Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently posted to another blog entry at this site:
I’m not worried about the quality of your contributions. Personal anecdotes are gold. People relate to personal anecdotes. This stuff doesn’t have to be complicated. The Wall Street Con Men try to make it sound complicated because that’s a good way to make a sale — intimidate people with big words and they feel that they need to listen to the “guru.” Yuck! People need to understand what they are doing to stick with a plan for the long term. We need simple, plain talk.
There’s no rule here that you need to understand or endorse Valuation-Informed Indexing. I love to hear from Buy-and-Holders so long as they adhere to basic rules of human civility. They keep me honest. And they teach me things that I otherwise might miss. Buy-and-Holders are very welcomed here. And of course followers of all other strategies are welcomed. And people who have no loyalties to any strategies and who just prefer to ask questions or to ponder possibilities are warmly welcomed. So that is not an issue either.
There are THOUSANDS of things we can talk about at the board.
You are correct in your suggestion that, once you describe the strategy, there is not much more to be said about what works from one way of looking at things. The strategy can be summed up in two words — Price Matters. That’s pretty much it. It’s common sense. All the peer-reviewed research shows that this is so. So what else is there to say beyond those two words?
Have you ever gone to Edmunds.com before buying a car? They provide information about the fair price of the car so that you can negotiate more effectively. I see this site as being the Edmunds.com of personal finance. In a perfect world, we could just tell people “Price Matters” and that would be the end of it. In the fallen world we live in, things tend to get a bit more complicated than that. The Buy-and-Holders have come up with THOUSANDS of tricks to take people’s eyes off the ball and to cause them to ignore the “Price Matters” injunction. We should be trying to describe the tricks for people so that they are not taken in by them. That’s a big job given how the Wall Street Con Men operate today!
Thanks for your post. We will see how things go. I much relate to the words you posted above re how this is not just about money. People spend much of their lives saving the money they need to finance a retirement and people in this field should show some respect for that reality. I hope that, as we explore things more deeply over time, we will come to think of each other as friends.
Please take good care until you have some time free to pay us another visit, Canuck.
Rob
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