when they bid stock prices up to crazy levels. But they want to! Just like smokers want to smoke and alcoholics want to drink.

Shiller’s research will change the world when as a society we give ourselves permission to talk about it on every discussion board and blog on the internet. When we hear somebody say that he is thinking of failing to engage in market timing (price discipline!), we need to take him aside and show him what the research shows happens to people who travel down that dark road. If we are going to have an investment advice field, we need to permit people to do honest work in it.

Where would we be as a society if doctors were not permitted to discourage their patients from smoking because the tobacco companies felt that they could make more money if people were kept in the dark re the cancer risks? Or if there were no Alcoholics Anonymous because someone tool a survey of alcoholics and found that they possess a strong urge to continue to drink to excess? Sometimes you have to extend a hand to a struggling fellow human. I believe that we should permit honest posting re Shiller’s research.

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:

Just curious as to why you wouldn’t post links to the death threats if they actually occurred.

Because it is just a distraction to act like the death threats themselves are a big deal. The big deal is that I pointed out an error in a retirement study 19 years ago and it has not been corrected to this day.

What difference does it make if the cover-up has been achieved through the use of death threats or threats of career destruction or whatever? What matters is that the Gresney study has not been corrected to this day.

We should all be working to get all of the Buy-and-Hold retirement studies corrected. When that is done, we will all be living better lives from that point forward.

And then we should turn to the other stuff that the Buy-and-Holders got wrong — the asset allocation advice and the risk management advice and so on. The more stuff we can get corrected, the better.

My sincere take.

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:

No expert has ever agreed with you about Greaney. No expert is currently willing to even speak with you.

A good number have agreed with me. Bill Bernstein said in his book that the safe withdrawal rate is not always 4 percent, that the Buy-and-Hold studies were off by a full two percentage points at the top of the bubble. Wade Pfau said that the Greaney study is “dangerous.” John Bogle did not comment specifically on the safe withdrawal rate issue but he said that he could see how Valuation-Informed Indexing might well work out; if you support Valuation-Informed Indexing, you implicitly support the idea of taking valuations into consideration when calculating the safe withdrawal rate. The Economist magazine had an article saying that many people have lost confidence in the idea that the safe withdrawal rate is always 4 percent. Todd Tressider stated very strongly that the old studies are in error and gave me full credit for discovering the error and making the case for correction of the studies on the internet. And there have been numerous others.

You are right though that the vast majority of experts get real quiet once they see the death threats and the acts of extortion and the acts of defamation. That sort of thing scares people into silence. That’s why as a nation of people we adopted laws against the use of those sorts of tactics. We need to insist on reasonable enforcement of those laws if we want to advance in our understanding of how stock investing works. I believe that lots of people will be coming forward to do just that in the days following the next price crash. It will be interesting to see how it all plays 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:

Experts with credentials say YOU are wrong about your interpretation of Greaneys work, so you are starting with a false premise.

No one with any credentials has said that they believe that the Greaney study contains a valuation adjustment. Full truth be told, Greaney himself has not said that. Greaney ought to know what is contained in his own study.

Few have been willing to say flat-out that the Greaney study should be corrected. That’s the problem. That’s why I say that we need to open every discussion board and blog on the internet to honest posting. To get people to say that, we are going to have to do something about the death threats and the unjustified board bannings and the acts of extortion and the acts of defamation.

I believe that we will see it happen in the days following the next price crash. I sure hope so!

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 missed the part where Evidence said that you are right on the SWR issue and that John was wrong. I also missed the part where you have provided a fixed calculation. I missed the part where Wade Pfau also confirmed your work on SWRs. Perhaps you could provide links to all of this. Afterall, you said you believe in honest posting. So it is time to prove it.

Evidence didn’t say that Greaney is wrong. But he did acknowledge that Greaney’s study lacks a valuation adjustment. That’s as close as you can get to being honest about this stuff without actually getting there.

That’s the distance that we have been trying to travel for 18 years. We have the research showing that a valuation adjustment is required. But we don’t want to hurt the feelings of the Buy-and-Holders by asking them to correct their studies. So we have put millions of retirements at risk.

I believe that, once we see those retirements fail, we will work up the courage to take that final step. But we will have to wait a bit to find out for sure.

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 don’t think that I am wasting my time.”

If a buy and holder was wrong for 24 years, you would say that he/she wasted their time. Why do you hold yourself and VII to a different standard?

First of all, it’s not 24 years. Shiller said in 1996 that we should expect to see a price crash by 2006. We haven’t yet seen one that remained in place for a good length of time. So you could say that he was off by 14 years. But not 24 years. And there are explanations for why he was off by 14 years. I have written several articles on that topic. Others who believe that valuations matter have done the same. It is up to each investor to consider the points made in the articles and decide for himself or herself whether they are persuasive or not, But you can’t just say that the crash is now 14 years overdue, so forget about everything that Shiller showed in his research.

According to the research, the Buy-and-Holders have wasted their time for 150 years. Wade Pfau examined all the literature in this field and never was able to identify one iota of research indicating that long-term market timing might not work. Even there, I don’t conclude that we should ban discussion of Buy-and-Hold. The Buy-and-Holders may see something that Wade Pfau missed, so I want to hear what they have to say. But I do find it a very impressive reality that a man who makes his living doing research in this field could not find one iota of evidence supporting the core Buy-and-Hold claim that market timing is not required, That’s a highly counter-intuitive claim. In every other market, price discipline is absolutely critical and long-term market timing is the means through which price discipline is practiced in the stock market. And, if it turns out that the Buy-and-Holders are wrong and that Wade Pfau and Robert Shiller and Rob Bennett (and lots of others) are right, and the claim that market timing is not required (or that it might not work!) is going to go down in history as a very, very damaging claim, then the Buy-and-Holders should have been very careful about making that claim. I don’t think they were at all careful. They based the claim on a finding that short-term timing doesn’t work. They never even looked into long-term timing before advancing the claim. It was that failure to exercise some caution before making that highly counter-intuitive claim that caused all the trouble we have seen in the years since (including the 2008 economic crisis).

We will not know whether the Valuation-Informed Indexers were wrong about anything until we see the end of this bull/bear cycle. That will tell the tale. We have witnessed the Get Rich Quick part of the Buy-and-Hold experience. We have not yet seen the human devastation that in the past has always followed. I believe that it is going to follow again this time. But I don’t have a crystal ball, We are going to have to wait to see how things play out to find out for sure. But I sure am not going to say that I approve of the Ban on Honest Posting. If things turn out as they always have in the past, you Goons will be going to prison. Huh? What the f? How is that a good thing? Permit honest posting and you take that possibility off the table. The laws of our nation permit people to have different views on these sorts of questions. Permit people to express different views and permit other people to hear those different views and everything works. If Buy-and-Hold really is best, that will be revealed. If it is Valuation-Informed Indexing that is best, that will be revealed. But there will be no prison sentences or any of the other awful stuff if you just follow U.S. law (no death threats, no extortion, etc.).

That’s my sincere take, Anonymous. I think it is an important reality that the price crash has been deferred for 14 years now. That is a very strange reality and we all need to come to terms with it. I would never make any effort to hide that reality from anyone. If someone said that, because of that reality, he was going to go with Buy-and-Hold, I would say that I understood that choice. I have not taken that path myself. I see too much evidence going the other way to take that path. But I don’t know everything and neither does any of the other Valuation-Informed Indexers. Despite our best efforts to get it right, it is always possible that we got it wrong. So each and every investor needs to look at the evidence on both sides and make his or her choice as to which model to follow,

The thing that I feel strongly about is that the evidence for both sides should be presented at every site on the internet. There should not be a ban on honest posting at a single site. We cannot make sound and informed choices unless we hear both sides. And today we are not hearing both sides. The Buy-and-Holders have been suppressing discussion of the far-reaching implications of Shiller’s Nobel-prize-winning research for a long time and that needs to come to a full and complete stop by the close of business today.

My sincere take.

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:

Why do we need to ask questions of Shiller? We have read what he has said. He clearly states to not time the market using CAPE and he was right. Face it, he does not agree with you and you don’t like it. Wade Pfau also disagreed with you and look at what you did to him. It is no wonder no one wants to talk to you. You don’t listen.

I think we should be discussing Shiller’s Nobel-prize-winning research at every discussion board and blog on the internet, without a single exception. We need to figure this stock investing thing out. In every other market, price discipline is absolutely essential. There was a thought for some time that the stock market was the sole exception. In the stock market, price discipline is achieved through market timing and there was research published showing that one form of market timing, short-term timing, does not work. So the idea became popular the no form of market timing is required (or that timing might not even work!). Shiller was awarded the Nobel prize for showing that this is not so, that the stock market is like every other market that ever existed, that price discipline is 100 percent required, that market timing always works.

The problem is the 39-year cover-up. Now that Shiller’s research findings have been covered up for 39 years, it has become very hard for us as a society to expose the error made by the Buy-and-Holders. If we just learned today that market timing always works and is always required, we would all be jumping up and down over our good fortune at finally coming to understand how stock investing works in the real world. But the Buy-and-Holders have been saying the opposite for 39 years now. It makes them look very, very, very bad for the people to learn what the research says. Our Wall Street Con Men friends are powerful and wealthy and well-connected people. So they have the ability to intimidate those who would like to speak up into silence. Not good.

I think this needs to come out. I think that our Wall Street Con Men friends will feel a lot better about themselves after we have opened the entire internet to honest posting. Our Wall Street Con Men friends are human beings first. They want to see the work they do help people. They want to gain the freedom to do honest work again and they want to see everyone else gain that freedom. But they are afraid of you Goons and of the gooniness that resides within all the rest of us that evidences itself whenever we are exposed to evidence that the entire Buy-and-Hold thing is a scam. No one likes to see the lives of their loved ones threatened. No one likes to see their career threatened. We need as a society to stand up for those seeking to post honestly. That’s the entire deal. Then we will all be free to learn what we need to learn and to live better and richer lives from that point forward.

Wade Pfau devoted 16 months of his life trying to find an iota of peer-reviewed research showing that long-term market timing might not work. He came up empty-handed. He declared: “Yes, Virgina, Valuation-Informed Indexing works!” He should be permitted to say what he believes about how stock investing works to every investor on the planet without having to fear that his career will be destroyed by Buy-and-Holders if he does so. So should ever other academic researcher. People make mistakes. The Buy-and-Holders made a mistake when they concluded that market timing is not always 100 percent required. We need to get that mistake corrected. The safety of all of our retirement accounts depends on it.

My sincere take.

And my best and warmest wishes to you and yours.

Rob