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 is the results/outcomes. It tells us all we need to know. If you had superior outcomes, people would follow what you say. But your outcomes and predictions failed.

The peer-reviewed research that I co-authored with Wade Pfau showed outcomes for those following Valuation-Informed Indexing strategies vs. those following Buy-and-Hold strategies going back to 1870 and the Valuation-Informed Indexing strategies were shown to be far superior over and over and over again by every measure that Wade employed to look at the question.

We don’t have outcomes data for today because the irrational exuberance that is keeping market prices up has not yet disappeared. Subtract for the effect of irrational exuberance, as the last 39 years of peer-reviewed research shows you must, and you get very different answers from what you get if you count Get Rich Quick gains as real. In the days following the next price crash, the Get Rich Quick/Buy-and-Hold/Irrational Exuberance gains will have disappeared. People will be better able to assess then whether going pure Get Rich Quick/Buy-and-Hold proved to be a good thing.

I voted for letting people hear both sides of the story on the morning of May 13, 2002. I still vote that way. But I only get one vote. There’s a lot of money to be made pushing a pure Get Rich Quick approach and that money has been able to drown out the voices of thousands of people who have expressed a desire that honest posting be permitted. I believe that that will change in the days following the next price crash, when we will all be able to see up close and personal where the Get Rich Quick/Buy-and-Hold/No Market Timing stuff always takes us. We’ll see.

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

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:

This is about investing, not journalism. We are investing for our retirements. If your market timing scheme worked, you would have 10’s of millions as you claim to do better than the market.

People are not coming to investment forums to learn about journalism.

The tens of millions stuff is just crazy talk. The peer-reviewed research that I co-authored with Wade Pfau shows that an investor who makes the switch from Buy-and-Hold to Valuation-Informed Indexing will thereby reduce his risk by nearly 70 percent while also permitting himself to retire earlier. There is nothing in there about tens of millions. That is pure Goon nonsense.

People come to investment forums to learn about investing. But people need good journalism to keep investment forums clean. There is always going to be a huge inventive for people who work in this field to favor Get Rich Quick/Buy-and-Hold strategies. Those are the short-term money makers. But people need to be able to hear both sides of the story for knowledge to advance over time. That’s where good journalism comes in.

People don’t go to the grocery store to hear about FDA regulations. They go to the grocery store to buy meat. But the quality of the meat they can buy there is greatly influenced by the presence of FDA regulations. Without those regulations, each meat producer would feel strong temptations to offer a poisoned product. With their competitors all doing it, they really wouldn’t have an choice, But those regulations impose penalties on those who offer poisoned products and thereby make it possible for people in that field to behave ethically. Which works to the good of all of us.

So it is in the investment advice field. There are LOTS of people in this field who would LOVE to feel free to do honest work. But look at what the Buy-and-Holders do to those of us who step out of line and give it a try. We are destroyed. I believe that the money-making idea of offering poisoned investment strategies (strategies that do not call for market timing!) will come to an end in the days following the next price crash, when good journalists will be able to tell people where most of their retirement money went. And, from that day forward, we will all (including our Wall Street Con Men friends) be able to live better lives.

Good journalism matters. Good journalism is important. Good journalist adds to our lives. We may not always see it. Sometimes it is working in the background. But when we stop enforcing the laws that permit good journalism to be practiced, we all pay a price. I believe that we all are going to see up close and personal how that works in the days following the next price crash.

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:

Wade prefers that you do not speak about him any more. You have caused him too much harm already.

It’s the 39-year cover-up that has caused Wade (and many thousands of others) harm, not me. Bring the cover-up to an end, as I have been proposing relentlessly since the morning of May 13, 2002, and we are all free to say what we believe. What possible problem could there be for anyone at that point?

We cannot have a functioning society if we do not provide people with some access to honest and informed reports re the peer-reviewed research in this field, Anonymous. We just cannot. The situation that we are in today is not a viable long-term situation. We all need to pull together and put on our thinking caps and come up with some way to bring things to a better place.

Wade LOVED working with me on Valuation-Informed Indexing. Loved it, loved it, loved it. And the work we were doing would have benefited millions of people if only we could have shared it with those millions of people. Wade doesn’t mind doing amazing work that helps people. He just doesn’t want to see his career destroyed by the Buy-and-Holders as his penalty for doing it. So we all need to pull together and take action to bring the cover-up to end.

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:

You continuously comment on your “ work” and that you deserve to be paid $500 million for your work. Yet another example that you are not just reporting.

The work that I am referring to is journalism work. I don’t do investment advice work. I do journalism work. I bring things to light. I explain things to people. I expose crimes. Those are journalistic endeavors.

I haven’t been paid a penny for my work for over 18 years now. That is an exceedingly odd reality. Why have I been willing to stick at this so long without receiving compensation for my efforts? Because I see that the need for the work that I do is so great here. We don’t need peer-reviewed research showing that valuations affect long-term returns. We have had that for 39 years. We have thousands of people who would love to be telling people about the implications of Shiller’s amazing research and who are not doing so because they are afraid of the punishments that they would face for exposing the 39-year cover-up. We need to unleash those people. More amazing research is not going to get the job done. There’s only one thing that can get the job done — EXPOSURE of the cover-up. That’s journalism work. That’s what I do.

There will be thousands of people who will come after me who will do amazing work on the investing advice side and who will be compensated in the hundreds of thousands or in some cases perhaps in the millions for doing so. Good for them. But those people will not be doing what I am doing — exposing the cover-up so that all those people can feel free to do the good work that they want to do. It is the cover-up that has been holding back all that amazing work for 39 years now and it is journalism work to expose that cover-up. It is because exposure of the cover-up is of such huge importance that the work that I have done is worth well in exceed of $500 million. Exposure of the cover-up has to come first. It is exposure of the cover-up that permits all the amazing stuff to take place.

After the cover-up has been exposed and we have thousands of people writing about this stuff at every site on the internet, I intend to drop out of the discussions and permit people with more knowledge and experience than me to take over building up the Valuation-Informed Indexing concept. I will probably return to writing about effective saving strategies. Or I may do some work on career-building issues. I would like to write a third book called “The Self-Directed Life: When to Risk All You Have to WIn What You Might Love More.” I am not a guy naturally drawn to the examination of investing issues. I do the investing stuff because I found out about the cover-up (to my great shock and dismay) and I couldn’t see how someone who loves his country would not do everything in his power to help his country out when it found itself in such circumstances.

Does that help?

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:

Every article? Every text book? How can anyone take you seriously.

How many science textbooks do you think had to be rewritten when it was discovered that the earth revolves around the sun rather than the other way around?

Humankind learns new things over time. That’s not a bad thing, it’s a good thing. But the people whose careers are tied to the old understanding sometimes PERCEIVE it as a bad thing. It is the job of the society as a whole to help them understand that progress is a plus and must be permitted.

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 had plenty of time to post and you did so profusely. It is your behavior the led to your banning.

The behavior that you are talking about is that I said that the Greaney study lacks a valuation adjustment. That caused people to lose confidence in the Greaney study and Greaney does not want that. Greaney wants people to maintain confidence in the study and, to achieve that goal, he needs to have me banned everywhere. I want people to appreciate how dangerous the study is. So we are working at cross purposes.

The bottom line is that Buy-and-Hold cannot work if Shiller’s research is legitimate. The Buy-and-Holders act as if Shiller does not exist. I do not, I say that he exists and I say that it is perfectly appropriate for me and everyone else who cares to to discuss the implications of his research.

Shiller’s reseach and Buy-and-Hold cannot co-exist. If valuations affect long-term returns, then the idea that market timing is not required is crazy talk. The Buy-and-Holders recognize the threat and so they insist that discussion of the implications of Shiller’s research be banned. I think that a ban on honest posting is the wrong way to go, I advocate open discussion of the peer-reviewed research so that we can all over time come to a better understanding of the realities.

Any minority opinion can get banned if site administrators decide on who gets banned by taking a vote. Valuation-Informed Indexers are outnumbered by Buy-and-Holders by 10 to 1. But I say that the published rules of the sites and the statutes of the United States should determine who gets banned, not a popularity poll. It is Greaney and the others who have participated in criminal acts who should be banned, not those of us who have properly pointed out that his retirement study lacks a valuation adjustment.

An invalid retirement study that tells people what they want to hear is still an invalid retirement study. Buy-and-Hold is popular because it tells people what they want to hear (that the numbers on their portfolio statement are legitimate), not because there is any good reason today to believe that the market is efficient (as many believed was the case in the days before Shiller published his Nobel-prize-winning 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:

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” – Upton Sinclair

That’s the story of the investment advice field over the past 39 years, Evidence. We now know what works and we should all be enjoying the benefits of finally knowing what works. But there were years when we didn’t know what works and we built an entire industry telling the story as we understood it then and it is terrifying to think of tearing down that industry and starting over.

I believe that eventually we are going to see that we have no choice but to start over. If only Shiller had published his research before Buy-and-Hold came along, I don’t think that there would be a single dissenter to Valuation-Informed Indexing today. It’s not what we don’t know that is killing us. It’s what we once thought we knew for certain that turned out to just not be 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:

Some consider your posting abusive, so they ban you.

You ban posts that are not abusive and I have never seen a single person that has posted a death threat.

It comes down to you wanting to post what you want, whenever and wherever you want, but you do not allow the same on your website.

When research was published showing that smoking causes cancer, the tobacco companies considered that abusive and did everything in their power to stop people from learning about it. They in essence banned discussion of the new research.

As a nation we overcame that b.s. in time. I believe that we will see the same happen in the investing realm. When that happens, I will be able to point to thousands and thousands and thousands of posts in my file showing that I had been advocating that honest posting be permitted going back to the morning of May 13, 2002. I have done everything that a person could possibly do.

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:

Shiller, Pfau, Bernstein, Ferri, Swedroe, Burns………they all would have to be in on this conspiracy. When Jack Bogle was alive, he would have to have been playing a big role in this conspiracy as well……………or Rob Bennett is making all this up. What is more believable?

Brett Arends wrote an article titled “The Market Timing Myth” in the Wall Street Journal on October 14, 2010. It stated that: “For years the investment industry has tried to scare clients into staying fully invested in the stock market at all times, no matter how high stocks go. It’s hooey. They’re leaving out more than half the story. Anyone who followed the numbers would have avoided the disaster of the 1929 crash, the 1970s or the past lost decade on Wall Street…. I wonder how many stayed fully invested because their brokers warned them ‘you can’t time the market’.”

Everybody in this field reads the Wall Street Journal. So everybody in this field is in on it. Everyone knows that Buy-and-Hold is “hooey” and that the idea that market timing is not required is a “myth.” People don’t want to see their high-paying careers come to an end. So they keep their mouths shut. I think that we all should be speaking up. I think that we should be pointing out that the emperor is wearing no clothes. That’s my contribution, to state that plainly.

Please understand that all of the people who are in on it rationalize their behavior. They tell themselves “oh, it will be okay.” I think it is going to be harder to say that in the days following the next price crash. We’ll see.

Everyone is in on it to one degree or another. Everyone over the age of seven understands that it is a logical impossibility that there could ever be an asset that is worth buying at any possible price. That is a perfectly ABSURD claim.

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:

How odd that you can’t find anyone that can provide proof or verify your claims about death threats, job threats and felonies. Also add that people would avoid your timing scheme even though it would make them money. Also odd that Wade wouldn’t list you as an author. Very odd that every investment expert is too scared to say what you say. It is just one big vast conspiracy.

Was the Madoff fund a conspiracy?

Is alcoholism a conspiracy?

Is smoking a conspiracy?

Was racism a conspiracy?

Humans have weaknesses. There are some circumstances in which money can be made exploiting human weaknesses. When there is a lot of money to be made going in that direction, there is always going to be a widespread temptation to do that.

The Buy-and-Holders made a lot of valuable contributions. I respect them for that and I feel gratitude to them for that. But I do not believe that humankind knew everything that there ever would be to know about the subject of stock investing in the year 1980. Shiller added something of great value and we should be exploring his contributions at every discussion board and blog on the internet.

Shiller’s advance was so great that it threatens people who developed their reputations promoting the model that he discredited, So, yes, there is a lot of resistance to exploration of the new model. If we all were thinking clearly, there would not be one objection to the idea of permitting honest posting everywhere. But this is a subject that pushes people’s buttons. Partly because their common sense tells them that there must be some price at which stocks are not worth buying. It works that way with everything else that can be bought or sold in this world.

I don’t think that the answer is to keep quiet about what Shiller did. I think the answer is for those of us who believe that Shiller’s Nobel-prize-winning research is legitimate research to speak up. In a respectful and charitable way. But also in a firm and non-apologetic way.

I naturally wish you all good things.

Rob