Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently posted to the discussion thread for another blog entry at this site:
This is a 56 word title, and it’s not even a particularly long one for you. Also, this is your second post of the day. Didn’t you used to take weekends and holidays off and limit yourself to one new post per day?
In ordinary circumstances, there would have been a headline at some point saying “Buy-and-Hold Retirement Studies Do Not Contain Valuation Adjustments” and then everyone working in this field would have pulled together and addressed the problem. That was the message of my famous May 13, 2002, post. But we have not pulled together and solved the problem. So we are in this strange twilight-zone world today in which it is public knowledge that the Buy-and-Hold retirement studies do not contain valuation adjustments and yet those studies have not been corrected.
Most of the short-headline blog entries that can be written about these matters have already been written. In the blog I document my conversations with the Goons. Those conversations reveal insights as to WHY we have not all pulled together to correct the discredited studies and to do all the other things that we need to do to get accurate and honest and informed investing advice out to millions of people. I don’t control how those insights are delivered to us. They are delivered via conversations with our Goon friends. I feature at the blog the conversations that have something of value to those trying to understand what has been going on. Sometimes I need to quote a good number of words from one of those conversations to make clear the point being revealed. So that’s what I do.
It’s an unusual procedure. But this entire matter is out of the norm. Given the circumstances we all face here, I think that this approach makes sense. The headlines that I choose are usually quotes from the conversation that sum up a point that either has not been made before or that has not been examined from the same particular angle before. I would prefer to tell the story with the usual sorts of headlines. But it wouldn’t work to post a new blog entry each day saying “It Has Been Shown for the 500th Time That the Buy-and-Hold Retirement Studies Really, Really, Really Do Not Contain Valuation Adjustments.” That’s the news that we need to act on. But as a society we have not acted in an effective way as of today. So I use these longer headlines to reveal points that need to be revealed for us all over time to come to an understanding of WHY we have not acted. I believe that we will be taking all these points into consideration in the days following the next price crash, when we can all see before us the downside of failing to act on reports that the Buy-and-Hold retirement studies do not contain valuation adjustments.
I hope that helps a small bit, Carl.
Yes, I used to put up one post each business day. I think that’s plenty. There have been more Goon conversations revealing something of value in recent months and I have fallen behind on posting about the ones that I need to post about. So I have temporarily adopted a practice of having two posts per day seven days per week until I get caught up. I followed a similar practice in the days after Wade Pfau flipped, when I had lots of blog entries examining what had happened and I fell far behind. It is usually possible to report on what needs to be reported with one blog entry each business day. But when things get to a point where I am several months behind re the posting of new blog entries, I feel that I need to make a change in the ordinary practice before things get too out of hand.
At one point I had fallen to about three months behind. As a result of the new posting schedule, I am now about five weeks behind. My intent is to return to the five-posts-per-week schedule when I get caught up.
Please take good care.
Rob
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