Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently posted to the discussion thread for another blog entry at this site:
Don’t you need the criminal charges in order to get on the front page of the New York Times? This seems to be the only way to get that $500 million, so if you don’t bring charges, I don’t see how you get your $500 million.
I’m going to tell the story, Anonymous.
Part of the story is financial fraud. So I am going to say that. That’s certainly not the entire story. I certainly am going to tell the other parts as well, some of which reflect very well on all of my Buy-and-Hold friends and even on my Goon friends in some cases. I’ll tell it all. I won’t leave out the financial fraud aspects of the story but I don’t intend to focus on them. My aim is to tell the story in a balanced way, not leaving important parts out because I am afraid to address them but also not dwelling on those aspects of the story because of some personal grudge or anything like that.
Will criminal charges be brought as the story gets out? I believe so. But I won’t be bringing them. And I won’t be leading an effort to see that they are brought. To the extent that I play any role re the bringing of the criminal charges, I expect that my role is going to be to argue for a deemphasis on that part of the story. I see it as my job to bring us all together. So I would prefer to focus on more positive aspects of the story and to try to explain the pressures that my Buy-and-Hold friends and my Goon friends have felt as a partial explanation for their bad behavior. I cannot control how others react to those efforts. So I am not making any promises as to how things will turn out. But I can say that my personal intent is to praise the Buy-and-Holders and to try to make the people who will be angry at them following the next price crash understand the difficult circumstances that influenced many of their decisions.
My personal guess as to how the criminal side of this will be addressed is that following the next price crash a group of responsible people in the field will be arguing for an amnesty that would need to go through Congress. The amnesty will let a lot of people off the criminal hook while containing funding to aid the transition to Valuation-Informed Indexing. Please understand that that is pure speculation. I have no inside knowledge re this aspect of things. I am just putting forward a guess by someone who has been involved in this since the first day as to how it might make sense for us to proceed as a society in a way that gets the important work done that we need to get done in a manner that all parties can accept.
The $500 million is for a settlement of civil claims. It is a separate matter from the criminal charges. I believe that we will likely need a legislatively adopted amnesty to address the criminal side of this because that is so sensitive a matter. I don’t see the $500 million settlement payment as being such a big problem. That’s just money. The Wall Street Con Men have tons of money. They will of course want me working with them for p.r. purposes as well as for lots of other reasons Paying $500 million to make that happen quickly is nothing for them. I don’t see any problems in that area once the story gets out.
I hope that helps a bit.
Rob
“The amnesty will let a lot of people off the criminal hook while containing funding to aid the transition to Valuation-Informed Indexing.”
So, you believe there will be Federal money spent to promote VII?
The economic crisis that was caused by the promotion of Buy-and-Hold “strategies” is the #1 public policy issue of our time. It is scaring millions of people that their economic circumstances are getting worse and worse at a time when they should be getting better and better. Our economic system is working. It is producing huge advances in productivity. But the money is not finding its way into the pockets of the millions of hard-working middle-class people who produced it. It is all being funneled through the miracle of Buy-and-Hold into the pockets of a small number of Wall Street Con Men. And we are seeing political frictions on both the left and the right as a result. These frictions will worsen with another huge price crash.
We are going to have to do everything we can as a society to open up some space for accurate and honest presentations of what the last 36 years of peer-reviewed research tells us about how stock investing works. There was a time when we did not spend Federal money on environmentalism. We do today. There was a time when we did not spend Federal money on education. We do today.. There was a time when we did not spend Federal money on anti-discrimination efforts. We do today. So, yes, I think it is entirely possible that we will elect as a society to spend Federal money to assure that nothing like this current bull market (and the massive act of financial fraud that keeps it going) ever happens again. I could see that happening.
I am someone who believes that Federal programs that are well-intentioned can get out of hand because, once they are put in place, they are not monitored carefully and there is a gradual drifting away from the original purpose. So, personally, I would prefer seeing this done though the private sector. There are huge amounts of money to be made giving accurate and honest and research-based investing advice. Once we begin enforcing the laws against financial fraud, everybody in this field is going to be presenting himself as a Valuation-Informed Indexer and the word re what works will spread quickly. We have seen on the various boards that the hunger for honest investing advice is HUGE. So we can easily get the job done without the adoption of any Federal programs.
However, the full reality is that Shiller’s research shows that how people go about investing in stocks is a public policy question. The stock market is where most of us put our life savings. It matters what happens to our life savings. We all have a Get Rich Quick urge within us. So we are always as humans inclined to fall for Get Rich Quick strategies. Once those strategies become popular, they are VERY hard to defeat. Get Rich Quick strategies provide HUGE short-term payoffs. And so bull markets always get out of control. Once a bull market gets out of control, it becomes impossible for the “experts” who promoted them to acknowledge their errors, even in the face of mountains of peer-reviewed research revealing them, because they have caused so much human misery at that point that they just cannot bear to own up (even in their own minds!) to what they have done. So this is a serious business.
I don’t personally think that we need a Federal program. I think this can be done through educational efforts, which can be done through the private sector. I personally think that is the way to go. But I also think that it makes sense to adopt some sort of amnesty. Lots of people are potentially on the hook both criminally and civilly who really just got caught up in something a lot bigger than them. Wade Pfau obviously had every intention of using his talents to help people. He 100 percent wanted to do honest work. The evidence re that point is simply overwhelming. So I believe that he should be left off the hook for things he did because he was worried that he would not be able to feed his children if he continued to do honest work in the face of the threats delivered to him by the Bogle Goon squads. There are thousands of Wade Pfau’s out there. An amnesty is appropriate.
But how do you sell the amnesty? Wade’s story evokes sympathy. To someone who has not lost most of his life savings as a result of Wade’s criminal actions. Someone who has lost most of his life’s savings as a result of Wade’s criminal actions is going to have a hard time going along with an amnesty. Millions of people are going to be very, very, very angry following the next price crash, and understandably so. We are going to need to do something to address that anger. Adopting a Federal program that insures that nothing like this can ever, ever, ever happen again might be the way to go.
It might be that we provide an agency where people can go to obtain educational materials when they hear some investing “expert” pushing some strategy that sounds plausible on the surface but that causes warning bells to go off suggesting that the story doesn’t quite add up. That’s how I felt about Buy-and-Hold in the days before Greaney’s first death threats, when it became clear to me that the entire thing was a huge con. I would have liked to have been able to call a number and have someone point me to materials showing that the idea that there is some mystical, magical research somewhere showing that the claim that there is no need to practice long-term timing (price discipline) when buying stocks is a lie. It was Wade Pfau who told me that when we were doing research together. It would have been a lot easier just to be able to call a Federal agency and have someone not getting rich pushing the purest Get Rich Quick garbage ever concocted by the human mind tell me the straight story.
My personal vote would be not to have Federal money spent cleaning up this mess. But I can easily see it happening. And it could be that I am wrong in my inclinations. A lot of people didn’t think Social Security was a good idea. My inclinations would probably have been to oppose Social Security. I have come to believe that it was a good idea. I am beginning to feel that way about Obamacare. I certainly did not support it when it was being considered. But I think it would be fair to say that efforts to repeal it have not played out well. Perhaps we need some kind of Federal program ensuring that everyone has access to basic health care. Perhaps some of us get stuck in old ways of thinking and become too reactionary in our thinking. Perhaps I am just letting the liberal side of me come out and play a little bit today.
I am not able to give you a definitive answer to your question, Anonymous. How we proceed is something that we are going to decide as a society. Each and every one of us is affected by this massive act of financial fraud. We are all going to get to have a say on how to turn things around. We have a great economic system. But I think that it would be fair to say that capitalism runs on the pursuit of self-interest; that is the driver of our system. In most areas, that works okay. But in the investing realm, there is a huge payoff for telling horrible lies to people about what the last 36 years of peer-reviewed research show us about how stock investing works in the real world. That needs to change. Of that I am 100 percent certain. There are lots of good people trying to do good work in this field. But they hold back from doing that work in an effective manner because they live in fear of what the Wall Street Con Men will do to them if they put forward a fully honest statement or two. That simply must stop.
Our system is based on incentives. The incentives get too out of whack in the investing realm because Buy-and-Hold can be such an amazing winner in the short term and such a horrible loser in the long run. I still believe that we can address the problem in the private sector. But I certainly don’t object to turning to the government sector for help if that is what is needed. I want to see my Wall Street Con Men friends doing the sort of work they intended to do when they first entered this field, in the days when Buy-and-Hold was just a gleam in Jack Bogle’s eye.
The bottom line is that we will do what we need to do to open up access to honest discussion of safe withdrawal rates and scores of other critically important investment-related topics to every investor on the planet. We must do that and so we will do that. If we can do it without adoption of Federal programs, I would vote for doing it without the adoption of Federaal programs. If it takes Federal programs to keep in check the greed of the Wall Street Con Men, then so bet it, you know? My priority is the preservation of our economic system and of our political system. I have a funny feeling that, deep down in his heart of hearts somewhere, that is my good friend Jack Bogle’s priority too.
We will see how it all plays out in days to come.
Rob
Bigger than climate change? LOL
I don’t get the “LOL” part, Anonymous.
I would certainly put it up there with climate change.
I suppose that we are going to have to wait to see how things play out.
I naturally wish you the best of luck with it in any event.
Rob
How would Federal dollars be used? Would we be setting up teaching programs on VII?
I’m not able to answer the question. It’s something that we need to work out as a society as part of a national debate.
The key is making the change from thinking of investing as something that we all do as individuals and coming to accept that investing is largely a SOCIAL phenomenon. No one individual can cause a bull market. We see bull markets when we all act together to create a fantasy world where we come to believe that our stock portfolios are worth two times what the peer-reviewed research shows they are worth in reality.
It’s comparable to the situation we have with environmental matters. We all want a clean environment. The acts of any one person do not affect the overall environment very much. So, if someone throws their trash out the window, is it really a big deal? There was a day when lots of people didn’t think it was a big deal and when lots of people did indeed throw their trash out the window. Today. there is less of that. There are degrees of intensity re environmentalism. But pretty much everyone recognizes that it is wrong to throw one’s trash out the window. We have achieved lots of progress in the environmental area.
We need to achieve that sort of progress in the investing realm. We destroy our economic system in a very serious way when we encourage the promotion of Buy-and-Hold “strategies.” We should be permitting and even encouraging honest and accurate posting on the lessons of the last 36 years of peer-reviewed research in this field. The Wall Street Con Men act as if it would be absurd for them to adhere to the ethical standards that apply in every other field of human endeavor. There’s money to be made pushing a pure Get Rich Quick approach. If millions of middle-class people lose most of their retirement money, it’s their fault for being dumb enough to believe our smelly Buy-and-Hold garbage. Our only job is to turn a quick buck and everyone who works in this field that it is by telling lots of lie that you do that.
I don’t buy it. I think people can make a decent income giving honest and accurate and research-based investment advice. But, we are going to need to recognize that our entire society is done harm when the Buy-and-Holders tell the lies that bring on economic crises. The Buy-and-Hold Lies really do push those portfolio values up for a time. The inflated values are not real but most investors don’t study this stuff enough to know that they need to be wary of what they are told by the stock salesmen who refer to themselves as “experts” in this field. When millions see their retirement plans fail, that’s a social problem. We are going to need to as a society begin to take action to stop economic crises before they take place.
Educational efforts would surely be a good thing. But there are lots of positive things that could be done. I am 100 percent confident that we will have hundreds of good and smart people contributing good ideas following the next price crash. We should hear everybody out and go with whatever ideas sound most sensible and appear most likely to bear good fruit. That’s how our system works. It is a good system. We should make use of it in the investing advice realm just as we today make use of it in hundreds of other areas of life endeavor.
My sincere take.
Rob
“Educational efforts would surely be a good thing. But there are lots of positive things that could be done. I am 100 percent confident that we will have hundreds of good and smart people contributing good ideas following the next price crash. We should hear everybody out and go with whatever ideas sound most sensible and appear most likely to bear good fruit. That’s how our system works. It is a good system. We should make use of it in the investin”
Does that include educating people on the advantages of buy, hold and rebalance or do you think we should only educate people on VII?
There are millions of good and smart people who believe in Buy-and-Hold. We certainly should be encouraging those people to speak up and to share what they think on every possible question. They are obviously part of the mix and it is only by having people from every part of the mix participating actively that our system can work.
However, I don’t think it would be quite right to say that we need to “educate” people on the benefits of Buy-and-Hold. Anyone who has been paying attention had heard about the benefits of Buy-and-Hold. It has been pushed very heavily for many years now. We need to have people continuing to push it and we need people answering questions on aspects that some might not fully appreciate just yet and we need people exploring new ideas and all that sort of thing.
But the situation with Buy-and-Hold is not at all comparable to the situation with Valuation-Informed Indexing. Discussion of VII has been brutally suppressed for 36 years running. Discussion of Buy-and-Hold is omni-present today. Buy-and-Hold doesn’t need any help. Valuation-Informed Indexing does. We need to get things to a point where there are enough Valuation-Informed Indexers that the Buy-and-Holders wouldn’t dare to engage in the sorts of abusive (and even criminal!) tactics that we have seen from you Goons during the first 15 years of our Great Debate on Whether or Not to Permit a Debate on the Last 36 Years of Peer-Reviewed Research.
Rob
So, are there other strategies, other than VII, that would require federally funded education or would it only be VII that needs this education?
The term “Valuation-Informed Indexing” is synonymous with the term “research-based,” Anonymous.
It is because VII is research-based that it possesses such great power. It is by learning what the research says that we gain the ability to overcome our Get Rich Quick urge, which is responsible for 70 percent of the risk of stock investing.
It is also because VII is research-based that those promoting Get Rich Quick strategies hate it so. You can’t work a con on people once they know what the research says.
The thing that we need as a society to promote is the idea of permitting people to learn what the research says. You could have a research-based strategy that goes by a name other than “Valuation-Informed Indexing.” In that case, something other than VII would be promoted.
But it all comes down to the same thing. The Wall Street Con Men cannot work their con if millions of middle-class people are able to learn what the last 36 years of peer-reviewed research says. It is public policy Job #1 to get the word out.
Rob
Rob,
It looks like Shiller is calling you a liar. He said to say in the market.
http://www.cnbc.com/2017/05/23/robert-shiller-market-could-go-up-50-percent-from-here.html
Either you are wrong, or Shiller is the ultimate goon. Which is it?
There is not one thing in that article that is in direct conflict with anything that I have said. Shiller says that people should “stay in” the market. I have always said that the ordinary investor should keep 30 percent in stocks even at times of insane valuations. And I say it precisely for the reason that Shiller gives — stocks could go up by 50 percent. Short-term timing doesn’t work.
You should be asking Shiller whether he believes that investors should practice price discipline (long-term timing) when buying stocks. If he says “no,” then he disagrees with me. Long-term timing (price discipline) is what Valuation-Informed Indexing is all about. If Shiller says that investors should practice price discipline (long-term timing), he is disagreeing with Bogle. Bogle says that it is not necessary to practice price discipline when buying stocks.
You should also be asking why Shiller is reluctant to say that he favors long-term timing without needing to be asked. He is reluctant because he has seen what you Goons do to people who offer straight talk re these matters. You Goons should want to hear straight talk. But you discourage it very, very strongly. Why? Because you lack confidence in Buy-and-Hold. You follow it. But you don’t possess the confidence in it needed to feel comfortable hearing people point out the dangers of the strategy. That’s not good, Anonymous.
Rob
“And I say it precisely for the reason that Shiller gives — stocks could go up by 50 percent.”
Actually what you said is the market will crash 65% within two years. You said that for about six years before finally giving up. Now you say nothing at all about timing, while still claiming to be a successful market timer.
No. Shiller says exactly the same thing that I say about the coming crash.
I once said that I personally thought that the crash would come by the end of 2016. I said that when 2016 was years away. And I made clear at the time that that was my personal opinion only and that the research does not permit us to say when a crash will come, only that it will. That prediction had nothing to do with Valuation-Informed Indexing. That was just Rob Bennett having fun. If anything, the failure of that prediction shows that VII is on point. A core tenet of VII is that short-term predictions don’t work and indeed that one did not work.
Long-term timing has been working since the stock market opened for business. There has never been a single exception. The research that I co-authored with Wade Pfau shows that as clearly as anything could be shown. The idea that long-term timing could ever fail is silly. Long-term timing is price discipline. How could exercising price discipline ever be a bad thing?
I suppose that anything is possible in this crazy, mixed-up world of ours. But I think it would be fair to say that the idea that there might come a time when long-term timing did not work is the longest of all possible long shots.
My sincere take.
Rob
“the research does not permit us to say when a crash will come, only that it will”
Duh. Shiller, Bogle, Buffett, every freakin investor knows that a crash will come someday. That’s not timing, “long term” or otherwise. On the contrary, it’s another way of saying you can’t time the market.
The risk of a crash is astronomically higher at times of insanely high valuations, Anonymous.
There has never been a crash of lasting significance that started from moderate or low prices. But every time prices got to where they are today stock investors were wiped out of most of their life savings. How is that a good thing?
Short-term timing doesn’t work because it is investor emotions that determine stock prices and investor emotions are irrational and thus cannot be predicted. But there’s a big difference between having your life savings tied up in an asset class where the price reflects economic realities (as is the case when prices are in the fair-value range) and having your life savings tied up in an asset class where the price represents a Get Rich Quick fantasy.
When you put most of your money in a market priced like this one, you are taking a bet that it is all going to play out differently this time than it has ever played out before. Anything can happen. But that’s like buying lottery tickets with your retirement money. I can’t say exactly when the lottery ticket guy is going to go bust either; he might win a few along the way and that might keep him going for a time. But I don’t want to join him. I don’t call his strategy a good one just because I can’t say precisely when it is going to go bust.
Rob
“The risk of a crash is astronomically higher at times of insanely high valuations”
And for your personal investing, those times have included the last 21 years.
“Short-term timing doesn’t work”
That’s the argument for buy-and-hold. In fact there is no other argument for buy and hold. How can you argue for it while still saying it’s the scourge of the universe?
Even if the government wanted to fund VII education, what more is there to say besides those two quotes? People have asked you many times how to implement VII, and you refuse to answer. If Rob Bennett is noteworthy for anything, it’s that you’ve spent so many years typing so many words to say so little.
Yes, it’s so that stocks have been priced at insanely dangerous levels Since 1996 (with the exception of a few months in early 2009). I view that as an extremely unfortunate reality. We all should be investing in stocks to provide for our retirements and, when they are priced as they have been since 1996, the long-term value proposition just isn’t there. This is one of the reasons why I oppose Buy-and-Hold so strongly. If we permitted investors to learn about the last 36 years of peer-reviewed research, prices could not remain at these levels for so long. Investors will act in their own self interest if they can learn the realities. We should be permitted them to do so. We are all paying a price for failing to do so.
You are making an accurate statement when you say that the showing that short-term timing doesn’t work is the argument for Buy-and-Hold. That’s historically accurate. Buy-and-Hold came about in response to Fama’s 1965 cshowing that short-term timing doesn’t work. The problem is that there was a further finding in 1981 that long-term timing always works and is always 100 percent required. Logically, that should have been the end of Buy-and-Hold. If short-term timing never works and long-term timing always works, Buy-and-Hold is a horrible strategy. So why do we continue to hear about it to this day? It’s the Wall Street Con Men protecting their turf, turning a buck. That’s ugly stuff. They hurt millions of people in very serious ways when they protect their turf in that manner.
You ask how I can agree that short-term timing doesn’t work and still describe Buy-and-Hold as “the scourge of the universe.” It’s because most of us are investing for the long term. It’s the long term that matters. Buy-and-Hold should be deemed a good or bad strategy based on whether it produces good or bad results in the long term. It produces HORRIBLE results in the long-term. It cannot even be compared to Valuation-Informed Indexing. But the Wall Street Con Men are able to continue to push it because us humans suffer from a short-term focus and they exploit that for their financial benefits. The result is billions of dollars in losses. And the result of the billions in losses is a loss in consumer buying power that crashes the entire economy. As a nation of people we cannot continue to let that scenario play out over and over again. The survival or failure of our economic system affects us all.
I like the comment about “what more is there to say besides those two quotes?” VII is painfully simple. We all consider price when buying cars or bananas or sweaters. And there is now 36 years of peer-reviewed research showing that we should be doing exactly the same thing when buying stocks, that indeed the market becomes dysfunctional when a large number of participants become persuaded that it is not necessary to take price into consideration when buying stocks. So the concept is very simple. But the IMPLEMENTATION is not so simple. If the implementation were simple, we wouldn’t be in an economic crisis today and the P./E10 number would not be what it is today. If the implementation were simple, we wouldn’t see some of the smartest people in the field following and recommending Buy-and-Hold “strategies.”
We don’t need government programs to explain to people why they should consider price when buying stocks. Nothing could be more obvious. But we may need government programs to help people see through the mountains of garbage dumped on them by the Wall Street Con Men in their efforts to exploit the Get Rich Quick impulse residing within all of us. The bottom line is that the Wall Street Con Men continue to push their smelly Buy-and-Hold garbage to this day. And to a large extent they continue to make a buck doing it. Huh? What the h? Something very strange is going on. There is SOMETHING that we need help with.
The private sector has shown an inability to deal with the problem. We have seen thousands of people make an effort. Lots of people long to do good work in this field. But the Wall Street Con Men send their Goon Squads out to show these people what’s what and they fold. We see this happen over and over and over again. It would be a lot cheaper to have a government entity educate people educate people about the realities of stock investing that the Wall Street Con Men would prefer that people not know about than to spend the trillions of dollars that we have had to spent to try to recover from the economic crisis that was brought on through the relentless promotion of the smelly Buy-and-Hold garbage. People in the private sector feel that they need to put turning a buck first, second, third and fourth. It might be that people working in the government who did not feel a need to put a profit motive first would feel free to report what the last 36 years of peer-reviewed research says honestly and accurately. To have a few people tell the truth would make it very hard for the Wall Street Con Men to continue their con. It could make a very big difference indeed.
My best wishes to you and yours, Anonymous.
Rob
“But the IMPLEMENTATION is not so simple.”
If you can’t describe exactly how to implement VII, then you have no evidence that it beats buy-and-hold. Just gut feelings and “common sense”. Sorry, I know how you hate numbers, but investing is all about numbers.
I am the co-author of a study that I think could fairly be described as the most important piece of peer-reviewed research published in the last 30 years, as you well know, Anonymous. That study addresses the implementation question in an extremely effective way. So I have directed my energies to this question.
But we need to hear lots and lots and lots of others address themselves to the question. I want to hear what Bogle thinks about implementation. I want to hear what Shiller thinks. I want to hear what Bernstein thinks. I want to hear what Swedroe thinks. I want to hear what Schultheis thinks. I want to hear what Arnott thinks. I want to hear what Richards thinks. And on and on and on and on and on. There’s great leverage in opening the internet up to honest posting on the last 36 years of peer-reviewed research in this field.
For that, we need to see prison sentences announced for you Goons. The announcement of prison sentences will send a signal that as a society we have had just about enough of the ugliness that you Goons have been bringing to the table ever since that fateful morning when I pointed out the errors in Greaney’s retirement study at the old Retire Early board. I think we will get there. I believe that it is going to take another price crash for us to all pull together. But I am 100 percent confident that we will in time get to the place where we all deep in our hearts want to be.
I have addressed the implementation question thousands of times in thousands of ways. What we need today is to have everyone else do the same. For that we need to see announcement of the prison sentences. That’s coming. I cannot make them happen by myself, you know? I have done my part. When everyone else is ready to move forward, I will be here doing my best to make it all work out well for every single person involved.
I hope that helps a bit, my long-time Goon pal.
Rob
“I want to hear what Bogle thinks about implementation. I want to hear what Shiller thinks. I want to hear what Bernstein thinks. I want to hear what Swedroe thinks. I want to hear what Schultheis thinks. I want to hear what Arnott thinks. I want to hear what Richards thinks.”
Easy. They all say buy-and-hold. And even if they didn’t, why do you need other people to tell you how to implement your own strategy?
Each of these people has advanced statements supportive of Buy-and-Hold. And each of these people has advanced statements NOT supportive of Buy-and-Hold.
Consider Bernstein. Back in 2002, I was saying that the safe withdrawal rate was something in the neighborhood of 2 percent. You Goons were saying that anyone who thought it might be something other than 4 percent was not taking his meds. Bernstein was saying it really was 4 percent but that you needed to subtract 2 percent from that number to get the correct safe withdrawal rate. He was supporting Buy-and-Hold by saying that the number is always 4 percent. But he was also speaking out in opposition to Buy-and-Hold by pointing out that you needed to subtract 2 percentage points from the Buy-and-Hold number to get the accurate number. He just said it in that funny way because he didn’t want the Buy-and-Holders to threaten to destroy his career.
Valuation-Informed Indexing is not “my” strategy. Every researcher who has ever worked in this field contributed to development of it. The only difference between Bogle and me is that Bogle ignores the last 36 years of peer-reviewed research while I do not. People still offer their views of various aspects of Buy-and-Hold, do they not? Is there some reason why people should not continue until the end of time to offer their views on Valuation-Informed Indexing, which is just Buy-and-Hold updated to incorporate the last 36 years of peer-reviewed research. I learn from other people. So I want everyone helping out to the greatest extent possible. Why wouldn’t I?
Rob
“Valuation-Informed Indexing is not “my” strategy.”
You’re the only one talking about it. That makes it yours.
“And each of these people has advanced statements NOT supportive of Buy-and-Hold.”
Bogle never said any such thing. He has said countless times that all market timing schemes are nonsense. Your response is to say he belongs in prison.
“I learn from other people.”
There’s no evidence of that either. In fact, there’s a shocking lack of evidence for virtually everything you say.
Shiller was awarded a Nobel prize for his “revolutionary” (his word) research findings. I’m not the only one talking about Valuation-Informed Indexing.
Bogle said that Reversion to the Mean is an “Iron Law” of stock investing. That’s ain’t consistent with Buy-and-Hold. For Buy-and-Hold to work, stock returns would have to play out in the pattern of a random walk. There’s no Reversion to the Mean in a random-walk return pattern.
Bogle has also often said that investors should look to the peer-reviewed research for guidance. That’s VII all the way, not Buy-and-Hold. It’s the Buy-and-Holders who for 15 years now have been threatening to kill anyone who posts honestly re the last 36 years of peer-reviewed research.
Re the prison thing, it is a stone-cold fact that Bogle has permitted his name to be used at a board that permits posting by the sorts of individuals who have posted in “defense” of Mel Lindauer. There are Post Archives.
There’s a shocking lack of evidence for my claim of May 13, 2002, that Greaney “forgot” to include a valuations adjustment in his retirement study. That’s the sort of “bad behavior” for which I have become famous. Good point, Anonymous. Truly outstanding!
Rob