The great thing about studying what investors say on discussion boards is that you learn about how things work in practice, not theory.

Investors have been told for 25 years now to follow buy-and-hold strategies. And they say they do. But do they really?

I’ve seen hundreds of comments indicating otherwise. One thing I’ve seen a lot of is a rigid adherence to the idea of buy-and-hold combined with an extremely loose understanding of what it involves in practice.

There are lots of investors out there who in 1999 believed with their entire minds, hearts and souls that owning the S&P500 and the NASDAQ forever was the essence of buy-and-hold. Then the idea became to own just the S&P500 forever. Then it was the S&P and value stocks. Then the S&P and REITS. Then the S&P and small caps. Then the S&P and a global index. Then the S&P and Emerging Markets. The idea seems to be growing of late that maybe it’s best to leave out the S&P altogether and just go with all the other possible slices and dices.

That ain’t buy-and-hold. The idea of buy-and-hold was to stick with a plan long enough to see if it can really pay off. Switching to a different Permanent Portfolio every six months or so doesn’t do the trick.

Investors are kidding themselves. They like the buy-and-hold idea, and for good reason. It is indeed important to stick with a plan long enough to give it a fair test. But the promoters of the buy-and-hold concept did a poor job of pointing out the pressures that those following it will feel to abandon it. As a result, most would-be buy-and-hold investors are unprepared for those pressures and have no idea how to respond to them other than to change their understanding of what constitutes buy-and-hold regularly enough to keep up with their changing desires to own different classes of stocks.

Buy-and-hold is a good idea. But the popular formulation of it is unrealistic. We need a new understanding of how buy-and-hold can work, one that stands a better chance of playing out well in the world of flesh-and-blood investors.

The problem is that buy-and-hold became popular during the longest and strongest bull market in U.S. history. People came to think that you could buy the S&P and forget about it. That of course can never work. When the S&P is selling at reasonable prices, it is a wonderful asset choice. When it is selling at the sorts of prices that apply today, it represents a dubious long-term value proposition.

If we could just say that, we could develop all sorts of strategies for following what are basically buy-and-hold strategies but that are a good bit less rigid than what many of the promoters of the concept have endorsed. Until we develop that freedom, many investors will feel that their hands are tied. It is taboo to change one’s stock allocation or one’s mix of asset classes. But it’s becoming increasingly clear that it is foolhardy not to make some changes in one’s portfolio when the investing environment changes dramatically.

Is it okay to make shifts in the makeup of your portfolio from time to time? Of course. It’s not only okay, it’s pretty much mandatory. None of us knows it all starting out. We learn over time. If we didn’t put what we learned into effect by changing the makeup of our portfolios, there wouldn’t be much point to learning, would there?

We need to be more up front about the changes we make and the reasons why we make them. Many investors have given up on the S&P500 in recent years. For good reason. The S&P is dangerously overvalued. We should learn from our mistaken belief of yesteryear that the S&P would always be as attractive a buy as it was back in the time when it was available at a far more reasonable price.

Buy-and-hold should be a tendency, a goal, a principle. When we make it a dogma, we switch onto the wrong track. We all need to make changes in our portfolio composition and in our stock allocation from time to time. We should discuss those changes openly and thereby learn lessons from the mistakes we made at earlier times.

Today’s Passion: The article entitled Basics of the New Buy-and-Hold provides a groundwork for the development of a new way of implementing this strategy.

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