Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently put to another blog entry at this site:
Just 9 more to go. At your current rate of progress after 11 years, we can project the end of the Buy-and-Hold Mafia at: never mind.
What happened to those two “JWR-level of support complete converts” you found at FinCon? Did the BAHM pick them off already?
The Valuation-Informed Indexers only need one win, X.
When something replaces something else, it replaces it forever. The Buy-and-Hold “idea” has wrecked our economy four times now. It is not going to wreck it a fifth time. After the next crash, it’s over. We didn’t have 32 years of peer-reviewed academic research showing what caused the three earlier economic crises when they hit. That changes things.
If you had it to do over, even you would play it different. You won’t acknowledge it, but it’s so all the same.
Lots of other Buy-and-Holders are thinking similar thoughts. Once honest posting is permitted, Jack Bogle goes down in history as a great hero for having built the foundation for Valuation-Informed Indexing. The same is true to a lesser extent for lots of others, people like Bernstein and Swedroe and Burns and on and on.
After the next crash, everybody wants the same thing. When everybody is pushing in the same direction, things move quickly.
And, if we all are going to be pushing in the same direction then, it make sense that we all start pushing in the same direction now. The number of people who will be angry at the Buy-and-Holders drops dramatically if we spare people the Second Great Depression.
So everything points in the same direction.
The only hitch is making the transition.
Cognitive Dissonance is the answer there.
I gave this a great deal of thought a number of years back and that’s the best we can do.
So we should be going with Cognitive Dissonance and we should be going with it now.
I cannot make the call on my own. You got me re that one.
So I have no choice but to wait.
The other side of the story is that you have no choice but to acknowledge sooner or later that we are all in the same boat.
Your side decides the timing.
But doing it sooner helps your side even more than it does mine.
You can hurt me. But only by making choices that hurt you more.
I vote for less hurt for all concerned.
While acknowledging that I get only one vote.
And, as always, I offer you my best and warmest regards.
Rob
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