Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently put to the Goon Central board:
it’s just that not enough folks have yet been introduced to your insanity profound insights in order to create a tipping point which will make the Hocomania Wave unstoppable!
Yes, it’s a Tipping Point thing. EVERYONE (including you, Yip!) knows that GRQ is garbage. That’s close to universal. Virtually no one knew that Buy-and-Hold was GRQ garbage in 1974, when A Random Walk Down Wall Street was published. We are today living through the transition period from believing as a society that Buy-and-Hold was the first research-based strategy (a perfectly reasonable belief in its day) to understanding that human knowledge was lacking re one critical question in 1974 (that long-term timing always works and in fact is required for any investor hoping to have a realistic hope of long-term investing success) to believing as a society that Buy-and-Hold was rooted in a mistaken understanding of how the market works and that Valuation-Informed Indexing (Buy-and-Hold with the unfortunate GRQ element removed) is the first true research-based strategy. The hold-up is that millions have been done great financial harm by the mistaken belief and saying out loud what we now know causes those people to experience a great deal of emotional pain. Most of us humans have elected to hold back from saying anything, hoping that things will work themselves out somehow. A few of the braver souls (Wade Pfau is in this category, as are Bogle and Bernsteinzz) drop veiled hints. Dropping veiled hints makes sense in that it offers a means to get the truth out without getting your head knocked off. BUT IT DOESN”T GET THE JOB DONE. People have been dropping veiled hints for 30 years and there are still people pushing Buy-and-Hold today, even after the onset of a freakin’ economic crisis. The Rob Bennett take is that we must go BEYOND veiled hints to the Valley of Death where we do the wild thing of reporting the SWR (and lots of other important numbers, to be sure) accurately and honestly. Imagine! There is not one soul alive who is hurt by us doing this. Even The Stock-Sellig Industry is far better off if we do the wild thing. You’d be surprised how much people cut back on stock purchases in a Great Depression! The question is — How do we get from Point A (economic crisis) to Point B (the place where we all want to be in our hearts, where the risk of stock investing is reduced by 70 percent)? That is indeed a Tipping Point question. People want to be able to make a buck telling the truth about stock investing. They don’t want to have people making death threats against them or threatening to get them fired from their jobs. We need to have enough people telling the truth that the idiots (this means you, Yip!) who are making death threats are the ones who feel social pressure, not the good guys trying to help us all. Wade would never have stopped doing honestzzz research if Old Saint Jack had had Lindauer banned from the Bogleheads Forum when Mel first threatened Wade. It was Bogle’s silence that caused Wade to feel pressured to flip to the Goon side. Bogle needs to be made to feel that he cannot get away with associating with Mel Lindauer or those who post in “defense” of him anymore. And of course everyone else needs to feel that way too. It is not an intellectual problem we face. Intellectual work is 20 percent of the work I have done over the past 10 years. The hard issues are emotional issues. We don’t need more insights, we need more COURAGE. People develop confidence in speaking up when they see others speaking up and being rewarded for it. We need to start rewarding those putting forward research-based strategies and putting the heat on those who pump out GRQ garbage. Once we hit the tipping point, we have 30 years of insights to mine together. Think where the electronics industry would be if the makers of Pong had had the power back in 1974 to stop all advances in the field because it made them feel bad for people to learn that their product was not the last word in electronic advances? That’s where we are in the investing field. We have seen powerful investing insight after powerful investing insight for 30 years now. But few benefit from the insights because we are all afraid of what the Buy-and-Holders will do to us if we give voice to our sincere beliefs. Once there are enough of us sticking together that the Buy-and-Holders can no longer intimidate us, that comes to an end and we move from economic crisis to the greatest period of economic growth ever experienced in our history. I cannot wait! (And the full truth is that even you Goons will be glad we made the change once we get over The Big Black Mountain of legal battles and prison sentences and all that sort of thing.) Rob |
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