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

Are your financial statements full of lies?

I don’t hold any stocks. So, no.

Stocks are different than other asset classes, Anonymous. Stocks are the only asset class that permits the owners of that asset class to vote themselves huge raises. You can’t do that with Certificates of Deposit. The owners of CDs carry the same Get Rich Quick urge within them that the owners of stocks carry within them. But CD owners can’t do anything to temporarily push the value of their asset class up to crazy and unsustainable levels. They would do it if they could. But the opportunity just isn’t there. The certificate says what the interest rate is that is paid and that’s the end of it.

You need to think through a bit who it is that sets the price of stocks. We say it is “the market.” Fine, but who comprises this “market.” The market is the people who own stocks! Not exactly an unbiased group, is it? Asking the owners of stocks to set the price of stocks is like asking Trump supporters who they think won the debate held last Monday. Gee, I wonder what they are going to say?

You’ve probably heard that the Trump people back up their claim that Trump won the debate by citing internet polls held at places like the Drudge Report. Do you find those claims convincing? I do not. Those polls are loony tunes. To get an accurate read of who won the debate, you need to use a scientific methodology.

It’s not enough to ask just Trump supporters and it is not even enough to ask both Trump and Clinton supporters. Most Clinton supporters are going to say that Clinton won regardless of what actually happened just as most Trump supporters are going to say that Trump won regardless of what actually happened. To obtain an accurate read, you need to be sure to survey some of the people in the middle, the people who are open to being persuaded either way.

It of course works the same way with stocks. My bias is different than yours. I am biased in favor of Treasury Inflation-Protected Securities (TIPS) in the same way that you are biased in favor of stocks because that is the asset class in which most of my money is invested. The difference is that investing experts don’t stand to make money by persuading people to buy TIPS while there is a ton of money to be made persuading people to buy stocks. So you don’t see any of these complicated, phony baloney arguments re how TIPS are always the best asset class no matter what. There’s not a mountain of money to be made telling lies about TIPS, so no one bothers telling such lies.

LOTS of people go to the trouble to tell lies about stocks. People become millionaires telling lies about stocks. That’s the Buy-and-Hold Story in a nutshell. The Wall Street Con Men are not our friends, they are people out to turn a quick buck and people who are able to rationalize the lies they need to tell to achieve “success” in this field.

It all changes once we open the internet to honest posting re safe withdrawal rates and scores of other critically important investment-related topics. The people who work in this field are like the people who work in all other fields. They WANT to be able to do honest work; nothing could be more clear. But, once they see that their careers will be destroyed if they dare to “cross” the Buy-and-Holders by doing so, they get real quiet real fast about what we have learned from the last 35 years of peer-reviewed research in this field. Once this story gets written up on the front page of the New York Times and your prison sentence is announced, people in this field are going to be running from any association with Buy-and-Hold as fast as they can run. We will then be able to put all the nasty stuff behind us.

Buy-and-Hold is rooted in an old way of understanding how stock investing works, Anonymous. We learned the realities in 1981 and the stock-selling industry had already adopted Buy-and-Hold as its model at that time and a decision was made not to rock the boat by telling people about the mistake that had been made. The rationalization no doubt was that we were unlikely ever again to see fair-value prices in any event (stock were priced at one-half fair value at the time), so why make waves? And then, once you have told lies about something, it becomes harder and harder over time to come clean. 35 years later, here we are.

We could report stock prices accurately. There is no intellectual limitation stopping us from doing so. The obstacle is the corruption and the widespread knowledge that telling the truth re how stock investing works means that people like Jack Bogle will be going to prison. People who work in this field are afraid to say that. Bogle is a powerful guy. People who work in this field don’t want to cross him. It’s not so hard to understand once you think it through a bit.

How did Roger Ailes get away with what he did for years and years? How did Bill Cosby get away with what he did for years and years.? How did all those Catholic priests get away with what they did for years and years?

To bring corruption to an end, we need to EXPOSE it. I exposed the Buy-and-Hold Con. As you never tire of pointing out, I have not been able to earn a dime in this field for 14 years running as a result. There is a price to be paid for exposing corruption this widespread. Most people in this field earn big incomes. They don’t want to pay that price. There’s the “conspiracy” that you never tire of asking about.

You could know the true value of your stock portfolio if you wanted to. It’s not hard to divide by two. You don’t want to know. You like the fantasy of believing that your portfolio is really worth double its fair value. It makes you feel smart to believe that you have done such a good job “saving” so much. So people who can rationalize exploiting your human weakness tell you the lies that you demand of people who make a claim to “expertise” (In what? Marketing?) in this field. And the beat goes on.

If you want to know the truth about stock investing, it’s there for you. It’s not hard to figure out. But you are not going to learn the truth about how stock investing works by listening to marketing experts. When you buy a car, do you believe everything that the dealer tells you about the car you are looking at? That’s what you are doing when you listen to someone like Bogle. He is in the business. He makes money when you buy stocks. He feels that it is his job to lie to you. That’s how he turns a buck. That’s how he makes a living.

A salesman is the LAST person you should turn to for advice re whether you should buy something or not. A salesman is too compromised. If you want to get anywhere, you need to listen to someone who possesses at least a tiny bit of independence.

All of these words will pass through one ear and out the other today. I get that. Perhaps you will revisit this page following the next price crash, when most of your life savings goes up in smoke. Perhaps you will be able to appreciate then who your true friends are and who your true enemies are. Whenever you find yourself opening to the message, these words will still be here. The good stuff that is housed at this site was written for your benefit as well as for the benefit of the other millions of middle-class investors who need access to some honest words re this subject.

I wish you all the best, man. Hang in there.

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:

Taking 30-35 years to build a retirement nest egg is hardly “get rich quick”.

I appreciate what you are saying and to a large extent I agree with what you are saying. The Buy-and-Holders relentlessly stress the need to focus on the long-term. They are 100 percent sincere about this and they have had a positive influence in this area. The percentage of investors who believe that it is important to focus on the long-term is much higher as a result of the work that the Buy-and-Holders have done and because of the advice that the Buy-and-Holders have given.

You can tell that there’s a “but” coming, right?

I don’t call the Buy-and-Holders “Get Rich Quickers” because I am trying to take a dig at them, Anonymous. I have spent a lot of time trying to understand why the Buy-and-Holders are so hostile to the message that Shiller conveys in his research and in his writings. Something that Shiller says bugs them on a very deep level. It is my job to figure out what that something is. I have come to the conclusion that the problem lies in a different understanding of what the term “long term” means.

The reason why the Buy-and-Holders came to the conclusion that market timing is a bad thing is that Fama did research showing that short-term timing never works. That settled the matter, in the eyes of the Buy-and-Holders. They adopted the phrase “timing never works” as a dogma and have stuck with it ever since and have been unwilling even to question the merit of the idea ever since. Shiller showed that long-term timing ALWAYS works and is ALWAYS 100 percent required. The Buy-and Holders have never even tried to dispute Shiller’s findings. They declared the idea that “timing is required” as out of bounds and therefore IGNORED Shiller’s revolutionary findings for the 35 years since he published them.

So the question of “How long is long-term?” is the key to the entire dispute.

The Buy-and-Holders really do reject the idea of looking only six months out or one year out or two years out when making investing decisions. Good for them. They are right on re that one, in my assessment.

But the Buy-and-Holders ALSO dismiss the idea of looking 10 years out or 15 years out or 20 years out or 30 years out or 60 years out. And they don’t just casually dismiss this idea. They HATE the idea of looking out more than five years (at five years out, timing really does not work — it is after five years out that timing begins to work a bit and then of course it becomes more and more critical to engage in timing (price discipline) as the time-period grows longer and longer.

“Quick” is a relative term. The Buy-and-Holders are certainly not Get Rich Quickers compared to day traders. That’s to their credit.

But the Buy-and-Holders are very much Get Rich Quickers compared to Valuation-Informed Indexers. Valuation-Informed Indexers advise investors to consider how their strategies will work over the course of an entire investing lifetime. Valuation-Informed Indexing is ALWAYS far superior to Buy-and-Hold over 60-year time-periods. There has never been a single exception in 145 years of stock market history.

So why do the Buy-and-Holders so much hate the idea of permitting investors to learn this reality? They hate it because they don’t think it is good marketing to tell investors the truth re these matters. Get Rich Quick strategies have huge marketing pull. We all have a Get Rich Quick urge within us. Those who push investing strategies rooted in Get Rich Quick thinking have a huge marketing edge over those pushing research-based strategies.

This all wouldn’t be such a big deal if the Buy-and-Holders didn’t object to others pointing out what the last 35 years of peer-reviewed research says. Many investors LOVE Buy-and-Hold. Many investors do not want to wait 10 or 15 or 20 years to see their strategies pay off. There is no reason why the Buy-and-Hold advocates shouldn’t be able to promote Buy-and-Hold to that group of investors. So long as they limit themselves to that, everyone is happy and there is no problem.

But the Buy-and-Holders want to have it both ways. They want the marketing edge that comes with pushing a Get Rich Quick approach. And they ALSO want to be able to say that there is peer-reviewed research supporting their claims. Huh? There is zero peer-reviewed research supporting the core claim that it is not necessary for investors to practice price discipline when buying stocks. That is the core Buy-and-Hold Lie. It is that particular lie that played the primary role in bringing on the economic crisis. Wade Pfau spent months checking all of the literature in this field to make 100 percent sure that there is not a single study supporting the key Buy-and-Hold Lie. There is not one. All people who love this country need to call out the Buy-and-Holders when they push this dangerous untruth.

Get Rich Quick strategies do not help investors. They help the people who sell stocks, not the people who buy them. My job is to help the people who buy stocks, not the people who sell them. So I have no choice but to call out my Buy-and-Hold friends when they tell this horrible and irresponsible lie that is today believed by so many (I believed it myself for a time).

There is a sense in which the key Buy-and-Hold Lie makes Buy-and-Hold even more dangerous than day trading. It is a limited segment of the population that finds appeal in day trading. Most middle-class people are just not interested in taking on the sort of risk involved in following such strategies. But Buy-and-Hold is presented as a respectable investing strategy. The claim is made that there is research supporting Buy-and-Hold and most investors never take the time to research the question; they assume that there must be at least some truth to the claim given that there are so many “experts” (experts in marketing!) repeating it. The trickery of the Buy-and-Holders has caused millions of people who want to be responsible in their investing choices to follow an approach with a heavy Get Rich Quick component to it.

So I think that it is fair to describe Buy-and-Hold as the purest and most dangerous Get Rich Quick strategy ever concocted by the human mind. I do not believe that it was the intent of the Buy-and-Hold pioneers to create a Get Rich Quick approach. It is important to remember that index funds were not available at the time that the Buy-and-Hold concept was being developed. So Fama had no way of knowing how important it was to check out whether long-term timing works before declaring that timing in general either does not work or is not required. Fama made a mistake, he did not engage in deliberate fraud in the early years. The same is true of Bogle.

But 35 years have passed since that mistake was revealed by the peer-reviewed research in this field. People of Fama’s stature and of Bogle’s stature obviously have a responsibility to stay on top of the peer-reviewed research before shooting their mouths off about what works in stock investing; millions of investors take what these two men say seriously and have put their financial futures at risk on a belief that these two are telling them the straight story. They are not telling the straight story when they repeat findings that were discredited 35 years ago. At the very bare minimum Fama and Bogle and all the others should be letting the millions of investors following their advice know that there is 35 years of peer-reviewed research telling a very different story than the story that they are telling.

Or so it seems to Rob Bennett, in any event.

I hope that helps a bit, old friend.

Please take good care.

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 non sequitur answer you give when you have no answer.

Try to stay on point, Rob. What gain is to be had by spending your time on political sites, Twitter, etc?

The investing advice field has become completely corrupt in the Buy-and-Hold Era, Anonymous. Lots of people know about Shiller’s research findings. Lots of people know that he was awarded the Nobel prize for this “revolutionary” (his word) advance. And lots of people in this field want to do honest work and to thereby help other people (they are just people after all — people in every field of human endeavor possess a natural desire to do honest work and to thereby help other people).

But they feel that their careers will be destroyed if they dare to “cross” the Buy-and-Holders by reporting honestly on the implications of the last 35 years of peer-reviewed research. Wade Pfau is the obvious and most clearly demonstrated example of the phenomenon. But there are of course many, many others. Rob Arnott told me about academic researchers he knows who tried to do honest research and who were taken aside and warned that their careers would be destroyed if they did so. Jack Bogle himself includes lots of honest stuff in his speeches all the time and then undermines his own message by suggesting in the last paragraph that Buy-and-Hold is just fine.

The Buy-and-Hold Crisis does not affect only people who work in the investing field. It affects all of us. It is a political issue. We have millions of people unemployed today because of the crisis. We have millions on the way to suffering failed retirements. We have people on both the left and the right losing confidence in our political process. This is serious stuff. We are going to have to find some way to get honest investing advice out to people. We are going to need to get prison sentences announced for you Goons and then to reward those doing honest and accurate work in this field with various economic benefits.

People respond to incentives. We need to provide positive incentives to people of integrity who want to work in this field and call the Buy-and-Holders out on their b.s. We can’t find people in the investing field to do it because people trying to make a living in this field are too compromised. Wade has two small children to support. That’s why he felt that he could not stand up to Bogle and his various Internet Goon Squads. We are going to need to create communities of people outside the investing realm who are willing to help out those of us trying to expose the corruption and to open up the possibility of people of integrity obtaining work in the investing field.

I haven’t finalized my plans in this area. I am still outlining an agenda. My guess is that I will get to work on this new phase early next year. I have been thinking more and more about it over the past few months.

I am debating not even going to FinCon16 in September because I may want to devote my time and energies in this new direction. I have not made a decision but I expect to do so within the next few weeks. Regardless of which way I go with the FinCon decision, I more and more expect to be moving toward directing more of my efforts at political sites and at social media sites.

Once we generate pressure from outside the investing realm for honest work to be permitted in the investing realm, I believe that we will see things begin to happen quickly in the investing field. There’s is already a great deal of pent-up desire both to provide honest investing advice and to hear honest investing advice. We have been seeing that going back to May of 2002. We need help from outside the investing field to help deal with the pervasive corruption within the field. I have tentatively concluded that that’s where I should be placing most of my efforts in days to come.

Those are my scattered and tentative thoughts re this matter at this time, in any event.

I hope that helps a bit.

Hang in there, my old friend.

Rob

Yesterday’s blog entry reported on my correspondence with Kevin, owner of the Out of Your Rut blog. Set forth below is follow-up correspondence:

Kevin:

Thanks much for your response.

I agree with most of what you say.

I obviously don’t agree with the part about backing down until the worm turns. There are three reasons. One, learning is a building block process. I learn by exploring things and talking things over. I have learned AMAZING things over the past 11 years that I would not have learned had I not been fighting the good fight (always in a fair way, I hope).

Two, one gains credibility by speaking out BEFORE the crash. I don’t want people seeing me as a sunny-day solider willing to get involved on their behalf only after they suffer devastating losses.

And, three, I just don’t have the heart to keep it zipped. Too many people are suffering. I don’t want to come across as a martyr. But I have run into lots of people who are suffering in serious ways. This includes big names in this field who very much want to be doing good and honest work and don’t feel free to do so today. That’s just too sad and too horrible.

The Goons ARE significant. And fraud IS keeping systems afloat. And powerful people DO have a vested interest in keeping it going. I don’t mean to be glib, but what else is new?

Powerful people had a vested interest in keeping slavery going once upon a time. Powerful people had a vested interest in keeping people from learning that smoking causes cancer once upon a time. Powerful people had a vested interest in covering up what was going on in the Penn State football program. All of those cover-ups were exposed because good people worked up the courage to speak up. That’s part of the JOB of a blogger., in my assessment.

The powerful people you refer to do not want to see the Second Great Depression. How the heck does that help them? Buy-and-Hold started out as something good and real. It got off track. Those people do not today possess what it takes to get it back on track. They need a little push from outside.

This is what I truly believe. I am not anti-Bogle, as the Goons assert. I am Bogle’s best friend in the world. I am helping him realize his vision, with him kicking and screaming every step of the way. The guy has done some amazingly wonderful things in his life. He has ALSO screwed up big time re the issue of valuations. Does that make him all bad? It does not. I personally do not believe in the cynical take any more than I do in the head-in-the-sand take. People are people. We are all flawed. The Buy-and-Hold Pioneers are flawed humans, not monsters and not saints.

Did you know that I learned about the errors in the Old School safe withdrawal rate studies by reading John Bogle’s book? That’s a fact. HE started all this. He wouldn’t have put that passage in his book if he was a monster seeking ONLY to cover up. He HELPED me. I can say the same about Bill Bernstein and Larry Swedroe and Scott Burns and lots and lots of others.

They ARE flawed. They HAVE made mistakes. I say that all the time. I am famous for it. But these people did not wake up one morning thinking “Gee, wouldn’t it be nice if I could come up with a way to bring the U.S. economy to its knees?” They LIVE in the U.S. economy. They want it to succeed. They are blinded by their pride. They are suffering cognitive dissonance. They have devoted so much energy and time to this failed idea that they cannot bear to hear the truth about it. That ain’t saintly behavior. But it ain’t monster behavior either. It’s flawed human behavior.

I obviously do not mean to single you out in any way, shape or form. I of course understand that you have done more than 99 percent of the bloggers out there. I am thinking out loud. I am always trying to come to grips with why people don’t act when there is so much good to be done by doing so and so much to lose by failing to do so.

I don’t think the Fed is covered in glory either. But the Fed is a political institution. It is the Fed’s JOB to stop a deepening of the economic crisis. So it is doing what it can. We all know that the Fed can only perform stopgap measures. But educating people about the last 32 years of peer-reviewed research is NOT a stopgap measure. That is something with real and long-lasting benefits. What millions of investors understand is far more important than what the Fed does or does not do. I mean no disrespect but I view blaming the Fed as a way of getting ourselves off the hook for OUR role (I include myself in that — I was afraid to tell my fellow community members what I knew about safe withdrawal rates prior to May 13, 2002.)

I of course agree that the aim of the Goons is not to debate but to discredit. But I think it is important to keep in mind that they hurt themselves each time they hurt others. The Goons are in the process of seeing their retirement plans destroyed just like all the rest of us. They know not what they do, you know?

My view is that the hard part of giving sound investing advice is understanding the Goon within all of us. We ALL have a Get Rich Quick impulse, the Goons are just more obvious about it. I talk to them because I care about them and because I want to learn from them and use what I learn to help them and others. I ALWAYS let the Goons know that I oppose the abusive garbage. So it is not that I am afraid to say that. I of course find dealing with them to be an intensely unpleasant experience. I do it because I need to know as much as possible about the Get Rich Quick impulse to be able to do effective work helping millions of others understand the true risks of stock investing. The Goons represent the dark side of all of us magnified by a factor of 20. We become good investors not by ignoring that dark side but by learning enough about it to overcome it.

A doctor cuts into human flesh to remove cancerous tissue.. It’s a messy and ugly business. But his purpose is a positive and constructive and life-affirming one. That’s the spirit in which I interact with the Goons. I don’t intend to let them pull me down into their darkness. I intend to lift them up to the light. I intend to make them more effective investors, no matter how much they resist the idea. If they refuse, I can use what I learned from my dealings with them to help millions of others with less serious pride and denial issues.

I really don’t think that anything is going to happen to people who stand up. Say that the Wall Street Con Men sue me. That runs the risk of bringing more attention to my site, does it not? That’s the last thing in the world they want to see.

The Goons have been threatening to have their Wall Street Con Men pals sue me for years now but they never file papers. I don’t think they dare to do it. Buy-and-Hold is dying. It has been dying for a long,
long time now. There were things that they once could do that they cannot do today. This is one of those cases where the only thing there is to fear is fear itself. They beat us because we so fear them that we don’t stand up to them. Once a group of 10 of us stands up to them, the bullies will run away in tears. I’ve talked to lots of people about this stuff. I don’t have 10 willing to go public today. But I think I am getting close.

Yes, people will listen after the next crash. But we are not going to have much time to fix things at that point. We need to be preparing now. And the best thing for every single person involved (including the Goons and the Con Men) is if we AVOID that crash. We will never drop below fair-value if the truth gets out. If we fall to one-half of fair value, as we have after every earlier bull market, it will be because people are still trying to believe in Buy-and-Hold and becoming depressed to see it not working. Illusions are dangerous. The difference between falling to fair value and falling to one-half of fair value might be the difference between going into the Second Great Depression and avoiding the Second Great Depression.

Thanks for caring enough to engage in a little back and forth. I of course get it that your heart is 100 percent in the right place. I wish I knew more like you. I could change the world in a very, very positive way if I did.

You’re one of the good guy’s, Kevin. Hang in there. We need more good guys running around this big old goofy planet of ours.

Rob

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

“The Buy-and-Holders say that the safe withdrawal rate is 4 percent “over and over.”

I dont think this is true. Tilting at windmills.

The errors in the Old School retirement studies should have been corrected within 24 hours of the moment that they became public knowledge. That was the morning of May 13, 2002. The studies have not been corrected to this day.

Yes, there have been dozens of articles in all the leading publications pointing out that the retirement studies are in error. That’s a good. That’s a positive.

But we still need corrections.

And we need to figure out how we are going to compensate the millions of investors who are on the way to suffering failed retirements because they believed that the studies were legitimate and planned retirements based on that belief.

And we need to have a national debate re how it is that these studies remained uncorrected for so long. The reason is obviously the fraudulent behavior of the Buy-and-Holders. Financial fraud is a crime, a felony. We have not yet seen criminal charges brought against those who posted in “defense” of Mel Linduaer and John Greaney and Jack Bogle. Why not?

That’s the next step, Laugh. We need to see criminal prosecutions and we need to see civil suits being brought. That’s how you penalize the intimidation tactics we have been seeing for 13 years now.

And then we need to see financial rewards for all those who put their necks on the line by pointing out the criminal behavior of the Buy-and-Holders when doing so took a lot of courage and when those doing so were suffering financial hits as a result of doing so. These are the people who will be building the first true research-based model for understanding how stock investing works. We want to reward those people to the greatest extent possible. It is by rewarding the people who give honest investing advice that we get to see more of it. And that of course benefits each and every one of us.

The investing advice field became 100 percent corrupt during the Buy-and-Hold Era. We want to flip that. We want to see the same ethical standards that apply in every other field of human endeavor coming to apply in the investing advice field as well. We all need to pull together to make that happen.

You Goons grow weaker by the day. This is no time for those of us who love our country to slow down. We want to see prison sentences announced. Once your prison sentence has been announced, I am 100 percent sure that there will not be one investing site on the internet advocating Buy-and-Hold “strategies.” Give me a friggin’ break.

People who work in this field are like the people who work in every other field of human endeavor. They want to do good work. They want to help people. They want to be honest. They want to be able to feed their families. They don’t want to see their careers destroyed because they posted honestly re safe withdrawal rates or re some other critically important investment-related topic. We need to let everyone in this field know that the deeply corrupt Buy-and-Hold Era has come to an end and that in the future everyone is going to be giving honest investing advice and not holding back from doing so because of the intimidation tactics of the Wall Street Con Men and their Internet Goon Squads. We send that message by enforcing the laws against financial fraud that we so smartly adopted as a people long before the Buy-and-Holders ever came on the scene.

That’s my sincere take re these terribly important matters in any event.

My best and warmest wishes to you and yours, Laugh.

Rob

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

Jacob ran your column for years, but now he’s too scared. Obviously something changed. You seem to be trying hard not to mention Sammy Soda.

Sammy’s abusiveness and my responses to it obviously are what brought about the change. I certainly don’t say different.

Some of Sammy’s comments were just obvious garbage. My standard response to those was to say: “My best and warmest wishes to you and yours, Sammy.” I don’t think that those comments and responses caused any problem. My sense is that Jacob is pretty darn tolerant of abusive comments (I see them appear at other places at the site). And he obviously would not have any problem with me offering my best wishes to someone who posted at the site. So I don’t think those interactions caused any problems.

I believe that the ones that caused a problem were the ones where you Goons would ask about who will be going to prison after this all comes out or about Wade Pfau being intimidated and agreeing to stop posting his honest views about safe withdrawal rates and about Bogle supporting you Goons and other items along those lines. You Goons put forward those comments as part of an effort to force Jacob to take action.

If Jacob ignores my responses letting people know about criminal activity, he could be sued for doing so. The lawsuits would lack merit. But the Wall Street Con Men have lots of money and lots of motivation to keep this stuff from coming out and people with lots of money can bring lawsuits whether there is merit to them or not. Those lawsuits can cause lots of problems for people who are doing nothing wrong but who go ahead and do good things even after being warned by the wrongdoers that there will be a price to pay for “crossing” them.

It is my belief that something like that happened. I cannot give details any more than I can give details re precisely what threats were made to persuade Wade Pfau to flip. But something was said and whatever was said scared Jacob and here we are. We have seen this same general pattern repeat over and over again over the course of the past 13 years. This is what Goons do. And this is what Wall Street Con Men encourage Goons to do.

I obviously knew what was going on when you Goons first started putting up comments of that nature. I could have taken a pass and just ignored those comments or wrote “I wish you all good things” in response to them. If I did that, I would still have the column today. I loved writing the column. And I knew I was taking a risk of having the column cancelled by giving the responses that I did. So I gave some consideration to playing it the other way. I elected to respond to those comments or questions honestly. I said the things that permitted you to go to Jacob with threats of lawsuits.

I don’t regret it. I regret losing the column. I didn’t write about those super-sensitive issues in the column entries themselves because I didn’t want to see the column cancelled. But the reality here is that those questions were important questions. Buy-and-Hold was discredited by the peer-reviewed research in this field 34 years ago. Investors understand this. I have had many middle-class investors tell me that they see that Valuation-Informed Indexing makes perfect sense. They say that their reluctance to buy into it is that they cannot figure out why all the experts don’t endorse it given how much sense it makes. People need an explanation of why experts in this field continue to endorse Buy-and-Hold 34 years after Shiler published his “revolutionary” research showing that there is precisely zero chance that it could ever work for even a single long-term investor either in this solar system or in some far distant one.

So people need to know about the financial fraud stuff.

The financial fraud stuff depresses people. And it scares people. People hate it when I talk about that stuff. So my inclination is to limit my discussion of it to the greatest extent possible when I am posting somewhere other than at this site. But, when you Goons force the matter, I don’t think it is right to duck it. You are raising real questions. Wade Pfau loves Valuation-Informed Indexing. He thinks it is the future. He fully gets it that the Old School SWR studies need to be corrected. He was the first person to write to the authors of the Trinity study requesting a correction. But Wade is a father and he wants to be able to put food on the table for his family. And so he agreed to stop posting honestly and to stop publishing honest research so that he could appease the Wall Street Con Men and you Goons. That’s the story here. That’s how the Wall Street Con Men have been able to keep this cover-up going for 34 years –through intimidation. They put forward hints that they will destroy the careers of those who insist on their right to post honestly and those of us who possess a desire to post honestly self-censor ourselves to preserve out abilities to feed our families.

The questions are real. It all needs to come out. We need a ten-part series on the front page of the New York Times. Once we see the ten-part series, none of us will be afraid anymore. We all will be posting honestly every day like it is the most natural thing in the world. That’s the place where we all want to be. Including Bogle. Including you Goons.

How do we get there?

Someone has to tell the true and full story.

There’s no other way.

I think it would be fair to say that I have been elected.

So, when you Goons leave me with no other choice, I go there.

I don’t regret going there. I regret the result of my doing so. But the questions you raised in those posts were real and I see it as my job to respond honestly to those sorts of questions when asked. All of the fraud stuff needs to get out. It will all come to an end when it gets out. When those of us who want to post honestly react in fear, we make matters worse. Perhaps not for ourselves but certainly for the country we love. If ten of us worked up the courage to show complete honesty re these matters, we could bring Buy-and-Hold down in little time. But it does take courage to get the ball rolling. It’s hard to be one of the ones posting honestly when there are not yet nine others protecting your back.

Sammy killed the column with those questions. I responded knowing what the result might be. I concluded that I wouldn’t be doing my job if I failed to respond to those questions. I did the right thing, Jacob got scared and the column died.

These things happen in this mixed-up world of ours from time to time. I am like everyone else. I would like to bring the nasty stuff to a full and complete stop. Where I am different is that I see clearly that we can never bring it to a full and complete stop by ducking the hard questions That hasn’t worked for 34 years running. We need to address these matters, bring them out into the open. When it means that we lose columns that we love writing, we have to accept that that is the price we are going to have to pay to bring this Buy-and-Hold Crisis to an end. There is no other way to get the job done.

I love my country. That’s the bottom line. I loved my column at the ValueWalk.com site that I wrote for six years. But I love my country more. When you Goons forced me to choose between the two, I chose my country. I believe strongly that I made the right choice.

That’s it.

I hope that helps a bit.

Rob

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

If there were hundreds of millions to be made from Shillers model, why doesn’t Shiller himself promote that and reap those millions?

This is a good question.

And of course the thought being expressed here applies not just to Shiller. It applies to everyone working in this field. The shift from Buy-and-Hold to Valuation-Informed Indexing is the biggest advance in the history of personal finance. We have seen more forward movement in the past 34 years in the investing advice field than we have seen in the computer technology field. People have made BILLIONS in the computer technology field over the past 34 years. Why wouldn’t people want to make billions in the investing field by teaching the millions of people who want to learn how stock investing works about all of the amazing insights that follow from Shiller’s “revolutionary” (his word) research findings of 1981?

Here’s a link to a commentary that Rush Limbaugh offered yesterday re the Donald Trump phenomenon:

‘THE GAME’: RUSH: I’ve Got News For You: TRUMP IS CONTROLLING THE MEDIA!

There are rules in The Game in every field of endeavor. Everybody is talking about “The Establishment” in the political realm. We need an establishment. The establishment sets the rules by which all business is conducted. If we didn’t have an establishment, we would have chaos. Every voice would get equal recognition and no one would have any means to distinguish which voices are worth listening to and which voices are not worth listening to. Establishments make the rules that permit us to make sense of things and not to waste tons of time trying to do so. Establishments are a good thing and a necessary thing and exist in every field and in every time. There is a sense in which to say that you are “anti-establishment” is to say that you are anti-human because humans always set up establishments. Some form of establishment governs all human interactions.

Now —

Establishments sometimes need to be taken down. Establishments can become overly rigid. The Soviet Union was a great example of this. The establishment had become so rigid that the society that it was governing could not advance. The human spirit was being crushed. The establishment had to go. The establishment collapsed. It was replaced by a new establishment better suited to the current-day realities. When one establishment falls, a new establishment rises. There’s always an establishment of some kind or another setting the rules of the game that all players of the game must follow.

Shiller shattered our prior understanding of how stock investing works. He tore up the rulebook. He overturned the establishment. This is why I so often point out that Shiller referred to his 1981 finding that valuations affect long-term returns as “revolutionary.”

If `valuations affect long-term returns, stock investing risk is not static but variable. If stock investing risk varies with changes in valuations (price), investors must change their stock allocations in response to big valuation shifts to have any hope whatsoever of keeping their risk profiles roughly constant. If the market were efficient, Buy-and-Hold would be the ideal strategy. If valuations affect long-term returns, Buy-and-Hold is the most dangerous strategy ever concocted by the human mind; it will always cause an economic crisis and in many cases it will bring on a depression. If Shiller is right (and we now have 34 years of peer-reviewed research showing that he is), Buy-and-Hold is poison.

There is a mountain of money to be made showing millions of middle-class investors that Buy-and-Hold is poison and describing to them the first true research-based strategy — Valuation-Informed Indexing, which is Buy-and-Hold corrected for the one mistake that the Buy-and-Holders made (their false conclusion that it is not necessary to exercise price discipline when buying stocks). There is a huge incentive for Shiller and lots and lots of others to make billions telling the truth about how stock investing works to the millions of investors who very much want to know the truth about how stock investing works. So your question is a perfectly reasonable one.

The answer is —

The investing advice establishment does not want this to get out!

If Shiller had published his revolutionary findings in 1961 instead of 1981, we would all be Valuation-Informed Indexers today. There is no evidence supporting Buy-and-Hold. 100 percent of the data supports Valuation-Informed Indexing and 0 percent of the data supports Buy-and-Hold. Everyone wants to reduce the risk of stock investing by 70 percent. Everyone wants to be able to retire five to ten years sooner. The value proposition here is off the charts. Everyone on the planet wants to know about Valuation-Informed Indexing and every investing advisor wants to help people by teaching them about Valuation-Informed Indexing and to get rich doing it. Why wouldn’t they?

The problem is that Buy-and-Hold was developed as a result of research that was published in 1965 that SEEMED to show that no form of market timing is required. Between 1965 and 1981, an establishment was formed around the promotion of Buy-and-Hold, which was at the time THOUGHT to be a true research-based strategy. When Shiller’s research was published, the establishment in this field made clear to all who tried to tell people about the implications of his revolutionary findings that their careers would be destroyed if they dared to “cross” all the people who had built careers pushing the smelly Buy-and-Hold garbage (which was of course not known to be smelly garbage at the time this establishment was formed).

Shiller WANTS to tell the truth about what the last 34 years of peer-reviewed research shows. So does Bogle. So does Pfau. So does Kitces. For that matter, so does Lindauer and so does Greaney. We ALL want to do good work in this world. We all want stock investing to be less risky. We all want to be able to retire early. The advance from Buy-and-Hold to Valuation-Informed Indexing is such a huge advance that it is impossible to imagine how there could be one person on the planet who would want to be associated with Buy-and-Hold rather than Valuation-Informed Indexing, all else being equal.

Our problem is that as of today all else is not equal.

Tell the truth about the dangers of Buy-and-Hold and your career will be destroyed. The lives of your loved ones will be threatened. Internet Goons will follow you everywhere you post on the internet and do all in their power to destroy your reputation. And few will speak up in your defense. Telling the truth about what the last 34 years of peer-reviewed research shows us about how stock investing works in the real world is career death in the year 2016. The investing advice establishment will not permit it.

Just like the Soviet Union, the establishment that today props up Buy-and-Hold is going to fall. Persuading millions of people to follow a pure Get Rich Quick approach (which is what Buy-and-Hold is if valuations affect long-term returns) has been a catastrophe. It has caused an economic crisis. It has put millions on a path leading down the road to failed retirements. It has caused millions to become unemployed. It has caused hundreds of thousands of businesses to fail. It has caused a loss of confidence in our political system on both the left and the right. Buy-and-Hold is pure garbage. The establishment props it up to this day. But that establishment will fall as the consequences following from the promotion of the pure Get Rich Quick approach grow more and more dire.

Either we open every discussion board and blog to honest posting re the past 34 years of peer-reviewed research or our economic system collapses. And, if our economic system collapses, our political system will collapse not much later. This massive cover-up is killing us. So the establishment propping it up has to go. When the current establishment collapses, all of the good stuff starts to happen. The good news here is 50 times more good than the bad news here is bad. So we very much should all be looking forward to the collapse of the current investing-advice establishment.

That said, we also need to recognize the long list of genuine and important contributions that have been advanced by this establishment. We know things today about how stock investing works that we didn’t dream of knowing back in 1965, when this establishment was born. The establishment is comprised of good and smart and hard-working people. We wouldn’t have Valuation-Informed Indexing if not for the good work done by these good people. We owe it all to these people. We need to recognize that for this transition to be a truly good one. We want to proceed in a balanced way.

Shiller and the lots and lots of others will be reaping the millions once we act as a society to bring today’s establishment down. We all want the same things. We all want to work together and we all will once we make together to the other side of The Big Black Mountain. We are on the one-yard line today. We need to make one more successful pass and then all the bad stuff comes to a complete and total stop and all the good stuff becomes available to each and every one of us.

It’s a process, Anonymous. It takes time for the collapse of one establishment and its replacement by a new establishment promoting the new understanding to play out. We are far along in the process but we are not yet quite in the end zone. We all need to be doing everything that we can do to get that ball into the end zone.

This is how our system works. The reason why our system is such a great one is that it contains the flexibility needed for existing establishments to be torn down and replaced by new ones more reflective of current-day realities. Our story is the story of the collapse of the establishment that promoted Buy-and-Hold and its replacement by the establishment of the future, the establishment that will promote the first true research-based strategy, Valuation-Informed Indexing.

These are exciting times.

Hang in there, man. It gets better. A LOT better.

I am sure.

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 does that compute with your fantasy of me (and others) to go to prison for disagreeing with you?

It’s of course 100 percent preposterous that anyone would go to prison for disagreeing with me Sammy. But death threats? Demands for unjustified board bannings? Tens of thousands of acts of defamation? Threats to get academic researchers fired from their jobs? Those sorts of things don’t belong in an investing discussion.

Shiller was awarded a Nobel Prize for showing that valuations affect long-term returns. If valuations affect long-term returns, investors need to change their stock allocations in response to dramatic shifts in valuation levels. That’s ABC logic. The Buy-and-Holders say something very different. The Buy-and-Holders say that there is NO NEED for investors to change their stock allocations no matter how much valuations change. Huh?

The Buy-and-Holders really believe what they say. So there is no crime in them saying it. They are helping us all out by arguing their beliefs to the best of their abilities.

But there are lines. You can’t intimidate others into not stating their sincere views. That’s what you have been doing for 13 years now. I have talked to many academic researchers who have felt intimidated. I have talked to many journalists who have felt intimidated. I have talked to many bloggers who have felt intimidated. I have talked to many investment advisors who have felt intimidated.

This is a problem of huge public policy significance. People invest to finance their retirements. If the Buy-and-Holders are wrong (there is now 34 years of peer-reviewed research showing that they are), people need to know that. Our economic system could fail if we do not get the word out. Heaven help us all, but our political system could fail. We are already seeing a loss of confidence in our political system on both the left and right and we haven’t even experienced the next price crash yet.

Bernie Madoff is in prison because he caused thousands of failed retirements. If Shiller is right about valuations (and there is now a mountain of evidence backing him up), Buy-and-Hold will have caused MILLIONS of failed retirements before we reach the end of this economic crisis. This is not a joke. This is serious stuff.

I am the best friend you have on this planet, Sammy. I am asking you to come clean. The sooner you come clean, the less angry people will be. The less angry people are, the shorter your prison sentence will be.

Your friend is not the person who always tells you what you want to hear. Your friend is the person who tells you what you need to hear when there is something that you very much need to hear but that you do not want to hear.

That’s my sincere take re these terribly important matters, in any event.

And, yes, I really DO wish you all the best. I will do my absolute best to see that things go as well as possible for you given the circumstances that apply. I obviously am not going to engage in financial fraud myself and thereby set things up so that down the road I join you in prison. But anything short of that I am 100 percent happy to do. Please just let me know when you open your mind to the possibility of acting in your own best interests re these matters.

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:

Today, a poster at your board asks you to provide a link to support your statement that Wade’s job was threatened. Here is your response:

Rob says
January 15, 2016 at 7:23 am
You were there, Anonymous. You don’t need a link.

I will provide a link to the members of your jury. Then they will decide on the length of your prison sentence. That’s how our system works.

I wish you all good things.

Rob

With responses like that is it really hard for you or anyone else to understand why you are banned at so many boards? Is it any wonder why people think you have a mental issue? Is it any wonder why people like Wade refuse to even talk to you any more?

We’re all in this mess together and we all will need to work together to get out of this mess together, Sammy.

The sooner we do so, the better things will go in the future for every last one of us.

That includes Shiller. That includes Bogle. That includes Arnott. That includes Pfau. That includes me. That includes you.

Fama was awarded a Nobel prize. Shiller was awarded a Nobel prize. Every investing board and blog on the internet should be exploring the implications of Shiller’s 1981 findings as frequently as they discuss the implications of Fama’s 1865 findings.

Wade and I were good friends until the day that you Goons threatened to get him fired from his job is he continued to publish honest research. If Bogle were to come out with a speech next week saying either “I Was Wrong About Valuations” or even just “I’m Not Sure About Valuations,” Wade would be thrilled beyond belief. That would free him to start the hundreds of research projects that he told me that he wanted to get working on and then put aside when he was threatened with career destruction for his plans to do so.

And it wouldn’t be just Wade. There are HUNDREDS of academic researchers in this field who would love to be doing work exploring the implications of Shiller’s “revolutionary” (his word) findings. Many have told me so. How does it hurt anyone for us all to see such research? If the Buy-and-Holders were right in their initial beliefs, the research will vindicate them. If the Buy-and-Holders were wrong in their initial beliefs, the research will persuade them to make the changes that they need to make to get things right.

That’s a good thing, isn’t it? The Buy-and-Holders want to get it right, do they not? It’s sure my belief and hope that they want to get it right. They can hardly get it right if hundreds of researchers are afraid to do their best work because it would upset millions of investors to learn that the experts in this field have been giving bad advice for 34 years now.

We need to clear the air. We need Bogle to give that “I Was Wrong” speech and for the New York Times to report on it on its front page. That frees us all to do our best work. Journalists will be writing better articles after Bogle gives that speech. Advisors will be developing better calculators after Bogle gives that speech. Economists will be making better economic predictions after Bogle gives that speech (the losses that investors suffer in bear markets have a huge effect on the economy). And on and on and on.

Either Bogle got something terribly wrong or Shiller did. They say opposite things. The only way for us all to figure out who got things terribly wrong is for us to launch a national debate re these questions. I think Shiller’s ideas will prevail. But I am perfectly happy to see Bogle’s ideas prevail if he can defend his ideas in an open, public debate. Do you feel the same? Do any Buy-and-Holders feel the same? I have the strong impression that the Buy-and-Holders lack confidence that they can prevail in an open, national debate. Why? What are the Buy-and-Holders afraid of?

I believe that the Buy-and-Holders  are afraid that they got it wrong with their initial effort to develop a research-based strategy. Now they want to avoid the debate because they feel that the cover-up has gone on so long and it will look bad for them if the debate begins now. But it is only going to look that much worse if the debate is delayed yet another week or another month or another year or another two years.

That’s my sincere take re these terribly important matters, in any event.

I naturally wish you the best of luck in all your future life endeavors.

Rob

Set forth below are the words of a comment that I recently posted to the discussion thread for one of my columns at the Value Walk site:

Today, we see yet another example that you are living in a fantasy world when we see you make the following comment, Rob:

“I obviously would have earned far more than $500 million had you Goons not engaged in insanely abusive and criminal behavior and if big-name “experts” like Jack Bogle had not failed to act when informed of your behavior. I have offered to settle for $500 million because it makes sense for every single person involved for us to put the nasty stuff behind us and get about the business of spreading the word about the first true research-based strategy and thereby bringing on the greatest period of economic growth in our nation’s history.”

I stand by the statement, Sammy.

Wade Pfau holds a PhD in Economics from Princeton University. He should know pretty much all there is to know about stock investing. It should not be possible for Rob Bennett, some guy whose only claim to expertise in this field is that he figured out what buttons to push to have his words appear at investing boards and blogs, to teach Wade Pfau anything important in this subject area.

But I did.

Wade saw my writings on the internet and he contacted me and told me that he wanted to do research with me showing once and for all whether Valuation-Informed Indexing is the real deal or not. When he learned as a result of those 16 months of research that, yes, it all checks out, he was as excited as he has ever been excited about anything in his lifetime. He told me that he couldn’t sleep at night because of all of the implications of the findings of the research that we did together that he was thinking over. He told me that he had visions of winning a Nobel prize for the role he played in producing that research. That’s very, very, very cool stuff.

Wade is not the only one. I have seen that same general reaction from HUNDREDS of people. They all see how huge this is and they all want to direct their life energies to spreading the word about what we have learned during the first 34 years of the Shiller Revolution. We have seen big advances in the computer electronics revolution since 1981. But those advances pale in comparison to the advances that we have achieved intellectually in the investing advice realm as a result of the Shiller Revolution.

Lots of people became millionaires for playing a lead role in the computer electronics revolution. Their names have become household names. Bill Gates. Steve Jobs. Larry Page. And on and on and on and on. People naturally like the idea of becoming millionaires by helping their fellow humans in big ways. So the natural expectation is that every site on the internet would on a daly basis be producing materials helping us all to appreciate the breakthroughs we have achieved in the first 34 years since we learned that the Buy-and-Holders got it wrong and that in fact valuations affect long-term returns and that stock investing risk is thus not static but variable.

We haven’t seen that. Huh? What’s going on?

What’s going on is the result of a big difference between the computer electronics field and the investing advice field. There wasn’t much of a computer electronics field to speak of in 1981. So no one felt threatened by the huge advances that were achieved and those advances benefitted everyone living on the planet and made the pioneers who promoted them very rich men and women. In 1981, Buy-and-Hold was already in place. There were thousands of wealthy and powerful people whose careers depending on it remaining in place. So we have seen huge opposition to the idea of moving forward in the investing advice field.

We need to move forward. This is too big. Our economic system wont survive unless we do.

Given that we are going to move forward, the best thing is to move forward as quickly as possible. We hurt too many people by failing to do so.

People respond to incentives. The practical reality in today’s world is that there are few positive incentives for incorporating what we have learned from the last 34 years of peer-reviewed research into our investing advice and many negative incentives for doing so. So word has not spread. Millions continue to believe in Buy-and-Hold to this day

But that is going to change following the next price crash. That’s certainly what I believe in any event. When it happens, all the people who played the role of pioneers will be handsomely rewarded for helping us all to get to the other side of The Big Black Mountain. Why would they not be? Bill Gates was handsomely rewarded. Steve Jobs was handsomely rewarded. Larry Page was handsomely rewarded. That’s how things are done in our society. That’s why we are so rich a people — we reward people who put their necks on the line and thereby bring us all to a better place.

That’s my sincere belief re all this in any event. I haven’t been able to earn a dime for the past 13 years because of all the static generated by you Goons. But I expect to be earning millions and millions of dimes for the 13 years of work effort on the other side of the next price crash. I am not trying to keep anything to myself. I am thrilled when others join me and make their claim to millions of dollars of financial rewards to be delivered following the next price crash. I am in the unusual situation of wanting more competitors for the niche that I own because more competitors means the word spreads more quickly and that’s a very good thing for all of us.

I think we have a tiger by the tale here. I think that Shiller’s finding that the Buy-and-Holders got it wrong in a fundamental way is the most important peer-reviewed finding in the history of investing analysis. I think the man started a Revolution.

That’s my sincere take. I could be wrong. I’ve been wrong before and, if it were happening again, I would probably be the last to know. But that is definitely my sincere take.

I guess we will just have to exercise a little patience and see how it all plays out before us as time goes on. That works for me. I hope it works for you too, my longtime Goon friend.

Rob