Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently posted to another blog entry at this site:
Notice that when people learn more about you and your comments, they eventually move away from you, disagree with you or ignore you. Examples are JD, Mike Piper, and Wade. Remember the thread on FMF? When your story started to unfold and people learned more, they turned away. Why is it that your purported supporters like Joe and Kevin re not giving you a regular columns? Are they starting to catch on?
Once people really dig in, Rob, they just don’t like what they see.
People DO move away. You have that part right, Anonymous.
It has zero to do with me and it has zero to do with Valuation-Informed Indexing. People love me and people love Valuation-Informed Indexing.
People move away because they are afraid of the reactions they see from Buy-and-Holders when they talk openly and clearly and frankly about what the last 33 years of peer-reviewed research tells us about how stock investing works.
The Wall Street Con Men stop giving you links once you post honestly. Goons invade your site when you post honestly. The millions of investors who follow Buy-and-Hold strategies become upset with you when you post honestly and are less likely to visit your site or buy your products.
Buy-and-Hold started as a research-based strategy. Then research was published showing that there is zero chance that a Buy-and-Hold strategy could ever work for even a single long-term investor. Rather than acknowledging their mistake and fixing it, the Buy-and-Holders became defensive. Now that the cover-up has continued for 33 years, they have caused massive amounts of human misery. Buy-and-Hold is today the OPPOSITE of what it was intended to be when it was first put forward. Today, it is the Buy-and-Holders who go into brutal attack mode when anyone mentions what the last 33 years of peer-reviewed research tells us.
J.D. Roth knows that Buy-and-Hold is b.s. He doesn’t want Buy-and-Holders to attack his site and his reputation. So he keeps it zipped.
Mike Piper knows that Buy-and-Hold is b.s. He doesn’t want Buy-and-Holders to attack his site and his reputation. So he keeps it zipped.
Wade Pfau know that Buy-and-Hold is b.s. He doesn’t want Buy-and-Holders to attack his site and his reputation. So he keeps it zipped.
People will turn on the Buy-and-Holders after the next crash, Anonymous. They will be very, very, very angry when they see that their retirement money is gone and when they realize how the Buy-and-Holders caused that to happen with their millions of deceptions and with their brutal intimidation tactics. My job is two-fold: (1) Get the truth out; and (2) Heal the wounds caused by the 12-year cover-up (it’s 33 years if we count back to when Shiller published his revolutionary research).
Intimidation tactics are desperation tactics. If there were even a sliver of support anywhere in the research for this smelly Get Rich Quick garbage, we never would have seen a single death threat, much less 12 years of this stuff. Buy-and-Hold died its intellectual death a long, long, long, long time ago. Now it’s just a question of getting the word out to people.
All the people you mention would like this to be over. J.D. Roth has told me that, Mike Piper has told me that, and Wade Pfau has told me that. Wade talked about his feelings a LOT in the numerous e-mails that he sent to me that I have reported on here at the blog. Wade wants to be liked. That’s the story. He has seen that telling the truth about stock investing makes Buy-and-Holders hate him. And he wants no part of it. He wants to be liked. So he lies.
But he LOVED telling the truth back in the days when he thought he could get away with it. And Mike Piper would love to feel free to tell the truth if he thought he could get away with it. And J.D. Roth would love to feel free to tell the truth if he thought he could get away with it.
We need help from one big site or one big researcher or one big advisor or one big policymaker or one big economist or one big journalist or one big venture capitalist. Then it’s over. There is HUGE money waiting to be made telling the truth about stock investing. And, as the Buy-and-Hold Crisis worsens, more and more people are going to feel emboldened to tell the truth. And once they do, lots of others are going to join the party because it is those who tell the truth early who will win the biggest reputations for themselves and who will enjoy the biggest financial rewards.
There is nothing more pathetic in an intellectual debate than putting forward a death threat. There is nothing more pathetic than putting forward demands for unjustified board bannings. There is nothing more pathetic than putting forward tens of thousands of acts of defamation. There is nothing more pathetic than threatening an academic researcher for the “crime” of doing honest research.
Another way of saying it is — There is nothing more pathetic than Buy-and-Hold. There was a day when that was not so. But that is today’s reality. And the longer the cover-up continues, the more pathetic the plight of the Buy-and-Holders gets. Prison sentences. Huge financial liabilities. Destroyed reputations. The blame for causing the economic crisis. The blame for causing millions of failed retirements. These are the sorts of things the Buy-and-Holders bring on themselves with their continued abusive behavior today. And that stuff is as pathetic as pathetic gets, Anonymous.
Your high point in this debate was the morning of May 13, 2002. It got a little worse for you the next day. And then a little worse the day after that. And today it is a whole big bunch worse. The only thing worse than your predicament today is the predicament you will be in tomorrow. And the only thing worse than the predicament you will be in tomorrow will be the predicament you will be in following the next price crash. I wish you luck with that one, Anonymous. Please forgive me if I elect not to sign up with your Liar’s Club.
It can never get better for you. It can get a lot worse. But it can never get better. There’s an advantage that I gained from being on the right side of the History Train that you will never be able to enjoy again until you flip. Don’t blame me! I’ve been advising you to flip for 12 years now!
J.D. Roth will flip. Mike Piper will flip. Wade Pfau will flip (again). EVERYONE will flip. Because they ultimately have no choice. Buy-and-Hold is the greatest wealth-destruction engine ever concocted by the mind of mortal man. There are already millions of people hurting because of the wealth destruction already achieved by the Buy-and-Hold “idea” that investors need not exercise price discipline when buying stocks. There will be millions more following the next crash. At some point, the pain will have grown so great that there will be no choice but for all of us to flip.
Except for those of us who have been posting honestly all along. We don’t have to flip. We can just continue growing in our knowledge as time goes on. No flipping required. That’s one thing I like about telling the truth!
You have held back the future for a far longer time than I imagined possible, Anonymous. I give you that one. But I would never want to be in your shoes. Not in a billion years.
People who are working up the courage to tell the truth have a valuable resource with this site. I give them the articles they need and the calculators they need and the podcasts they need. I also teach them about the trickery of the Wall Street Con Men and their Internet Goon Squads. People who are afraid that the Wall Street Con Men are going to use their money and power to sue them can look at me and see that they don’t have the guts to pull the trigger. People who are looking to prove that the “defense” of Buy-and-Hold has become a massive case of financial fraud in recent years can point to THOUSANDS of proofs of the case in the materials at this site.
You want to show that Jack Bogle is in on the cover-up? The proof is in materials at this site. You want to show that Bill Bernstein is in on the cover-up? The proof is in materials at this site. You want to show that Wade Pfau is in on the cover-up? The proof is in materials at this site.
This site serves an important public policy purpose in presenting those materials for all the world to see, Anonymous. There are millions of middle-class people who are in the process of seeing their retirement plans destroyed. We are going to have to proceed with hundreds of thousands of civil lawsuits and perhaps hundreds of criminal financial-fraud cases following the next price crash. Having so much evidence collected in one place is a huge plus. We want to put the ugly stuff behind us as quickly as possible and thereby free ourselves to learn about all the wonderful research-based goodness that we should have begun exploring in depth 33 years ago.
J.D. Roth and Mike Piper and Wade Pfau won’t be afraid forever, Anonymous. Ruling though intimidation is a short-term strategy. I hate it that you have done so much damage to a country that I love. But I am proud that I worked up the courage to do a whole big bunch of good here. I intend to continue following the research-based path for a long time to come. (I thank my Buy-and-Hold friends for teaching me the importance of rooting one’s investing strategies in research back in the days when Buy-and-Hold was something more than a nasty marketing gimmick.)
My best wishes to you and yours, Anonymous. Please don’t worry too much about J.D. Roth and Mike Piper and Wade Pfau. They will work up the courage to post honestly as the Buy-and-Hold house of cards continues to collapse. All of us will. In the end, even you Goons will need to work up that courage.
Honest Goons! Imagine! Oh, my!
Rob
No, Rob, you are the issue. People do not love you. The FMF thread was very revealing. You just have trouble accepting the truth.
Many people hate me with a burning hate, Anonymous. Those are the people trying to “defend” Buy-and-Hold.
Others love me with an intense love. Take a look at the 200-plus endorsements of my work you see in the slider that appears at the top of every page of this site. No one else in the investing field has had that many people say things that kind about their work.
Why?
Why this great disparity of viewpoints?
Some of us want to move ahead. Some of us see that we are the luckiest generation of investors who ever lived because we are the first that has available to it all the magical insights of the Buy-and-Hold Pioneers PLUS all the magical insights that follow from Shiller’s “revolutionary” (his word) findings and the 33 years of peer-reviewed research that followed from them. Some of us think that it’s just great that we now know how to reduce the risk of stock investing by 70 percent while earning sufficiently higher returns to be able to retire five to ten years sooner than we ever before imagined possible.
And some of us want to remain stuck in the Dark Ages in which we were so ignorant of the realities of stock investing that we thought that there might be some magical, mystical alternate universe in which a Buy-and-Hold strategy might end up working out for one or two long-term investors. But even those people are not dumb or evil. You see them all the time dropping hints that Buy-and-Hold is a doomed strategy.
My good friend Jack Bogle himself does that. I didn’t work up the courage to advance my famous post of the morning of May 13, 2002, by reading Shiller. I did it by reading Bogle! I think it would be fair to say that, if Bogle is right that Reversion to the Mean is an “Iron Law” of stock investing (and he is), there is precisely zero chance that a retirement study that fails to account for the valuation level that applies on the day the retirement begins is going to get any of the numbers even roughly right. So I said just that. And all the wonderful insights that we have developed in the 12 years since naturally followed. It was Bogle who got these amazing discussions rolling, not Shiller! True fact.
You encourage hate. You encourage ignorance. You encourage deception. You encourage intimidation.
Yucko! Not this boy!
If you win, we all lose.
I encourage love. I encourage learning. I encourage humility. I encourage wealth-building.
That’s the spirit that built this country!
If I win, we all win.
Jack Bogle is on my side, Anonymous. He pretends to be a Lindauerhead today. But it ain’t in the man to stick with that long-term. If Bogle were as rotten a person as you suggest he is, he never would have included that language in his book about how Reversion to the Mean is an “Iron Law” of stock investing. That’s what you call a “tell.”
You have held back progress for 12 years. I certainly did not think it was possible that you could do that. And you did it. So I will grant you that the forces of hate are sometimes stronger than those who believe in the forces of love imagine them to be. Point for you.
But I’ve got Jack Bogle on my side in an ultimate sense. And Bill Bernstein. And Larry Swedroe. And Todd Tresidder. And J.D. Roth. And Scott Burns. And Wade Pfau. And on and on and on and on and on.
I’ve got the entire freakin’ country on my side in the long term!
Why the heck do you think we had our elected representativs enact laws against financial fraud? Why do you think we had them make that crime a felony? It was so people who engage in the sorts of tactics that you Goons have engaged in for 12 years now would end up in prison cells. No? And I think it would be fair to say that the gig is up on the day that your prison term is announced. That one is going to go viral if anything has ever gone viral. It’s all downhill sledding from that day forward.
The forces of love have already won this one. We won on Day Six, when John Walter Russell put forward his sensitivity analysis of the Greaney retirement study. We know now a whole big bunch more about how stock investing works than we knew then. But we knew then that at the bare minimum those studies should have had warnings attached to them. Any retirement study with that sort of sensitivity score is truly dangerous stuff. More and more people are saying that all the time. And, after the next price crash, I think it is fair to say that the floodgates will open.
There are people who truly hate me, Anonymous. I get that.
But there have been people who hated every huge advance ever achieved in the history of mankind. Huge advances shake up the established order. People who built careers pushing the smelly Buy-and-Hold garbage don’t want word about what the last 33 years of peer-reviewed research says getting out. Well, guess what? It’s going to get out anyway. There are too many people whose lives are in the process of being destroyed for it not to get out.
The forces of love win again!
Whoever would have thunk it?
All of those people will love me following the next crash. They have goodness inside them and they will feel 500 times better about themselves when they feel free to do honest work once again. You will love me following the next crash, Anonymous.
I have trouble accepting that we as a society are not capable of supplying people with better investing advice than the smelly garbage that the Wall Street Con Men and their Internet Goon Squads have been pumping out during the Buy-and-Hold years, Anonymous. Please put me down as “opposed” to further promotion of the smelly Get Rich Quick garbage. Please do what you can to spread that message all over the internet. I want everyone on the planet to think of me as the most severe critic of Buy-and-Hold alive today. Every little bit helps. I would be truly grateful for anything you can do.
Following the next crash, we will have an opportunity to talk this stuff over from a very different perspective. I look forward to the conversations that we will have at that time, my long-time abusive posting friend.
Hang in there, man.
Don’t let the bad guys get you down.
Rob
Others love me with an intense love. Take a look at the 200-plus endorsements of my work you see in the slider that appears at the top of every page of this site.
Take a look at the number of people on your own site defending you. If you had friends Rob, they’d be here.
My job is two-fold: (1) Get the truth out; and (2) Heal the wounds caused by the 12-year cover-up (it’s 33 years if we count back to when Shiller published his revolutionary research).
Hey whatever it takes to support your family…
Take a look at the number of people on your own site defending you. If you had friends Rob, they’d be here.
Not for so long as you Goons threaten to kill family members of anyone who posts honestly and not for so long as you Goons threaten to destroy the careers of any academic reseachers who publish honest research.
That garbage has to stop. Every citizen of the United States should be united in demanding an immediate stop to these obvious and massive acts of financial fraud.
We need Jack Bogle to stand up in front of a big room and condemn the behavior of Mel Linduaer and John Greaney and all who have posted in “defense” of them (a group that obviously includes Jack Bogle himself). When Bogle says the magic words “I’ and “Was” and “Wrong” (to defend Lindauer and Greaney), it’s all over.
The New York Times will write that up on the front page and the next day we will have thousands of academic researchers getting to work producing honest research and thousands of financial planners writing honest books and creating honest podcasts and hundreds of bloggers having honest discussions at their blogs and on and on and on.
People love the idea of giving honest investing advice. But they want to feel safe doing so.
I cannot make people feel safe by myself. I need the Wall Street Con Men to come out with a clear and firm and simple and clear announcement that, starting here and starting now, the Ban on Honest Posting has come to an end and from this point forward those who post honestly will not be destroyed but will be celebrated.
All good things follow from that, Anonymous. That’s how our system works.
We will have thousands and thousands and thousands of people posting daily at this site within days of Bogle’s speech. But it will not happen until then. People need to feel safe.
I hope that helps a bit, my long-time Goon pal.
Rob
Hey whatever it takes to support your family…
Supporting my family is a very important responsibility that has been placed on me, Anonymous.
But it is not the ONLY very important responsibility that has been placed on me.
Say that a man with a family is drafted to serve in a war. To support his family, he should stay out of the line of fire. But if his superior orders him to put his life at risk, he has a responsibility to follow those orders. It is a hard truth. But it is an important truth as well.
This is the mistake that Wade Pfau made. Wade did wonderful, amazing work. His work was worthy of a Nobel prize. But when you Goons threatened to destroy his career and when he saw that Jack Bogle supported your efforts, he got scared. He thought about his duty to support his two children and he rationalized joining up with you Goons because he did not feel good about giving up his only means of providing for those two small children.
I obviously sympathize. I obviously believe that Wade was done a great injustice.
But he was NOT in the right to join up with you Goons and thereby to strengthen the forces that have caused the economic crisis and that are fighting so hard to extend it far into the future.
I believe that, working together, Wade and I could have gotten our research written up on the front page of the New York Times and brought down the Buy-and-Hold Mafia and brought the economic crisis to a swift termination. Wade should have directed his energies to that end.
If he felt that the investing advice field had grown so corrupt during the Buy-and-Hold Era that there was zero hope that it could ever be cleaned up (he obviously did believe this), then the only reasonable option left to him was to leave this field of endeavor and find some other means of making a living.
Had he done that, he would not have committed the crime of financial fraud.
Now it may well be that he will not be PROSECUTED for the crime of financial fraud. It may well be that people will look at how hard he worked to set things right and decide that prosecution is not needed or appropriate in his case. I have no problem with such a decision. But it is not for me to say. It is for the millions of middle-class people whose lives are in the process of being destroyed by the criminal acts of the Buy-and-Hold Mafia to say.
But you can’t just say “Hey! I need to support my family! So it is okay for me to put up posts in “defense” of Mel Linduaer and John Greaney and Jack Bogle!”
Um — No.
That doesn’t fly.
No way, no how.
All who work in this field have an obligation to post HONESTLY. All of us who know about the errors that were made in the Old School safe-withdrawal-rate studies have an obligation to direct our energies toward getting those studies corrected by the close of business today. Or else we need to find some other means of making a living.
That’s my sincere take re these terribly important matters, in any event.
Rob
You can lie to yourself and others about your silly goon stories, but it hasnt gotten you anywhere because it doesn’t line up with the facts. After 12 years, it has only resulting in you making a complete fool out of yourself.
Let’s see how things go following the next price crash.
Fair enough, Anonymous?
Rob
Nothing will happen for you following the next price crash Rob. You might actually get into the market this time around same as everyone else who is using buy, hold, and rebalance. But who knows maybe you will be too scared or not follow your own system again. I can’t imagine you have much of a nest egg left after 18 years of 3% returns and no income unless you got an inheritance of some sort.
Meanwhile, the rest of us, who have experienced triple digit returns in the last few years will continue locking in large portions of that run up by rebalancing and making our portfolios more conservative as we age. After all you have been calling for a crash for years and it hasn’t happened so who’s to say we won’t experience a few more years of great returns and locked in profit via rebalancing before the inevitable crash.
What makes you think this time around will be any different from the last crash? Your position as nothing more than a complete laughing stock in the realm of the financial world will remain. There are plenty of other people calling for a crash without your conspiracy theory lunacy.
Why are other people calling for a crash if the “science” of Buy-and-Hold is settled, Anonymous?
Buy-and-Hold says that price changes are random. If price changes are random, you can’t predict crashes. Are these people you refer to who are saying these things doing so in defiance of the “science”?
The Buy-and-Holders had a wonderful idea of rooting investing advice in peer-reviewed research. That’s what I love about them. That’s why I was a Buy-and-Holder myself until Greaney threatened to kill my wife and children and 200 people who had long considered themselves friends of mine endorsed his post. A strategy that causes people to do things like that ain’t science. So I gave it up on that day and the rest is history.
The Buy-and-Holders were right in the early days when they were serious about the idea of using research to support their advice. They betrayed their own vision when Shiller published his “revolutionary” (his word) research and they failed to incorporate his findings into their model (That’s what Valuation-Informed Indexing is — Buy-and-Hold updated to reflect the peer-reviewed research of the past 33 years as well as what came before it). I have just taken the vision of the Buy-and-Holders to the next step. Valuation-Informed Indexing is an updated version of Buy-and-Hold, one that actually works in the real world.
There are two reasons why the Wall Street Con Men have not adopted the necessary changes. One is a phony pride. They are Big Shots and they don’t like the idea of saying the words “I” and “Was” and “Wrong.” The other is money. Al of us humans possess a weak human nature that is drawn to Get Rich Quick strategies. Buy-and-Hold is (inadvertently, not intentionally — but still) the purest and most dangerous Get Rich Quick scheme ever concocted by the human mind. So it is possesses an amazing short-term appeal and has brought in billions of dollars of profits to the Wall Street Con Men while destroying the lives of millions of middle-class investors and taking us down a path that ends with our economic system reduced to a smoking ruin.
I want no part of any of that. No part whatsoever. My dream is to become known all over the internet as the most severe critic of Buy-and-Hold who ever walked Planet Earth. I think I’ve got a pretty darn good start on success re that particular project. No?
That makes me unpopular today. So be it, you know? A field in which honesty about what the peer-reviewed research says is banned as the first order of business is a field re which I prefer to be on the outside looking in for the time being.
People lose interest in Get Rich Quick schemes when they lose most of their accumulated life savings as a result off being tricked into following them. Look at what happened with investors in the Madoff fund. They sang the guy’s praises until they lost all their money. Then they demanded that he be imprisoned for his acts of financial fraud. I think it would be fair to say that our mutual friend Jack Bogle is Bernie Madoff times 5,000 when you consider the number of human lives he has destroyed with his support for Mel Lindauer and John Greany and the individuals who have seen fit to post in “defense” of these two.
There will be hundreds of thousands of lawsuits filed following the next price crash when people learn about the trickery that was employed to separate them from their money. There will be thousands of people being led off to prison cells. I will put in a word for you. I will point out the pressures that people like Wade Pfau and Bill Bernstein and my good friend Jack Bogle faced. I will make every effort in the world to be fair and then something even a bit more than just fair.
But I ain’t interested in going to prison along with you. No friggin’ way. Find someone else, you know? It’s not on my bucket list.
I’ll help the people bringing lawsuits against you and I’ll help you too. I have sympathies on both sides and so I will put forward what words I can to help both sides. That’s how I have been playing it for 12 years now and that’s how I will continue to play it for the next 12 billion. That’s me. But I would have to change my entire personality to be able to join you in this massive act of financial fraud. That’s a change that I am not capable of considering much less implementing. Please count me out re that smelly pile of garbage, old friend.
If you really were confident that you were not going to land in a prison cell, you would not be posting here on a daily basis. You know that, I know that, and anyone with half a grain of sense in his or her head who reads these pages now or at some later date knows that or will know that.
Keep posting if you like.
Or stop if you like.
Do whatever works for you.
Please just know that I don’t do financial fraud. One of my aims today is to have thousands and thousands of posts in the files making that point so that there is precisely zero confusion re this point in the minds of every single person who comes here to check the matter out.
I wish you well, man. But that’s where things stand.
Why will the next crash be worse than the last? Because people had excess funds when the last one hit. They felt that they could get through it by tightening their belts. Now people are fatigued by the economic crisis and they feel that they have already taken all the financial pain that they can take. This one will hurt much more. That’s why the P/E10 level will drop so much lower. That’s why you and all the other Buy-and-Holders will be selling this time. It’s only when the Buy-and-Hold zealots sell that a secular bear market hits bottom and that we finally gain the ability to start turning things in a positive direction.
It’s about psychology, man. The psychology and the economics go together. Bad psychology brings a bad economy and bad economics brings a bad psychology. It all feeds on itself. In the background is the Buy-and-Hold/Get Rich Quick garbage, which starts off all the bad stuff by persuading people to believe in fantasy worlds for which there are zero support in the peer-reviewed research of the past 33 years. When a society borrows trillions of dollars from its future, it causes a big heap of pain for a big bunch of people. All of the debt taken out on all the credit cards owned in this country doesn’t match the debt we incurred as a result of the lies about the peer-reviewed research told to us by the “experts” touting the Buy-and-Hold garbage.
Please let it be noted that I do not say that you INTENDED to cause this economic crisis. I don’t believe that. I believe that on one level of consciousness you really believe in Buy-and-Hold. But you have doubts. You lack confidence. That’s why my reports of what the last 33 years of peer-reviewed research says drive you crazy.
And the same is of course true of Bogle and Burns and Bernstein and all the others. I don’t believe that Bogle is the Frank Underwood of Personal Finance. That’s why I believe so strongly that his heart will melt following the next crash. Once Jack’s heart melts, I will be working with him to set things right. And you have my pledge that I will do everything in my power to get your (and his!) prison sentence reduced to the extent possible even then.
That’s the best offer that I can make to you, my old friend. The financial fraud stuff is just not my particular cup of tea.
I hope that all helps at least a tiny bit.
My best wishes to you and yours.
Rob
If you want to be known as the most severe critic of buy and hold that is fine.
That’s good to hear.
Hang in there, man.
Rob
You overestimate the amount of people who actually subscribe to buy and hold. It is only a smallish portion of all the money in the market and a depressingly low number of average adults implement it.
There is only one element of the Buy-and-Hold Model that is wrong, Anonymous. That’s the part that says that it is not necessary for investors to practice price discipline when buying stocks (that is, to practice long-term timing).
90 percent of investors fail to practice price discipline (long-term timing). If that were not the case, we could not possibly be at the price levels we are at today. Market prices are self-regulating so long as investors practice price discipline. We obviously are not regulating ourselves properly today.
What you are getting at is that many people do not implement OTHER aspects of the Buy-and-Hold Model. For example, many practice short-term timing, which the research shows doesn’t work. That makes things worse! The Buy-and-Holders only got one thing wrong (they didn’t say that it is necessary to always, always, always practice long-term timing). The fact that many investors don’t even implement the good aspects of Buy-and-Hold is just more evidence of how much emotion affects the stock investing project. The good aspects of Buy-and-Hold have stood the test of time for 50 years now.
When I say that I want to become known as the most severe critic of Buy-and-Hold who ever lived, I obviously don’t mean that I intend to criticize the many things that the Buy-and-Holders got right. If I were criticizing those things, I obviously wouldn’t have incorporated them into the Valuation-Informed Indexing model.
I am criticizing the failure of the Buy-and-Holders to correct the error that was uncovered by the peer-reviewed research 33 years ago. The harm done by that error cancels out all the good that would otherwise have been done by the many genuine powerful insights that the Buy-and-Holders have put forward.
Buy-and-Hold was rooted in something very, very, very positive. We all should be grateful that the Buy-and-Holders took us out of the Dark Ages. But they messed up when they became too proud to acknowledge a mistake. When you root your strategy in the peer-reviewed research, you must keep up with the research and make corrections in your initial, tentative thoughts as needed. This the Buy-and-Holders have failed to do for 33 years now. It is that refusal to acknowledge a mistake that is the focus of my criticism of what Buy-and-Hold has become in recent years.
Buy-and-Hold started as science. There is no one in the world who believes more strongly in the original vision of the Buy-and-Holders to turn investing advice into a science than does Rob Bennett. All of the work that I have done for 12 years is an effort to get Buy-and-Hold back on the right track, the track on which it was initiated. Bogle has betrayed that vision. I have remained true to it. If you go by what Buy-and-Hold stood for in the days when it was first advanced, I am the true Buy-and-Holder today and my good friend Jack Bogle is an imposter.
Buy-and-Hold, as originally conceived, is about research. It is not about death threats and unjustified board bannings and tens of thousands of acts of defamation and threats to get academic researchers fired from their jobs. My Buy-and-Hold friends insult and degrade themselves and their investing strategy when they associate with individuals engaging in such abusive practices.
I believe in research-based strategies. I believe in what Buy-and-Hold once was and no longer is today. I believe in Valuation-Informed Indexing, the first TRUE research-based strategy. I believe in Buy-and-Hold CORRECTED to reflect the peer-reviewed research of the past 33 years as well as the research that came before Robert Shiller’s “revolutionary” (his word) finding of 1981.
I hope that helps a bit Anonymous.
Rob