Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently posted to another blog entry at this site:
your lies about what you call buy and hold.
Do Buy-and-Holders urge investors to change their stock allocations in response to big valuation shifts or not, Pink?
I am 100 percent okay with calling Valuation-Informed Indexing “The New Buy-and-Hold” or “Buy-and-Hold 2.0? or whatever. I considered myself a Buy-and-Holder on the morning of May 13, 2002. Jack Bogle is a hero of mine. It has always been my dream to work WITH the Buy-and-Holders to get the mistake re long-term timing fixed and to move forward TOGETHER.
But it’s pretty darn hard to work with people who threaten to kill your wife and children, you know? I came up with a fresh name for VII not because I wanted a divorce from the Buy-and-Holders but because the Buy-and-Holders wanted a divorce from me.
Buy-and-Holders say that there is no need to practice price discipline when buying stocks. That is not a lie or even an opinion but a stone cold fact that is documented in MILLIONS of posts. And there is ZERO research indicating that long-term timing might not be required. Zero. Wade Pfau checked the entire record and found nothing.
Buy-and-Hold is a lie.
It started out as a mistake. That needs to be acknowledged in fairness.
But a mistake that isn’t fixed for 33 years after the peer-reviewed research in the field reveals it has become a lie. The idea that long-term timing isn’t required of every investor hoping to have any realistic chance whatsoever of long-term success is a LIE. It is the LIE that has brought on the biggest economic crisis in U.S. history.
The lie will fall with the next price crash. And you will be sent to prison when it falls. And I will become one of the richest men in the United States when the full impact of this ugly LIE is experienced by millions of middle-class people.
Or so says Rob Bennett, in any event.
Hang in there, my old friend.
Rob
Anonymous says
Of course, you are an expert at lying, Rob.
Rob says
All of us humans are, Anonymous.
Have you read Freud? Isn’t projection a form of lying? Are there ANY humans who don’t engage in even a tiny bit of projection (that is, a tiny bit of lying)?
How about Dostoevsky? When his character Raskolnikov killed the old woman, did he not justify doing it by telling himself lies (rationalizations).
What Wade Pfau and I discovered in that famous peer-reviewed research we co-authored is that nearly 70 percent of the risk of stock investing is attributable to the lies that investors tell themselves. If every book on investing started with a discussion of those lies and with descriptions of the tools that investors need to make use of to protect themselves from the effects of those lies, we all would be able to retire a good number of years sooner.
No?
It sure seems so to me.
When you say that I am an expert on lying, you are saying that I am an expert on stock investing. Because effective investing is all about avoiding risk. And most of the risk of stock investing is the product of the lies we are all inclined to tell ourselves unless the experts help us out by reporting straight to us on what the last 33 years of peer-reviewed research has revealed to us all about how stock investing works in the real world.
Or at least so says Rob Bennett.
Rob
Anonymous says
“When you say that I am an expert on lying, you are saying that I am an expert on stock investing. ”
No, I mean that you take lying to a whole new level that most people don’t. You stretch the truth, you twist words, you make outright lies, etc. In fact, most of your posts are filled with lies and it is rare to actual see you say something that is truthful.
I hope this clarifies it for you. If not, I am happy to address this further.
Rob says
I’m a true meanie, Anonymous.
Everybody knows it too.
That’s the thing.
Rob