Marcelle Chauvet is an Economics Professor at the University of California at Riverside. I wrote her some time back letting her know about the threats that were made by the Buy-and-Hold Mafia to silence Academic Researcher Wade Pfau when he sought to get the errors in the Old School safe-withdrawal-rate studies corrected. She wrote back a kind and intelligent note, saying: “I like it and I totally agree. The market goes through cycles and if we want to or need to sell in the wrong cycle phase all bets are off. The only thing is the cost of obtaining information as opposed to Buy-and-Hold. This would be a good research topic. Why would your job be jeopardized by such a sensible claim?”
I posted the words of my response to Marcelle here. I argued that: “Did we know it was funny money? We did. We all possess common sense. No one really believes on a deep level that their retirement accounts can increase by 20 percent or 30 percent in a year for no good reason. We all knew all along that there was some sort of funny business going on and that we should look into it. BUT WE DIDN”T WANT TO KNOW. So we silenced the voice within us telling us “this is wrong.”
Marcelle recently posted a comment to the discussion thread at that blog entry. She wrote:
Dear Robert,
We have exchanged one or two emails in which you mentioned that buy and hold can be a bad strategy and I agreed with you given the high volatility in the market. However, I think you are mentioning my name outside the context, and you inserted an answer below with your own thoughts, as if I endorse them.
I would like to ask you to take my name out of this article, please. I do not want to be listed as endorsing your positions blanche card. This does not represent our exchanges and they are misleading. Thanks.
I responded with the words set forth below:
Marcelle:
Thanks for writing about your concern. It is nice to hear from you again!
I certainly did not in any way, shape or form intend to suggest to anyone that you endorse all of my views on stock investing. I don’t believe that. I have added a note to the article (in bold type) stating this and directing people to your comment. I hope that helps. If you would like me to add any additional language detailing how your views differ from mine, I am happy to add such language (in bold type) to the note at the bottom of the article.
I’d be grateful if you would tell me how this came to be a concern. I have learned over the past 12 years that there is a lot of funny business going on in the investing advice area. I believe that we all need to work together to clean up the corruption in this field. I don’t know whether people involved in the corruption have contacted you or not. If they have, I would like to know more about what happened and share it with my readers.
My best and warmest wishes to you and yours.
Rob
I also added a note in bold type to the bottom of the blog entry. The note read:
I received a comment (see below) on August 2, 2014, in which Marcelle expressed a concern that readers might pick up the impression that she endorsed all of my views on investing. She has never said any such thing and I do not believe any such thing.
feed twitter twitter facebook