Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently posted to the discussion thread for one of my columns at the Value Walk site:
You remind me of the George Costanza character from the Seinfeld show. Maybe you could do what George did, which is doing the opposite of what you are thinking and then that will help you become successful.
I understand that you mean that as a put-down, Sammy. The curious reality is that, looking at things from the perspective of a Buy-and-Holder, Valuation-Informed Indexers really do live in Opposite World.
It is the core beliefs of the two models that are different. When you start from a different core belief, every strategic decision ends up in a different place.
Buy-and-Holders believe that the market is efficient. It follows that the idea that the market could ever be mispriced is pure silliness. Thus, stocks offer the same value proposition at all times. Timing can never work. That all follows.
Valuation-Informed Indexers believe that valuations affect long-term returns. It follow that stock investing risk is not static but variable. Investors MUST practice long-term timing to have any hope whatsoever of keeping their risk profiles roughly constant.
We live in opposite worlds. In ordinary circumstances, that would be fine. But in this case, the Buy-and-Holders got to the top of the hill first and have for the past 35 years used their dominance to block millions of investors from learning about the other universe of stock investing strategies.
If the Buy-and-Holders are wrong about their core belief (that is, if the market really is not efficient and if valuations really do affect long-term returns), 95 percent of the stock investing advice that millions of people have heard over the past 35 years is in error.
Imagine what would happen if this were the case in any other field. If doctors were still bleeding patients today, the medical field would be a big mess.
This is why we are all enduring an economic crisis today. We learned 35 years ago that everything that we once thought we knew about how stock investing works is wrong and the Buy-and-Holders have intimidated into silence those trying to get the word out.
Yowsa!
Rob
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