Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently posted to the discussion thread for another blog entry:
“It is my view that the length of time that re have remained at high prices is the biggest piece of evidence suggesting that I might be wrong. ”
Might? I think you now realized you have been wrong all this time. It is time for you to give your “I was wrong” speech.
Everyone should question Valuation-Informed Indexing. I stand by that one 100 percent.
Everyone should also question Buy-and-Hold. I stand by that one 100 percent too.
It is by questioning our ideas and the ideas of others that we learn. And learning is the one true free lunch in this world. So I am a big-time advocate.
I don’t think i should offer any apologies. Because I have always said that people shouldn’t believe in Valuations-Informed Indexing just because I advocate it. I have always said that anyone who does that has a screw loose. And because I have raised a lot of good questions about Buy-and-Hold. Which is good for Buy-and-Hold. Those questions can either cause Buy-and-Holders to make needed adjustments, which would be a plus. Or it can cause Buy-and-Holders to come to a stronger belief in Buy-and-Hold because they have seen it survive more challenges, which would also be a plus.
So there is nothing to apologize for. Asking questions is a good thing for everyone concerned. I am here to help. So I ask questions. I ask the hardest questions that I can think of. And I offer no apologies whatsoever for doing so.
It is your best friends who challenge you with questions about your beliefs, Anonymous. True fact.
Or so Rob Bennett sincerely believes, in any event.
Rob
Buy, hold and rebalance has had a track record of successful outcomes. VII has not. There is no contest, nor is there a debate. Having trouble understanding? It is like comparing a drug that has been used in patients for years showing successful patients versus a drug that hasn’t even reached experimental status.
I don”t agree, Anonymous.
Wade Pfau and I co-authored research that we had published in a peer-reviewed journal that shows that Valuation-Informed Indexing has been far superior to Buy-and-Hold for as far back as we have good records of stock prices. Investors who are open to practicing price discipline when they purchase stocks thereby reduce the risk of stock investing by 70 percent. That ain’t nothing.
And you Goons realize how important the Bennett/Pfau research is. That’s why you threatened to get Wade fired from his job if he continued doing honest work in this field. If you thought that you could prevail in a reasoned debate, you never would have crossed the felony line. You did it because you believe that you are boxed in by the last 38 years of peer-reviewed research in this field. I mean, come on.
I don’t agree that the Buy-and-Hold drug has been successful given that it has brought on an economic crisis on each of the four times in U.S. history when it became popular. Success would be NOT causing an economic crisis. Call me madcap but that’s my sincere take.
And I don’t agree that Valuation-Informed Indexing has not reached experimental status. It might have been reasonable to have said that in 1980. But once Shiller’s “revolutionary” (his word) research showing that valuations affect long-term returns was published in a peer-reviewed journal, Valuation-Informed Indexing became one of the two models for understanding how stock investing works that are respected by the academic community. And any doubts re that point were removed when Shiller was awarded a Nobel prize for his work in 2013.
The only thing holding us back today is the criminal behavior of you Goons. And I believe that we are going to see you sent to prison cells in the days following the next price crash. That one is going to go viral and change the world. After your prison sentence is announced, every investing site on the internet is going to be opened to honest posting re the last 38 years of peer-reviewed research in this field and we will all live better lives from that point forward. Good for all of us, you know?
I naturally wish you all the best that this life has to offer a person, my dear Goon friend.
Non-Proven-Drug-Pushing Rob
There is not a single line of truth in anything you wrote.
Okay.
Rob
If any of it was true, you would post links backing it up (links that are not just to your comments at your website).
If you drop the criminal stuff, you will have people at hundreds of sites discussing what the last 38 years of peer-reviewed research teaches us all about how stock investing works in the real world. You’ll have links coming out of your ears.
The rub is that you have to drop the criminal stuff for that to happen. I believe that you will drop the criminal stuff when you are prosecuted. And I believe that you will be prosecuted when millions of people experience a price crash that takes away more than 50 percent of their life savings.
At that point, everything will move forward. I wish we didn’t have to wait. But I only get one vote. So we are where we are.
I wish you the best of luck with it. I hope that that helps at least a tiny bit.
One-Vote Rob
And if you had links to that criminal stuff (other than your comments at your website), you would have posted them. You can’t because it never happened and doesn’t exist.
Set forth below are 45 comments from Wade Pfau. Wade is a respected academic researcher. He holds a Ph.D. in Economics. Wade made the comments in e-mails that he sent to me during the 16 months in which we were working together on our research showing that Valuation-Informed Indexing is superior to Buy-and-Hold (our research was published in a peer-reviewed journal). Wade will not comment today on the many things he said at the time because of your criminal acts (extortion is a crime). But I have a funny feeling that he will testify honestly when he is called to testify at your trial in the days following the next price crash. And then your conviction will be written up on the front page of the New York Times. And then every site on the internet will feel safe permitting honest posting on the last 38 years of peer-reviewed research in this field. And we all will have links coming out of our ears.
We’ll see.
A) Academic Researcher Wade Pfau’s Statements Showing Interest In and Confidence in Rob Bennett’s Work
1) “I do cite you and John Walter Russell in my paper as the earliest and strongest advocates of this approach [New School safe-withdrawal-rate research].
2) “Are you aware of Shiller offering asset allocation advice based on PE10? …. If you read Rob Bennett’s stuff carefully, I think he did provide an important contribution in terms of describing a way for PE10 to guide asset allocation for long-term conservative investors. I also think he was right on the issue of safe withdrawal rates.” — Posted at the Bogleheads Forum discussion board.
3) “I am also extremely grateful to Rob Bennett for motivating this topic and contributing his experience and encouragement.” — Written in Acknowledgments section of Wade’s breakthrough research paper.
4)”You deserve much of the credit as the whole idea of Valuation-Informed Indexing belongs to you.”
5) “I definitely need to cite some of your work as the founder of Valuation-Informed Indexing, as I have not found anyone else who can lay claim to that. Shiller pointed out the predictive power of PE10 but never discussed how to incorporate it into asset allocation, as far as I know.”
B) Academic Researcher Wade Pfau’s Statements on the Superiority of Valuation-Informed Indexing Over Buy-and-Hold
1) “What you see in the top part of the graph for each year is the amount of wealth accumulated after 30 years for someone following Buy-and-Hold against someone following Valuation-Informed Indexing….Valuation-Informed Indexing provides more wealth for 102 of the 110 rolling 30-year periods, while Buy-and-Hold did better in 8 of the periods.”
2) “I will take steps in my final paper to test a wide variety of assumptions about asset allocation, valuation-based decision rules, whether the period is 10, 20, 30, or 40 years, lump-sum vs. dollar-cost averaging, and so on, and to show that the results are quite robust to changes in any of these assumptions.”
3) “Any data mining that I am doing is in favor of buy-and-hold, not in favor of market timing.”
4) “The findings for “market timing” are so robust anyway, that it hardly matters how we do it.”
5) “The maximum drawdown from market timing is much less. That is how far the portfolio drops from past highs to current lows. The Buy-and-Holder once experienced a 60.96% drop, whereas the worst drop for market timing was 24.16%.”
6) “Market timing provides signficantly higher returns at a comparable level of risk.”
7) “The market timer enjoys a far less risky strategy.”
8) “On a risk-adjusted basis, market-timing strategies provide comparable returns as a 100 percent stocks Buy-and-Hold strategy but with substantially less risk. Meanwhile, market timing provides comparable risks and the same average asset allocation as a 50/50 fixed allocation strategy, but with much higher returns.”
9) “If everyone increased exposure after a market fall and vice versa, then this would dampen out the big swings in the market aggregates, and we might get shallower boom/bust cycles.”
10) ““‘I’m excited about this, as depending on what you have already done, I think I can design a study using the Shiller data to provide historical simulations of Valuation-Informed Indexing strategies against fixed Buy-and-Hold strategies and also lifecycle strategies (declining allocation to stocks as one ages). If Valuation-Informed Indexing consistently outperforms fixed and lifecycle strategies, then the proof is in the pudding so to speak. Given how well valuations help to explain withdrawal rates, I think there is a lot of potential for this topic.”
11) “Yes, Virginia, Valuation-Informed Indexing Works!”
12) “It makes complete sense to have an equity allocation that is in some way flexible. Having a completely inelastic demand for equities is a bit bonkers; no-one acts that way with life’s other important commodities.”
13) “I wrote up the programs to test your Valuation-Informed Indexing strategies against Buy-and-Hold, and I must say that the results look very promising…. I am quite excited about the findings so far. As you say in the podcast, Valuation-Informed Indexing should beat Buy-and-Hold about 90 percent of the time, and I am getting results that support this for various strategies.”
14) “I have been toying with the idea of sending the paper to the Journal of Finance, which is the most prestigious journal in academic finance.”
15) “Now that I am accounting for risk, I am even more amazed by how well Valuation-Informed Indexing works.”
16) You shouldn’t be too excited with great wealth accumulations if they happened due to unusually high valuations, and low wealth accumulations shouldn’t be as scary if valuations are also quite low.”
17) “My idea is to show many different tables with results over the whole period for returns and risks. Valuation-Informed Indexing always provides more returns for often less risk.”
18) “No matter what I try, Valuation-Informed Indexing will still perform better in 85-95% of cases for 30 years.”
19) “I have a new figure for showing this as well. And a nice figure showing the outperformance percentages across rolling periods of lengths between 1 and 40 years. I think it is all quite persuasive.”
20) “You haven’t seen anything yet! This was just the secondary study. I’m still working on the main one!”
C) Academic Researcher Wade Pfau’s Statements of Incredulity That He Was the First Academic Researcher to Examine the Valuation-Informed Indexing Strategy
1) ” I know that there is an extensive literature about the predictability of long-term stock returns dating back to Campbell and Shiller’s work in the mid-1990s. I also know that there is an extensive literature about short-term market timing strategies…. But my question is about LONG-TERM market timing strategies. In other words, using market timing over periods of at least 10 years to obtain better returns than a Buy-and-Hold strategy. The literature seems slim.”
2) “Let me just explain a bit more why I posted about this here. Valuation-Informed Indexing has had critics for years, but until Norbert did it in 2008, nobody seemed to have provided a serious investigation of it. I just couldn’t understand why. And that bothered me.”
3) “Two papers by Fisher and Statman are still all I can find that provide evidence against long-term market timing.”
4) “I’m so confused by why Fisher and Statman didn’t consider risk in their idiot switching tests. Valuation-Informed Indexing is much less risky by pretty much any standard I consider. I must wonder… did I make a mistake somewhere? Why haven’t academics already published research about this?”
D) Academic Researcher Wade Pfau’s Statements on the Dangers of the Conventional Retirement Planning Advice
1) “The traditional approach to retirement planning (as described on pages 10 and 11 of The Bogleheads’ Guide to Retirement Planning, for example) is counterproductive and possibly damaging.”
2) “Retirees now frequently base their retirement decisions on the portfolio success rates found in research such as the Trinity study…. This is not the information that current and prospective retirees need for making their withdrawal rate decisions.”
3) “This article provides favorable evidence based on the historical record for long-term conservative investors to obtain improved retirement planning outcomes (lower savings rates, higher withdrawal rates) using valuation-based asset allocation strategies.”
4) Wade sent me a link to an article in Business Week that was published more than eight years after my post pointing out the errors in the Old School retirement studies and which he characterized as “quite sympathetic to the point you were trying to make all along”.
5) “Though I was only trying to do an Old School safe-withdrawal-rate study, all that I ended up doing was showing in a different way what you had been saying all along: the safe withdrawal rate changes with valuations.”
6) “Valuations are the driving factor. ”
7) “This is similar to your drunk driving analogy, which I agree with.” The discredited but uncorrected retirement studies find that in most circumstances a 4 percent withdrawal rate provides a huge cushion for the retiree using it. However, in each of the three cases in history when stocks reached insanely high price levels, retirements using a 4 percent withdrawal came within a whisker of failing. To say that this shows that a 4 percent withdrawal is “100 percent safe” (these words are used in the Greaney study) for a retirement beginning at a time of insanely high price levels is like saying that driving drunk is “100 percent safe” because 97 sober drivers drove their cars 20 miles without incident while 3 drunk drivers were paralyzed for life in car accidents but did not die. The fact that 4 percent only worked by a whisker in the cases in which valuations were high at the beginning of the retirement shows that a 4 percent withdrawal is high-risk at times of high valuations, not that it is “100 percent safe.”
8) ” Actually, this issue shouldn’t really even be all that controversial. It’s just common sense that the probabilities from the Trinity study shouldn’t be interpreted as forward-looking probabilities for new retirees.”
9) Naturally, I am finding that Valuation-Informed Indexing can allow you to reach a wealth target with a lower savings rate, use a higher withdrawal rate, and also have a lower “safe” savings rate, than a fixed allocation.
E) Academic Researcher Wade Pfau’s Statements Showing His Concerns that Continuing to Report Honestly on the Investing Realities in the Face of the “Hostile Environment” for Doing So Created by Buy-and-Holders Would Harm His Career
1) “I was trying to pay tribute to your accomplishments in what I knew would be a hostile environment.”
2) “Valuations and long-term investors is a somewhat controversial topic.” Wade posted these words to his blog in October 2011 as his explanation of why he was abandoning his plan of doing further research on the superiority of Valuation-Informed Indexing strategies over Buy-and-Hold strategies. He had told me in earlier days that “You ain’t see nothing yet!” when I praised his breakthrough research in this area. After his flip to the dark side, Wade removed the page containing this blog entry from his site.
3) “We have both read and met to discuss your paper. Unfortunately, we did not find the paper’s incremental contribution to the academic finance literature, assuming the analysis proved to be correct, rose to the level that we are seeking for papers in the JFR. Thus sending the paper to a reviewer would be inefficient.” These words are from an academic journal’s “desk reject” of Wade’s breakthrough research.
4) ) ““ I was discouraged when I first received the “desk reject” by the editors of the same journal that published the Fisher and Statman paper. I realized that I didn’t have a chance with one of the top journals.”
5) “I think I should stay publicly quiet for a while, as I really don’t want anyone sending messages about any topics to officials at my university.”
6) I don’t want them [the Goons] working behind the scenes to derail me.”
7) “I did warn the editor of the Journal of Financial Planning that they may receive some ‘hate mail‘ after I mentioned your name in the safe savings rate paper.”
These posts have been answered thousands of times. You have learned absolutely nothing.
I still believe that the retirement study posted at John Greaney’s web site lacks an adjustment for the valuation level that applies on the day the retirement begins, that much is fair to say. It was my claim to that effect that set this whole thing off on the morning of May 13, 2002, and I still believe that to this day. So you are right in a sense that I have “learned nothing.” I still believe today what I believed then re this critical matter.
Price discipline.
That is what is lacking in Buy-and-Hold.
If you publish retirement studies showing that the safe withdrawal rate changes when we see changes in the price of stocks, you have price discipline. And it is price discipline that makes markets work. So, if your model for understanding how stock investing works gives proper attention to price discipline, everything falls into place.
If you do not have price discipline, everything goes to pieces. If the effect of price is the most important factor that needs to be considered when setting one’s stock allocation and you ignore price in your calculations, you are going to get every calculation wrong. If the core job of the market is to get the price right and you encourage participants in the market to ignore price, sooner or later prices are going to crash because there is no other way for the market to do its job but to crash prices. Crashes don’t just happen, we bring them on when we come to believe in Buy-and-Hold strategies.
That’s my sincere take in any event, Anonymous.
I naturally wish you all the best that this life has to offer a person.
Slow Learning Rob
The John Greaney issue has also been explained to you thousands of times as well.
You say you want a “discussion”. Far from it. You want to make your comments and then for people to say “We agree with you, Rob”. The problem is that people did not agree with you, so you kept repeating the same things. Eventually, people grew tired of it, and your behavior in how you handled it, so they had no choice but to ban you.
I want the people who agree with me to say “I agree with you, Rob.” And I want the people who do not agree with me to say “I do not agree with you, Rob.” And I want the people in the middle to say “I agree with you in part and I disagree with you in part, Rob.”
The problem is that the Buy-and-Holders outnumber the Valuation-Informed Indexers by 10 to 1. So they feel that they can get away with insanely abusive behavior, including in some cases criminal behavior. Those in the 10 percent object from time to time. But in general people do not like to expose themselves to the absolutely insane stuff (like death threats). So lots of people who would never engage in the sorts of behavior that we see from you Goons TOLERATE that behavior when they see you engage in it. And civil, reasoned discussion becomes impossible.
Our laws against financial fraud and against extortion and against threats of physical violence serve an important purpose. So long as those laws are respected, there are ways for new ideas to come on the scene and to gradually over time become more popular and eventually to replace the old ideas. We have not seen that happen in the 38 years since Shiller published his “revolutionary” (his word) Nobel-prize-winning research findings showing that valuations affect long-term returns. That has hurt all of us. It is a national tragedy. It is a shame.
The question that remains on the table is — When millions of people lose more than 50 percent of their life savings, will there be enough people who work up the courage to stand up to you Goons and to thereby launch the national debate that in an ideal world would have been launched 38 years ago? I think that that is how this will play out. I think that we are a good people and I think that, when the chips are down, we will do the right thing. There’s a big difference between knowing as a theoretical matter that Buy-and-Hold is a big pile of smelly garbage and seeing in a real-world sense what it has done to all your friends and neighbors and co-workers and fellow community members.
So I believe that this story will have a happy ending. And I believe that Shiller’s huge leap forward will be so liberating and enriching for all of us that we will in not too much time put our memories of the ugly stuff behind us. That stuff doesn’t amount to much in the grand scheme of things compared to the thousands of life-affirming insights into how stock investing works that we will all be able to mine together once we give ourselves permission to talk honestly about this stuff (not just in published rules but in a practical, real-world sense too).
We’ll see, you know?
I could be wrong. I thought that Greaney’s Campaign of Terror against us would last all of two days, three days tops, before we would pull together to bring it to a full and complete stop. I think it would be fair to say that the joke turned out to be on me re that one. But I believe that the story will have a happy ending all the same. We are all just going to have to wait to see how things play out in the days following the next price crash to know for certain.
I wish you the best of luck with it, Anonymous. I look forward to enjoying a few cold ones with you when we both make it to the other side of The Big Black Mountain and are laughing together about the stuff that went down in the old days. I wouldn’t be too surprised if we ended up being on the same side at that time, you know? But we are just going to have to wait a bit to find out for sure.
My best wishes.
Goon Pal Rob
Your response just proves my point.
Okay.
I do wish you all good things, in any event, Anonymous.
Rob
Isn’t it interesting that Wade Pfau is quoting John Greaney in his most recent writings, yet he never mentions you, Rob. Interesting.
Can you provide a link?
Rob
“Can you provide a link?
Rob”
Now that’s hilarious. We have all been asking you for links to many things, including death threats, job threats, etc, yet you have failed to do so every time.
Tell you what, you show us just one link, other than your own comments on this website, and I will be happy to give you the link you just requested.
I worked with Wade for 16 months on the research that we co-authored that shows the superiority of Valuation-Informed Indexing over Buy-and-Hold. We exchanged many scores of e-mails over that time. I have posted most of them at this site. I can of course post links to them and have done so on numerous occasions. So you have all of the links that you need available to you today.
You say that those links don’t count because they are posted at my site. Well, any links that I post here today are going to be at my site. So those are not going to count either in the eyes of you Goons.
If I post a link to Shiller’s book, will that one count? Shiller wrote a book called “Irrational Exuberance.” That book tells the story. Death threats are irrational. Demands for unjustified board bannings are irrational. Thousands of acts of defamation are irrational. Threats to get an academic researcher fired from his job are irrational.
If you don’t like links that are offered at my site, read Shiller’s book. If you don’t want to use a link that I provide to find the book, you can enter the words “Irrational Exuberance” into a Google search engine and you will gain access to what you need to know to understand why a Buy-and-Hold strategy can never work for a single long-term investor — Buy-and-Hold ignores the research-proven reality that today’s stock price is partly real and partly irrational exuberance and you need to make an adjustment for the amount of irrational exuberance to know how much real and lasting value you have in your stock portfolio.
Anyway, I cannot comment on what Wade said until I see his words. So, if you are not willing to provide a link, I cannot comment.
I do wish you the best of luck in all your future life endeavors, in any event.
Hilarious Rob
So you want other people to give links to the exact comments/statements, but you have a different standard for yourself in which you feel you only have to offer links to your own comments.
Shiller’s book does not have any links to death threats either.
Let me use a baseball analogy: you have been batting .000 for the past 2 decades.
“If I post a link to Shiller’s book, will that one count? ”
Just like your website, it doesn’t provide a direct link to any death threats or job threats.
It’s not hard, Rob. If the threats exist, then you just provide the links. When you don’t, people know you are lying.
Shiller’s book does not have any links to death threats either.
Shiller’s book does not describe death threats. But you don’t even have to go beyond the title of his book to understand that the Buy-and-Hold retirement studies get the numbers wrong. If a portion of our stock portfolios is comprised not of true and lasting economic value but is merely the product of irrational exuberance, then a model that treats the entire amount as real is going to get the numbers wrong. Every time. And sometimes by a very big amount. People planning to retire on these amounts need to know that. Everyone in this field should be working as hard as he or she can to make everyone aware of this reality.
Shiller SHOULD discuss death threats and the other intimidation tactics that have been employed by the Buy-and-Holders to block people from learning about the far-reaching implications of his research findings. Shiller once wrote: “There is a growing behavioral economics movement, but it has so far had limited impact. Economists are not fond of the softness and imprecision of psychology. These notions are considered vaguely unprofessional and flaky.” Think how the Buy-and-Holders would react if he described the intimidation tactics that have been directed at him. The would say that he was being “unprofessional” to discuss death threats and other such things. Rob Arnott told me that he knows of researchers who planned to do research on his ideas who were taken aside and told that it would be a career-limiting move to complete such research. Is that sort of behavior professional? It is not talking about intimidation tactics that is unprofessional, it is ADVANCING intimidation tactics that is unprofessional. There is nothing unprofessional in telling people about death threats. The unprofessional thing is using death threats to stop discussions that need to take place from taking place.
Shiller could write an entire sequel to Irrational Exuberance talking about the intimidation tactics that have been employed to silence him and about the intimidation tactics that he knows about that have been employed to silence others. That would be an amazing book. Once all this stuff is out in the open, people won’t be afraid of the people employing the intimidation tactics anymore because they will be able to turn to others who know about it and get help. When we keep quiet about the bullying, we empower the bullies. That’s a terrible, terrible, terrible mistake. It helps no one. It hurts everyone.
I don’t empower bullies. When death threats are directed at me, I talk. And I offer zero apologies for doing so.
My best wishes to you, my dear Goon friend.
Hitting-Below-the-Mendoza-Line Rob
If the threats exist, then you just provide the links. When you don’t, people know you are lying.
When millions of people see 50 percent of their retirement savings disappear into thin air for no good reason, I have a funny feeling that they are going to know that SOMEONE is lying about how this stock investing stuff works. I have a further funny feeling that they are going to be able to figure out that it isn’t me.
But we’ll have to wait a bit to find out for sure, you know?
I wish you the best of luck with it, in any event.
Born Liar (Or Not?) Rob
“When millions of people see 50 percent of their retirement savings disappear into thin air for no good reason, I have a funny feeling that they are going to know that SOMEONE is lying about how this stock investing stuff works. I have a further funny feeling that they are going to be able to figure out that it isn’t me.”
You just made the case again for buy and hold. How so? Well, if people followed your advice in 2009 and onwards, by staying out of the market, they would have lost out on one of the largest bull markets we make seen in our lifetime. We cannot predict when we will see the ups and the downs in order to time the market. Look at you, for example. One of the worst track records we have seen. Yet, what we do know is that the market will continue to cover from any downturn and will set new heights if we hold versus sell (which would be timing).
I don’t advise people to stay out of the market at ANY time. I say that risk is greater when the CAPE value is higher. And so, to keep their risk profile constant, I say they MUST be willing to adjust their stock allocation downward. I recommend a stock allocation of about 30 percent when the CAPE value is where it has been from 2009 forward.
We cannot predict PRECISELY when we will see ups and downs. But we know with certainty that we always see more downs when the CAPE value is high and more ups when the CAPE value is low. Yes, the market is up from where it was in 2009. But most of those “gains” are the product of irrational exuberance. So they will not be lasting in the event that stocks continue to perform as they always have in the past. Having a temporary gain and then watching it disappear is not a plus. The peer-reviewed research that I co-authored with Wade Pfau shows that Valuation-Informed Indexing ALWAYS beats Buy-and-Hold on a risk-adjusted basis in the long term. There has not yet been one exception in the 150 years for which we have good records of stock prices
Will the market recover from its losses eventually? It will. But it could take investors who suffer a 60 percent price drop in the next crash years or even decades to make up for that loss. We all only get so many years to fund our retirement account. To lose years or decades of compounding is a very big deal. Investors should be aiming to keep their risk profile roughly constant over time. That REQUIRES market timing. Market timing is price discipline. If you are not engaging in market timing, you are investing irrationally. Obviously you want to go with the form of market timing that always works — long-term timing — and avoid the form that never works — short-term timing.
My sincere take.
Market Timing Rob