“The Thing That I Loved About Buy-and-Hold In the Days When I Carried Around a Membership Card in My Wallet Was That Buy-and-Hold Was the Only Strategy Rooted in the Scientific Method and the Scientific Method Is All About Skepticism and About Rooting One’s Beliefs in Evidence Rather Than Just Going By What Feels Right or What Sounds Plausible. The Buy-and-Holders Lost Me When They Became Too Dogmatic Even to Consider the Possibility That They Might Have Somewhere Along the Line Made a Mistake. Valuation-Informed Indexing Is What Buy-and-Hold Used to Be, What Buy-and-Hold Was Meant to Be, What Buy-and-Hold Should Be.”

Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently posted to the discussion thread for another blog entry at this site:

Does the 15 yr old realize how strange you are yet?

Timothy is 16.

Robert is 13.

I was expressing skepticism about something at lunch the other day (it might have been a claim that someone made on an Amazon review about the battery life for a laptop computer) and Robert said: “Dad, you have trust issues.” That made me laugh. That has relevance to our investing saga, in my assessment.

The thing I loved about Buy-and-Hold in the days when I carried around a membership card in my wallet was that Buy-and-Hold was the only strategy rooted in the scientific method and the scientific method is all about skepticism and about rooting one’s beliefs in evidence rather than just going by what feels right or what sounds plausible. The Buy-and-Holders lost me when they became too dogmatic even to consider the possibility that they might have somewhere along the line made a mistake.

Valuation-Informed Indexing is what Buy-and-Hold used to be, what Buy-and-Hold was meant to be, what Buy-and-Hold should be. There will come a day when some young whippersnapper will put up a post that will become famous on the internet for showing where I went off the track. That’s just the way of the world. I pray that I own up to the mistake instead of dragging everyone through 13 years of muck pretending that the obvious (once it is uncovered!) mistake really isn’t a mistake for those willing to stand on one leg and dance to the beat and twist their mind into a pretzel shape.

But, heaven help us all, I may well behave as poorly as Bogle has and as poorly as Greaney has and as poorly as Lindauer has. How often do we become the very thing we fight? Great novels have explored this tragic aspect of human nature.

Yowsa!

Rob