I’ve posted an article to the “The Buy-and-Hold Crisis” section of the site titled Academic Researcher Silenced by Threats to Get Him Fired From His Job After Showing Dangers of Buy-and-Hold Investing Strategies.
Juicy Excerpt: The question this article addresses itself to is — How do they pull it off?
It’s not hard to understand why financial planners would want to encourage their clients to invest heavily in stocks — most of the money made in this field is made through the selling of stocks and all industries want their customers to believe that the product they are selling is a good buy at any possible price. But how has Wall Street managed to convince millions of middle-class people to throw away large portions of their retirement money through a misguided belief in this obvious fiction?
Buy-and-Hold advocates argue that the academic research on stock investing supports their claims that market timing doesn’t work or isn’t required for long-term success. Academic researchers are independent actors. How have the researchers been persuaded to keep quiet about what the entire historical record so clearly shows to be the case, that long-term market timing (changing your stock allocation in response to big swings in valuations with the understanding that you may not see benefits for doing so for as long as 10 years) always provides investors with much higher long-term returns at greatly reduced risk?
It’s done through the application of brutal intimidation tactics aimed at those who stray from support for the company line. Other researchers with thoughts of telling the truth about stock investing see what has happened to their peers, learn the lesson that the industry needs them to learn for their Buy-and-Hold marketing slogans to remain effective, and self-censor their research.
horse=dead
record=broken
no one cares
too bad rob, you were such a source of entertainment but you have degraded into a rut where you just write the same thing over and over. so uninteresting.
can’t your delusions morph into something with aliens? like the body snatchers have replaced people with goons?
no one cares
If no one cared, there never would have been a single death threat, What. Or a single act of defamation. Or a single board banning. Or a single threat to get an academic researcher fired from his job.
People care deeply.
Our trouble is that, as of today, the thing that most of us care deeply about is to keep the cover-up going.
After the next crash, we will be on our way to experiencing the Second Great Depression. Then the Buy-and-Hold Crisis is no longer a theoretical thing. We begin to see that it affects every single one of us, that we all need a functioning economy to live free and rich and happy lives. So I think there’s a good chance that a good number of us will start to care about opening the internet to honest discussion of what the last 30 years of academic research says about what works in stock investing.
That’s going to be a magic day, my old friend. We are the luckiest group of investors who ever walked Planet Earth. We know things about increasing return and diminishing risk that no one who came before us knew. We have the Buy-and-Holders to thank for that — they are the ones who came up with the idea of rooting our strategies in the findings of the academic research.
So I see the glass as half-full. I hope we will be able to have more fruitful interactions when we both get to the other side of The Big Black Mountain, my long-time Goon friend.
Please take good care.
Rob
like the body snatchers have replaced people with goons?
Falling in love with Get RIch Quick strategies really does turn us into Goons, What. You’re on the mark with this one, in my assessment.
I wish you all good things.
Rob
On this site Wade has said that your claims that he is afraid of the “Goons” are nonsense.
You are quoting Wade accurately, Evidence.
Rob
So then:
We either believe Wade, or else we believe you.
I have no issue dealing with that proposition.
I don’t think anyone else will have difficulty sussing it out, either.
We either believe Wade, or else we believe you.
I’m a reporter, Drip Guy. My job is to report the realities to the best of my abilities, making my reports as accurate and as complete and as fair as possible.
I don’t get to say which reports people will find convincing. That’s for all the people who read the reports to decide.
That’s as it should be.
I wish you all good things.
Rob
I’m a reporter, Drip Guy.
Not really.
My job is to report the realities to the best of my abilities,
Your abilities, unfortunately, are not up to much.
making my reports as accurate and as complete and as fair as possible.
Your reports are not accurate, or complete or fair.
Not really.
I somehow knew that the numbers in the Old School safe-withdrawal-rate studies were wrong 10 years before any of the big shots in this field were acknowledging it.
If I don’t know what I am doing, that must have been one incredibly lucky guess.
Take care, Goon friend.
Rob
I somehow knew that the numbers in the Old School safe-withdrawal-rate studies were wrong 10 years before any of the big shots in this field were acknowledging it.
No you didn’t. You know that the studies correctly calculated the withdrawal rates that survived for 30 years. You have admitted this.
How many others were saying at the time that the Old School studies needed to be corrected, Evidence?
For that matter, how many are willing to say it publicly today?
Rob
They don’t need to be corrected because they are not wrong.
We strongly disagree, Evidence.
I view it as urgent business that these studies be corrected. I would like to see this happen before the close of business today.
Rob
“If no one cared, there never would have been a single death threat, What. Or a single act of defamation. Or a single board banning. Or a single threat to get an academic researcher fired from his job.”
3 of those are delusional and the board banning was because you are a nuisance.
Good point, What.
Rob