Some History

A man named Rob Bennett posting at financial forums under the screen name "hocus" started his posting career with much admiration and respect in the era of 1999 through 2001. In the heyday of The Motley Fool and their Soapbox.com (now defunct) service, hocus published a "Secrets to Retiring Early" guide and made a nice chunk of money in a few months. Afterwards he quit his job, called himself retired--even though most don't believe he has enough money to do so by his public accountings--and commenced thousands and thousands of posts at various forums.

People started realizing he had little substance to offer and wouldn't respond to direct questions, and yet over time he's come to believe he knows this earth-shattering investment epiphany that would make the stock market crash were it popularly accepted. He seems to think there is a conspiracy or fear among the finance gurus to not publically acknowledge his "facts" even though he believes they know he's right or will soon come to realize he's right. His insistence and vague verbosity has resulted in his being banned from several forums and even prebanned from one created after his posting career started.

He has a vanity-published book which he offers for sale at his site. Reviews of the book by anti-hocus types describe it as rambling, pointless and self-contradictory. He claims to have another book or two in the works and seems to presume that each--including his first--will sooner or later be published by a publisher and/or sold at a normal book retailer.

Mid-2005 to December 2006

He persisted in three main venues: his blog, Morningstar forums and the Retire Early Home Page forums, the last of which has been openly mocking him for years and which is the inspiration for this site.

The Present

hocus was temporarily banned at REHP from mid-December 2006 to early January 2007 but as of late February has refrained from posting there, although he has been documented as still reading the site.

In late February 2007 90+ Morningstar Vanguard Diehard forum members signed up in a single day and started using an alternate forum in protest of Morningstar's failure to corral hocus. A day later hocus was banned from all of Morningstar's forums. This paragraph is being written on the day of the ban; hocus' next move is yet to be seen, but he has indicated a forthcoming blog entry about the banning. As a longtime hocus observer I expect him to try to get involved at an established busy financial forum soon.

hocus is a decent "soft" writer, and it takes new people some time to figure out what he is, so some of us feel compelled to continue correcting and even ridiculing him to warn others. We also ridicule him because he continues to post prolifically in boards dedicated to mocking him.

Where do you want to delude today?

If you've run into hocus elsewhere and came here to learn more, I think this comment has the best collection of hocus links for you to get a picture of how he is.

If you're morbidly curious (like we are) about what makes this guy persist you can start at the REHP Hocomania Resources page or click on one of the earlier forum links to see his latest posts.

This site aims to both summarize hocomania topics and research specific (and silly) aspects of hocomania. Be sure to check out the Site Index to see what's here.

Other Principal Players

• JWR1945 aka John Walter Russell: The only poster to continually support hocus in almost all claims. He and hocus form a mutual admiration society where hocus is the mover and shaker and poster and JWR is the math guy who says his regression tests prove hocus right. hocus regularly lists JWR's name along with published finance gurus like Bernstein, Bogle and Shiller.

• intercst aka John Greaney: The focus of hocus' aggression and principal debunker of hocus. hocus regularly misconstrues what intercst says and has said.

• Goons: hocus regularly refers to goons and The Goon Squad but is vague about who is a goon and what behavior is goonlike. hocus alleges intercst is leader of the goons and implies he explicitly sends them on missions to disrupt his discussions. I won't try to list goons, but anyone posting here is likely to fall into that category as well as everyone but hocus posting in the Best of Hocomania at REHP forums. Occasionally the definition of goon seems to extend to other people who disagree with hocus yet have no apparent tie to intercst.

• The Financial Freedom Community: hocus claims to have founded a community by this name (he has a habit of renaming things as well as redefining existing terms) by virtue of his voluminous posts and early popularity. (He did not own or operate any of the sites claimed as part of the community.) He claims all the early retirement forums he's posted at--even the ones that banned him or ridicule him--are part of this one community. He speaks as if the majority of this community perceives reality as he does yet are afraid to speak out in opposition of intercst and the goons who are a scourge on the community. It's amusing to see this point of view spill over into Morningstar forums and the Book of Hook forum who likely have little idea who intercst or goons are.

hocus Debunking Resources

• The Seven Stages of Hocomania - (reproduced on this site, too)
• Retire Early Homepage
• REHP Forums
• This site's guide to specific REHP hocomania pages
• DRiP Guy delurks - a nice summary from a typical board member
• More from DRiP Guy - When someone first enters hocoresearch they often make great summaries, points and comparisons. DRiP Guy has some good posts throughout the thread and a load of hocus quotes that I want to find links to and include in the quotes list on this site
• Schroeder debunks hocus' quoting of experts - a lot of work. Good work!
• M*'s SmartSometimes determines hocus scheme underperforms S&P historically in reply #141 Dec 6 2006
• http://www.s152957355.onlinehome.us/cgi-bin/yabb2/YaBB.pl?num=1189390571/5#5

• Tashina tells the tale of TMF from hocus' view and from others' view

• Book of Hook rant
• Misconstruing sgeeeee

Site Features

• About page - brief introduction to hocomania
• hocus Bingo! - with rambling posts and his own language, why not occupy yourself with a game while reading?
• The Seven Stages of Hocomania - an apt summary by sgeeeee
• hocus Timeline compiled by Tashina from his publications
• Hocoblog RSS feed - excerpts from his blog and comments
• hocus Weather - unregular reports on hocus' current mood and posting habits
• hocus Meteorological Report - weather from hocus' hometown
• hocus Lunar Report - moon phases
• Polls
• hocus Quotes
• Event Calendar - currently unused; hope to have map of hocus posts on here someday

• Most articles are visible from the home page. Those that aren't have navigation links to them at the top or via Site Help.

• Content may have small cryptic links between the title and the content. These are categrories and will list articles in the same category if you click on them. Actually I don't think this site is quite big enough to make this feature useful yet.

One of the best features of this site are the link collections:

• Links page
• Links to REHP hocomania resources - Be sure to try the links in the first comment, too

As of July 6 this site is now open to the search engines.

I noticed I often had to re-login to this site, but I just looked into it and realized it's set to expire the login when you close your browser. I don't know why it's like that, but I want to change it so it remembers logins until you log out or clear cookies. I'll look into it, but it will probably be a week or more as I'll be traveling. I think I know the general reason but not yet the specific reason.

EDIT: Okay, I figured it out minutes after I posted. The login now seems to expire after about 3 weeks. Maybe I'll change that when I get back. Why expire at all?

The Hocofeeds (Passion Saving articles, comments, moon phases, hocus Meteorological Report, etc.) haven't been working properly since around June 18, so some items between then and today (July 5) may be missing. I finally identified the problem and have it temporarily fixed. It should be permanently fixed soon.

My server has been iffy the past month, too. I've been extremely busy offline with the move and other stuff, so I don't know how the site's been, but I know the server kept crashing processes so something may have been amiss. I think the "iffiness" is fixed, and I'll probably add some more RAM soon to make sure it's good.

I just upgraded the software. All seems well except for some admin menus that only I see. There shouldn't be much difference, except right now the upper-right menu is gone. When I fix things, the upper-right menu will mirror the navigation menu automatically.

The reason for the upgrade is some of the features I want to implement change slightly across versions, and I might as well get on the newest version now before I start turning on the really nifty features. You ain't seen nuthin' yet!

Update: Fixed the menus. Now the upper-right mirrors the navigation menu, and my admin settings make sense again.

This site sprang from and contributes back to the Retire Early Home Page and its forums, the authoritative home of hocomania research and observation.

Hocomania resources at REHP:

• Rob Bennett (Passion Saving) irresponsible and a persistent liar?
• Urban Dictionary's Hocomania definitions contributed by REHP fans
• Hocomania Poll (poll no longer works)
• What is Hocomania?
• intercst's early retirement planning insights (parody) (parody of JWR's site)
• Vanguard Diehards Get Hocomania
• Book Review: Passion Saving, by Rob Bennett
• Dump & Wait Investing a sound retirement strategy?
• Passion Saving author Rob Bennett exposed as a fraud and sexual deviant
• Special Father's Day Edition
  Do good fathers voluntarily place their kids in financial hardship?

• Rob Bennett, Stock Predictor?
• Early Retirement Plan Failures
• Can Retiring Early Make You Crazy? forum category
  • The Best of Hoco-mania
  • The Best of Russell-mania
  • Media Resource: Documenting Financial Consultant Rob Bennett's Misstatements
  • Deleted Comments from Rob Bennett's Passion Saving Hoco-Blob
  • Simple Questions Rob Bennett Doesn't Answer
  • Rob Bennett Book and Media Discussion

This site serves two main purposes (read more for extended ideas):

The first purpose is to help me get familiar with administering this site software package. It is very powerful with lots of features including collaborative efforts, and it's going to take some playing around for me to figure out how to get it to do what I want it to do.

The secondary purpose is to document, analyze and mock hocomania. I created hocus Bingo! in an earlier fit of amused mockery, and this will make a good place to document bingos and host the later revisions after I reprogram it to fit here.