Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently posted to the discussion thread for another blog entry at this site:
So your plan was to go broke and get divorced. Got it.
That wasn’t even a tiny bit my plan.
When I saw the reaction among some Buy-and-Holders to my post pointing out the error in the Greaney retirement study, I knew that I had stumbled only something very, very important. If following a pure Get Rich Quick/Buy-and-Hold strategy causes people to go so totally bonkers, we all should be doing everything in our power to protect our fellow humans from that dangerous Get Rich Quick/Buy-and-Hold urge, no? So I developed a new plan — to do what I could to show people how dangerous Get Rich Quick/Buy-and-Hold always turns out to be in the long run.
For Buy-and-Hold to work, investors would have to be 100 percent rational in their investment choices. The behavior of you Goons showed that Shiller is right — stock investing is in reality a highly emotional endeavor. Instead of prohibiting discussion of the emotional behavior of investors, we should be focusing on it, encouraging everybody to help us develop strategies for overcoming it, strategies for keeping irrational exuberance under control.
Going pure Get Rich Quick ain’t the answer, Anonymous. I am sure.
Rob
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