A Rich Life

The Old Ideas on Saving & Investing Don't Work -- Here's What Does

Valuation-Informed Indexing #134 — Is the Lowest Possible Safe Withdrawal Rate 1.6 Percent or 2 Percent?

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I’ve posted Entry #134 to my weekly Valuation-Informed Indexing column at the Value Walk site. It’s called Is the Lowest Possible Safe Withdrawal Rate 1.6 Percent or 2 Percent?

Juicy Excerpt: I have doubts about one of the numbers generated by the calculator. I was not the sole developer of the Risk Evaluator. I worked with John Walter Russell, who died in October of 2009. John and I had a number of differences of opinion during the time the Risk Evaluator was being developed. On a number of issues, he ended up going along with my take. On this issue, I went along with his take. I think his take is perfectly reasonable. Still, I always feel a little funny when the particular number that he favored pops out of the calculator. So I thought it might be a good idea to explain the circumstances here. Going through the background might help people see that there are often not right or wrong answers to the questions addressed by investment studies and calculators.

“If You Want to Stop Me, You Will Get Your Powerful Wall Street Friends to Crush Me With Lawsuits”

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Set forth below is the text of a post that I recently put to the Goon Central board:

where you’re wrong lies in your belief you have some “right” to post your Bat$hit Crazy hocomania opinions anywhere you please on the Internet. I have the right to post honestly.

Wade has the right to publish honestzzz research.

Every American citizen has the right to tell his friends and neighbors and co-workers and fellow community members what they need to know to stop the Wall Street Con Men from pulling our nation into the Second Great Depression with their relentless and ruthless promotion of their Get Rich Quick investing strategies.

If you want to stop me, you will get your powerful Wall Street friends to crush me with lawsuits.

If I see no lawsuits, I will point to this reality in my posts. And I will point to posts like this one in which I invited them. When enough good people see that there are no lawsuits forthcoming, your intimidation tactics will be less effective than they are today.

And I am keeping a list of influential people who find great merit in the Valuation-Informed Indexing concept but as of today are too intimidated to speak out in a big way.

Things are reaching a point where bringing lawsuits is no longer going to be a last-choice option for “your side,” Yip. It’s getting to the point where bringing lawsuits is going to be your only hope of saving the ship from going down.

Hit me with your best shot, man. I’ve been overly optimistic before, it could be that I am being overly optimistic again.

I won’t post dishonestly on the numbers that my friends use to plan their retirements in any event.

I wish you all the best things that this life has to offer.

Rob

“I Put Up a Post Reporting on the Errors in the Old School Safe Withdrawal Rate Studies Many Years Before Any of the ‘Experts’ in This Field Had Discovered Them”

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Set forth below is the text of a comment that I put to an article that my friend Academic Researcher Wade Pfau posted to the Market Watch site:

I am the person who discovered the errors in John Greaney’s safe withdrawal rate study. I put up a post reporting on them at a Motley Fool board that we posted at together on the morning of May 13, 2002, many years before any of the experts in this field were saying that it is not possible to calculate the safe withdrawal rate accurately without taking into account the valuation level that applies on the day the retirement begins.

A fantastic discussion followed in which hundreds of us learned some amazing things about how stock investing works. Unfortunately, John and some others did not want the learning experience to continue and engaged in abusive posting tactics to destroy the board. The comments of hundreds of our fellow community members who wanted this learning experience to continue are detailed in this article:

http://www.passionsaving.com/investing-discussion-boards.html

Wade is familier with this history. I have discussed different aspects of it with him in great depth on numerous occasions.

Stock investing is an intensely emotional endeavor. It is not possible to make sense of any element of the stock investing project without taking the effect of investor emotions on stock prices into account. The P/E10 metric has been shown in research to be the best tool for doing this. There was a time when we didn’t know this but that was 30 years ago. Shiller showed in research published in 1981 that valuations (emotions) must always be considered.

We will not get the SWR (or retirement planning in general) right until we work up the courage to acknowledge that investing is not strictly a numbers game. This is a numbers plus emotions game. P/E10 is the metric that permits us to take valuations into account. It is my strongly held belief that valuation-informed retirement planning strategies are the future.

Rob

“There Is an Unspoken Code in the Finance Industry That You Don’t Call Out a Fellow Investing Advisor Who Is Talking Nonsense”

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Set forth below is the text of an answer that I posted to the Quora site to the question “Why do so many people trust stock analysts, investment banks or big audit firms when their conflicts of interest are obvious and they’re involved in fruad scandals all the time?”:

Twelve reasons:

1) Even the worst of these people mix in lots of true stuff with the false stuff and people are fooled by the true stuff into thinking they are dealing straight with them;

2) The best of these people (a not small number — there are many good and smart people working in this field) offer truly wonderful advice without charge and properly inspire confidence in the entire industry by doing so.

3) People are intimidated by investing. They believe they cannot possibly understand it (they are wrong, but this is what many believe). So they feel they have no choice but to place their trust in “experts”;

4) The stuff that these people say that is most dangerous is generally stuff that appeals to our Get RIch Quick impulse (we all have one). Our emotions override the voice of common sense telling us to be wary;

5) We are still in the early days of our discovery of what really works in stock investing. So there is no one who today can with a high level of confidence offer truly sound advice. So long as that remains the case, the stuff that the bad guys put out will sound at least plausible;

6) Stock market prices correct only over long periods of time. Stocks have been dangerous since early 1996. But the market performed amazingly well in 1996, 1997, 1998 and 1999. People who stuck with high stock allocations at a time when that was a very bad idea received lots of short-term positive feedback for doing so;

7) The checks and balances that help us in many other areas of life endeavor do not work well in this area. In politics, we count on the Democrats to tell us when the Republicans are playing games and on the Republicans to tell us when the Democrats are playing games. In stock investing, there is no other side. Bull markets last for years and during those years everybody profits from pretending that the bull market gains are real. So we hear all one side of the story for many years and then all the other side of the story for many years (after the bull becomes a bear);

8) Journalists don’t do a good job in this area. Journalists who cover politics are skeptical. Journalists who cover investing are intimidated by the subject (journalists tend not to be good with numbers). So they become excessively indebted to their “sources”:

9) Academics don’t do a good job in this area. I have spoken to numerous academics who have told me that they don’t have confidence in the conventional investing advice but that they are too afraid of what would happen to their careers to be willing to speak out or to do “controversial” research. Bull markets create so much imaginary money that they compromise even academics, who are of course supposed to remain independent;

10) Economists don’t do a good job in this area. The conventional investing advice is rooted in long-discredited economic theories that have hung around because lots of rich and powerful people have built careers rooted in a widespread belief in those theories. These people oppose advances that would benefit millions for self-interested reasons (of which they are probably not fully self-aware);

11) Cognitive dissonance is a powerful force and an exceedingly counter-intuitive force. Does an alcoholic know that he is ruining his life? He does or else he would not be so defensive when asked if he has a problem. But he also doesn’t or else he would take action. Humans are rationalizers. We LOVE investing experts who support our most self-destructive choices because we want to believe in those choices and we are desperate to hear seemingly logical defenses of them; and

12) The industry sticks together. There is an unspoken code in this field that you don’t call out a fellow investing advisor who is talking nonsense. The payoff of course is that no one calls you out either. The result for the investor is that he sees people talking what seems to be nonsense and no one calling them out and he concludes that he must be the one who doesn’t fully understand things. We don’t rely on our b.s. meters in the investing field because the normal rules of checking things out generally do not work.

The Big Picture Blog Reports on Wade Pfau’s Research Showing the Superiority of Valuation-Informed Indexing Over Buy-and-Hold

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The Big Picture blog early this morning posted an article reporting on Academic Researcher Wade Pfau’s research showing the superiority of Valuation-Informed Indexing over Buy-and-Hold. The report is titled: Buy-and-Hold is Dead (and Never Worked in the First Place).

Juicy Excerpt: Attorney, tax expert and financial writer Rob Bennett told us…”The thing that I have done that no one before me has done is to explain the practical IMPLICATIONS of Shiller’s findings. Even Shiller has never done this…. Shiller and many others have been keeping their mouths shut about the practical implications of his theory for three decades now.” Bennett’s website provides endorsements for his stock timing theories and argues that the prevailing Buy-and-Hold dogma helped to cause the financial crisis.

After seeing the report, I sent the following words to Wade:

Wade:

I hope things have been going well with you. I think of you often. I miss talking things over with you!

I am of course continuing my work to spread the word re your breakthrough research on Valuation-Informed Indexing and on the true cause of the economic crisis. An article was posted early this morning at The Big Picture blog that reports on the essential points:

http://www.ritholtz.com/blog/2012/11/is-there-a-better-way-to-allocate-stocks-thasn-buy-hold/

I’d be grateful to know your thoughts. My thought is — You need to get to work finding a journal for the follow-up research on VII that you told me about! I noted in my first comment on the discussion thread for the article (the comment has not yet appeared at the site) that you would be thrilled to get back to work on that paper if you were given some encouragement. Please consider these words of mine as encouragement that you direct some energies to this important project! Soon! Today! Yesterday!

I also wanted to share with you the words that I sent to the author of the article when he showed me a draft version yesterday night. Thoughts of your good work (and the good work of John Walter Russell and John Bogle and Robert Shiller and so many others) came flooding into my brain when I read the words of the article. Here is the text of my e-mail:

George:

If you have followed Bob Dylan’s career, you know that he has always been a smart-aleck in his dealings with the press. He gave a clue why in some words he put forward after he wrote the first volume of his autobiography and read the reviews of it. He said that those reviews brought him to tears. Most of the people who reviewed his records were not musicians and thus were not able to appreciate the struggles he was overcoming in producing the records. Many of the people who reviewed his autobiography had written books of their own and thus “got” what he was trying to do. The reviews of his autobiography were the first reviews that he fully respected.

That’s the feeling I experience reading your words. What’s different about your write-up is that it shows that you appreciate the scope and significance of the project. That’s the thing that very few others get. It almost brings me to tears to see that after ten years of work someone is seeing how big a deal this is and helping me get the word out to the millions of people who need to hear the message.

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I am extremely grateful. Please let me know if there is ever anything i can do to help you or your readers in return. I have worked for this sort of write-up for a long time. I am humbled to see the draft. I will work hard to merit the trust you have placed in me by giving these ideas the serious consideration that I have long believed they merit.
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I believe that you are moving the ball forward in a significant way. You focused on the right things. The people who have tried to hold me back are good people who want to do good work. You didn’t focus on the negatives, you focused on the positives. I believe that that is the approach that people need to take to help those people see that we are all on the same side re these matters. An advance in our understanding of how stock investing works helps us all live richer lives.
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When your article appears, I will forward a link to it to Wade. I have hopes that reading your words will melt his heart. It may take some additional time but somewhere down the road a piece I believe that either your words or words that follow from your decision to release your words will melt John Bogle’s heart.
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You have filled my heart with good cheer on this special Sunday night.
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Thank you.
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Rob

You of course have also done very important work, my old friend. Please take a bow!

I will ask my boys to say a prayer for you. My understanding is that God listens with special care to the prayers of children.

And, as John Walter Russell used to regularly advise us all — Have fun!

Rob

Addendum:  The article now appears at the ZeroHedge.com site and at the WashingtonsBlog.com site.  The Financial Times links to the article at its “Alphaville/Further Reading” section, referring to Valuation-Informed Indexing as “An Alternative to Buy-and-Hold.”

Jesse’s Cafe Americain Blog Links to My Article on the Silencing of Academic Researcher Wade Pfau

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The high-traffic Jesse’s Cafe Americain blog has linked to my article titled Academic Researcher Silenced by Threats to Get Him Fired From His Job After Reporting on Dangers of Buy-and-Hold Investing Strategies. The link appears at the “Matieres A Reflexion” section of the site (on the left-hand side of the page). The link is titled “Researcher Warns on Buy-and-Hold Strategies.”

Juicy Excerpt: All industries would like to be able to persuade the people who buy their product or service that it is worth buying at any possible price. The Stock-Selling Industry is the only industry that has ever pulled off this act of marketing magic. Millions of investors today believe that it is not necessary to consider price when setting their stock allocations, that it is not possible to successfully time the market.

There is now 30 years of academic research showing that the claim that it is not possible to time the market is false. There really is a wealth of research showing that short-term timing (changing your stock allocation because of a guess at to how stocks will perform over the next year or two) does not work. There is zero research showing that long-term timing (changing your stock allocation in response to big valuation shifts with an understanding that you may not see a benefit for doing so for as long as 10 years) doesn’t work. To the contrary, there is now a mountain of research showing that long-term market timing ALWAYS works. There has never been one time in 140 years (that’s as far back as we have records) when long-term timing did not produce far higher returns at greatly reduced risk.

This article exposes the cover-up.

Rob Bennett to Dallas Morning News Columnist Scott Burns: “Perhaps I Am One of the Unfortunate Humans Who Cannot See His Own Flaws Even When They Are Pointed Out to Him…. I Feel That I Can Say That We Are Friends Again.”

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I reported yesterday on an e-mail sent to me by Dallas Morning News Columnist Scott Burns on the Wade Pfau matter. Set forth below is the text of my response, sent on October 9, 2012.

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Scott:

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Thanks much for your response. It is super to be able to hear your voice up close and personal once again.
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I of course agree with much of what you say, as I have ALWAYS agreed with much of what you say. I believe I have told you before how, when I was collecting materials to use to put together my retirement plan, I created an entire binder to hold my favorite Scott Burns columns. I certainly consider myself a big fan of you and your work product. I hope that always comes through in my communications with you.
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I especially like your statement that: “We’re all struggling to find real information and less noise, but no one is yet in possession of Diogene’s lantern.” That’s a perfect statement in every way. I certainly do not say that I am the sole possessor of Truth. I would disassociate myself in every possible way from anyone who said such a thing. I have an article at my site titled “The Case Against Valuation-Informed Indexing.” ( http://www.passionsaving.com/valuation-informed-indexing-case.html ) The entire purpose of such an article is to signal to my readers that I do NOT view myself as in possession of all Truth and that I think that anyone who comes to believe that I am is making a terrible mistake.
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I DO believe that I have raised many important questions and at least put forward a sincere effort at setting forth some tentative answers to those questions. I DO believe that investing is a highly emotional endeavor and that just about everyone’s views of how stock investing works are influenced by whether we are in a bull market or a bear market at the moment the assessment is made. I DO believe that the Buy-and-Holders made huge contributions and advanced the ball in highly significant ways. I DO believe that the Buy-and-Holders are smart and good and hard-working people who are entitled to our gratitude and respect and admiration. I DO believe that many Buy-and-Holders become hyper-defensive when their core beliefs are challenged and that they have created huge problems in this field with their wildly inappropriate behavior.
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I DO believe that I have pitted myself against ignorance. I am a reporter. That’s the job. It is my aim to dispel ignorance with every word I write. I obviously do not succeed in every case. But that is always the aim. I hope that I balance my desire to dispel ignorance with an appreciation of the need to evidence warmth and balance and charity. I get the strong sense that you don’t believe that I measure up in that department. I have spent much time questioning myself as a result of your
numerous expressions of that belief. I cannot see where I have failed in that department. Perhaps I am one of the unfortunate humans who cannot see his own flaws even when they are pointed out to him. All I can say is that I sincerely do not see it your way at this time. I will continue trying to look inward and perhaps some day I will come along to your view of my behavior.
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Anyway, it makes me happy that you cared enough to send me a response. I feel that I can say that we are friends again.
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Please do not hesitate to ask me if there is ever anything I can do to help you out in any way or if there is ever a time when there is some question that you think I might be able to help you with. If my work has the value that I believe it has, it’s because of all that I learned from you and many others with whom you associate. I never forget those who have helped me learn. That’s a big deal to me. One of the things that my mother stressed to me over and over again is that you can lose just about anything you acquire in this life but that you never lose something you have learned. I am grateful for the many ways in which you have helped me throughout the years.
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Please keep doing what you do. You have my warmest wishes for your happiness and success and feelings of inner peace. Don’t let the bad guys get you down, man.
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Rob

Dallas Morning News Columnist Scott Burns to Rob Bennett: “If You Didn’t View Everything As a Highly Personal and Heroic Struggle Pitting You Against the Evil, Ignorance and Untruth of Anyone Who Didn’t Agree With You, You’d Have a Lot More Fun on the Playground”

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Set forth below is the text of an e-mail sent to me by Dallas Morning News Columnist Scott Burns on October 9, 2012, in response to my e-mail to him letting him know about the Wade Pfau story:

Rob,
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The first person to do valuation oriented period return work was Steve Leuthold. He found that periods starting with low PEs provided better returns, by far, than periods starting with high PEs. I mentioned this to you in some of our first correspondence. He did this work well before Bengen started the SWR conversation with his examination of safe withdrawal rates and his warning to Certified Financial Planners that stochastic methods were better than unreal deterministic calculations of retirement income.
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Leuthold was also disturbed, however, at the amount of noise in the valuation/return data— at both ends there were periods that did not fit the pattern. A consumate benchmarker, he still uses PE distribution data as a warning indicator. But he doesn’t make bald pronouncements from it.  I believe this degree of statistical noise is one of the reasons many have chosen to subscribe to the broad data, leaving the PE/performance data as an interesting foot note and sometimes warning flag.
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Rob Arnott has certainly paid a lot of attention to the initial- valuation side of long term returns and no one has shouted him out of the room. Ditto Easterling. And it wasn’t that long ago (2008) that Blanchett and Kasten (in the Journal of Pension Benefits) examined portfolio failure rates in the context of historical versus lower real returns. So lots of work is going on all around the issues of prospective returns and portfolio survival.
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As I have suggested before, if you didn’t view everything as a highly personal and heroic struggle pitting you alone against the evil, ignorance and untruth of anyone who didn’t agree with you, you’d have a lot more fun on the playground. We’re all struggling to find real information and less noise, but no one is yet in possession of Diogene’s lantern.
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Scott

“The Answer Is for People to Accept That There Are Two Models and Not Be So Defensive. We All Need to Acknowledge That the Other Guy Is a Friend and Someone Who Is Trying to Help.”

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Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently put to the Investor Junkie blog:

 can say from what I’ve seen people often claim you are let me put it in a nice way.. abrasive. While I have no issue with your viewpoint, I think many object to the methodology of how you do it.

Thanks for sharing your thoughts, Larry. There are lots of people who say that. Even people who support me say that. I’ll try to explain what I think is really going on.

I believe in 90 percent of what the Buy-and-Holders believe. There is only one point of disagreement. I say that valuations have to be taken into consideration in all calculations. They say that they should never be considered. If valuations were a small factor, this would not be a big deal. But the valuations effect is so big that whether you take them into consideration or not makes a HUGE difference.

I am 100 percent polite and warm and kind in my interactions with Buy-and-Holders. Always. No exceptions. The thing that is “abrasive” is that I say “Well, you got the numbers wildly wrong in that retirement study and the error is going to cause millions of people to suffer failed retirements.” It hurts people’s feelings for me to say that. But, if it is true that valuations matter, what I am saying is so. There’s no soft way of making the point. If you believe that valuations matter, you are either “abrasive” or dishonest. There are no other options.

I think the answer is for people to accept that there are two models and not be so defensive. We all need to acknowledge that the other guy is a friend and someone why is trying his best to help. I accept that there are lots of good and smart people who really believe in Buy-and-Hold. They have a right to believe what they believe. But if I were to say that I believe in Buy-and-Hold, it would be dishonest. There never should have been even a tiny bit of pressure applied to me to persuade me to post dishonestly. My right (and the right of all Valuation-Informed Indexers) to post honestly should be respected.

The Buy-and-Holders were the top dogs for a number of years. They are not accustomed to being challenged. They have to accept that those days are over. People learn new things over time and we move on to new and better ideas.

I say all the time how much I like and respect the Buy-and-Holders. It’s a rare event when one of them says that about me or about any of the Valuation-Informed Indexers. I have had Buy-and-Holders threaten to kill my wife and children. Never have I made any such threats in return. So who is truly the “abrasive” one?

People need to hear both sides to be able to make informed decisions of their own. As of today, the Valuation-Informed Indexers need to stand up for themselves to even be able to speak (as evidenced by the 15 bans!). I am 100 percent happy always to praise the Buy-and-Holders for their many legitimate insights and I always am sure to do so. I am NOT willing to say that I agree with them. I shouldn’t be pressured to do so. And my unwillingness to do so should not be perceived as “abrasive.” My view is that it is the abusive tactics of the Buy-and-Hold dogmatics that are truly “abrasive.”

Rob

Kevin at the Invest It Wisely Blog: “I Don’t Usually Mind a Little Bit of Controversy, But I Was Contacted by the Person in Question (Academic Researcher Wade Pfau) and Asked to Take It Down”

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I’ve recently been sending e-mails to many people (I’ve sent 650 so far) in an effort to make them aware of The Wade Pfau Story and thereby to bring the economic crisis to an end and to open up honest posting on the realities of stock investing at every investing board and blog on the internet. I sent one to my friend Kevin at the Invest It Wisely blog. Kevin was kind enough to link to the article.  This naturally caused a freak-out at Goon Central, the site owned by John Greaney (the individual who led the effort to intimidate Wade into agreeing not to publish further research showing the superiority of Valuation-Informed Indexing by threatening to have a number of Goons send defamatory e-mails to his employer).

Kevin late last night sent me the following words:

Hey Rob,

I think this one touched a personal nerve. I don’t usually mind a little bit of controversy, but I was contacted by the person in question and asked to take it down, and if they can verify their identity I’ll probably comply (I know that ties right into the theme of your post, haha… but I don’t want to take sides here — I’m more interested in the theories themselves rather than any personal disputes). I’ll swap the post for another one that’s “less personal” if you don’t mind.

Thanks!

Kevin

This morning I sent Kevin an e-mail containing the following words (I have also added an Addendum to the Wade Pfau article linking to this blog entry):

Kevin:

Every single person involved (including Wade) is more concerned about the theory than about any personal disputes. That’s true of me. That’s true of you. That’s true of Lindauer. That’s true of Greaney. That’s true of Bogle. That’s true of Shiller. That’s true of every single person affected by the economic crisis and of every single person who at one time or another was taken in by the Buy-and-Hold mumbo jumbo.

The question is — How do we turn to a discussion of the theory now that we have collectively as a society spent 10 years covering up the errors in the Old School safe withdrawal rate studies that became public knowledge on the morning of May 13, 2002? If you or any of the people named above offer me any suggestions for making that happen without them incurring hundreds of billions of dollars in legal liabilities for the failed retirements they have already caused, please know that I am 100 percent in.

Unless someone comes up with something, the only effect of a further continuation of the cover-up is to expose all the people named above to even larger financial liabilities and to even longer prison sentences. Is that what you want for people like Wade and Bogle and Lindauer and Greaney and possibly even Shiller (Shiller has said that he has never told us all he knows about stock investing because he fears what the Buy-and-Holders will do to his reputation if he does so — How are the millions of people who are in the process of suffering failed retirements going to feel when they learn that and how are we going to restore confidence in our economic and political system without taking  into consideration how those millions of people are going to feel about what has been done to them?). It is sure not what I want for them. I am going to do all that I can to keep both their legal liabilities and their prison sentences as limited as possible.

Thanks for all the help you have offered. I know you are sincere and that you are trying and that you are scared. I believe that we are all sincere in our own ways and we are all trying in our own ways and we are all scared in our own ways. I believe that there will come a day when one of us will come up with the magic words that takes us all to the place where we all feel safe and where we are are all moving forward together on a daily basis and where we have all put the ugly side of this matter 100 percent behind us.

I am of course happy to submit guest blog entries for posting at your site at any time you are willing to host them. It obviously is a positive step for you to host them. But it is also obvious that those guest posts will have 1,000 times the positive effect they have today after we have together taken those steps we all need to take to put the ugly side of this matter 100 percent behind us and to spend the remainder of our days exploring together all the amazing investing insights that are opened up to us once Wade and hundreds of other academic researchers in this field feel free to do honest and productive work once again.

Please have confidence that we are collectively working up the courage to take this to a positive place. If you think it is possible for you to say anything to Wade to reassure him, I hope you will do that. He is obviously in a very dark place today. He has done work that will win him a Nobel prize and make him known as a hero to all of us. Those of us who love the guy need to reach out to him and show him that we care and that we are there to help in a real and truly effective way.

Most of all, please understand that there is no “dispute” between Wade and me any more than there is any dispute between you and me or between Mel and me or between John and me or between Jack and me. We all want the same things. We all want to  learn how to invest effectively and to do what we can to teach others to invest effectively. We all want to bring the economic crisis to an end. We all want to do what we can to limit the civil liabilities and criminal penalties of those who have participated in the 10-year Campaign of Terror against our board and blog communities.  It’s a question of us working up the courage to show our desire for those good things with actions that are positive and helpful and life-affirming.

Hang in there, man. I read the last page of the story before I dared to put forward the May 13, 2002, post. It gets better. A LOT better. The ugly side of this gets blown away in the wind in time. The insights we mine together make all of our lives richer and fuller and better for many, many years to come. The smart and good and hard-working young man who contacted you wins a Nobel prize on the last page of the story. Remind  him of that. That’s been a dream of his for many years now and he needs to get back on the path leading to realization of that dream to start feeling good about himself again. He needs to keep that in mind to keep his spirits up when the world seems to be closing in on him because of mistakes he made in the sorts of weak moments we all experience from time to time.

Wade once told me how he was was looking forward to watching with his wife a version of Season Six of the Lost television show with Japanese subtitles. If you talk to him, please tell him that I recommend that he consider the advice that Jack took to heart at the end of that season — Sometimes it is best to just “let it go.” There are times when it is best to continue the fight and there are times when the only possible way forward is just to let it go.

And please tell him that there are people in this world who love him and who are wishing all good things for him and look forward to having a beer with him on the day he is awarded his well-deserved Nobel prize.

Rob

Addendum: Kevin sent me a response e-mail after I posted this blog entry. He said:: “I hope you two can make it up someday! I’m definitely not scared of publishing stuff that other people disagree with, but I do try to respect other’s feelings and he seems to be taking it personally. I’ll still be happy to link to non-personal posts from you that don’t call out anyone in particular.”

I sent a reply saying: “I understand your decision. He IS taking it personally. That’s for certain. And we WILL make it up. Wade’s a great guy. He has two small children for whom he has responsibility. He is afraid of what will happen to them. My guess is that Bogle’s heart will melt a bit following the next price crash and we will all be on the same page at that point.”

Kevin then wrote: “Thanks for understanding, Rob. I appreciate it!”