“The Brett Arends Article in the Wall Street Journal (‘The Market Timing Myth’) Arguing That the Advice to Stay Fully Invested in Stocks at All Times Regardless of How High Prices Go Is ‘Hooey’ Did Not Bring on the Collapse of Buy-and-Hold Because There Was No Reaction To It. I Am the Only Personal Finance Blogger Who Commented on That Amazing, Provocative, Breakthrough, Bold Article. We Are Deciding These Matters As a Community.”

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

“I am grateful for any help or suggestions that you can offer.”

I’ll offer this. You’re wasting your time sending your magnum opus to these nobodies. The League of Goons has already anticipated everyone you might decide to send it to, and warned them.

You need to focus on the NY Times and the Wall Street Journal. They’re too big for goons. Send it to them every day until they publish it. And if that doesn’t work, start sending it twice a day.

I don’t agree with much of what you say in this comment. But there is one point that you make re which we are in strong agreement. The New York Times and the Wall Street Journal are the difference makers. When they report on all the fraud stuff that has suppressed questioning of Buy-and-Hold for 37 years now, everyone else will feel safe doing the same. We beat the cover-up by making people aware of it. And we make people aware of it by getting it written up on the front page of the New York Times. When the Times has the story on its front page, everyone else will add follow-ups in a very short amount of time.

We are not too far from having the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal report what needs to be reported. Brett Arends wrote an article titled “The Market Timing Myth” in the Wall Street Journal on October 14, 2010. It stated that: “For years the investment industry has tried to scare clients into staying fully invested in the stock market at all times, no matter how high stocks go. It’s hooey. They’re leaving out more than half the story. Anyone who followed the numbers would have avoided the disaster of the 1929 crash, the 1970s or the past lost decade on Wall Street…. I wonder how many stayed fully invested because their brokers warned them ‘you can’t time the market’.”

That’s it. That’s the story that needs to be told. To tell the entire story would take a ten-part series. But the 2010 article from Arends says what most needs to be said in a very concise manner. So the Ban on Honest Posting has not been complete. There have been breaks in the wall. Some very big breaks. If the Ban were 100 percent complete, Shiller would not have have been able to find a publisher for his book. If the Ban were 100 percent complete, Shiller would not have been awarded a Nobel prize. If the Ban were 100 percent complete, the Bennett/Pfau research paper would not have been published in a peer-reviewed journal. If the Ban were 100 percent complete, there wouldn’t have been so many community members telling me that they were looking forward to meeting me when I attended the annual convention with Bogle (before I was banned from attending).

It took courage for Arends to write that article. It took courage for the editors of the Wall Strert Journal to run the article. But the article was published. Why didn’t it bring on the collapse of Buy-and-Hold?

It didn’t bring on the collapse of Buy-and-Hold because there was no reaction to publication of the article. I was expecting the next morning to see 20 or 30 of my fellow personal finance bloggers offer reactions to those amazing words, either positive or negative or in-between. I didn’t see one of them do that. Just me. I am the only personal finance blogger who commented on that amazing, provocative, break-through, bold article. That’s why we are where we are today. That’s why we are looking forward to a deepening of the economic crisis rather than living through the greatest period of economic growth in our history.

The $64,000 question is — Will there come a time when more of my fellow personal finance bloggers will come to see that the pain of not talking about the last 37 years of peer-reviewed research in this field has grown so great that it is worth taking on the beating they will experience by standing up to you Goons to get the word out to people? I think that day is going to come. I think that’s when we will see the entire Buy-and-Hold Model come tumbling down to the ground.

Arends would have written a follow-up had there been a strong reaction to that article. His editors would have published his follow-up had there been a strong reaction to that article.

We are deciding these matters as a community. Today there are huge benefits paid to those who are willing to pretend that the last 37 years of peer-reviewed research doesn’t exist. And there are huge penalties imposed on those who work up the courage to do honest work in this field. So we don’t get much honest work. We get lots of Buy-and-Hold marketing slogans. And the stock crashes that follow from the relentless reiteration of those marketing slogans. And the economic crises that follow from the loss of spending power we all experience as the result of those stock crashes.

The price is too high. The personal price for posting honestly is insanely high today. So we don’t see too many people working up the courage to stick their necks out. But the collective price for continuation of the Ban on Honest Posting will be so high in the days following the next price crash that a good number of us just will no longer be able to bear keeping it zipped. And then someone like Arends will publish something like what he published in 2010 but instead of generating zero reaction it will generate a huge reaction and we will as a society see 37 years of advances in our understanding of how stock investing works achieved in the space of a few weeks.

Or so Rob Bennett believes, in any event, you know?

I think we are close. I don’t think that Arends would have written that article unless we were close, It turned out that at the time he wrote it we were not close enough to get the job done. That’s of course very sad in about a million ways. But the optimistic take is that we were close enough to get that article written. And the publication of that article sent a message to all the rest of us who would like to be doing honest work in this field that we are very, very, very close to seeing something that will change all of our lives in a very, very, very positive way.

I am going to hang in there and wait for all the amazing good stuff to take place. I love my country, I think we are going to win this one. I think that death threats and threats of career destruction are the past and that open, civil, respectful discussion of the last 37 years of peer-research is the future.

We will see.

I naturally wish you all the best that this life has to offer a person.

Rob