“The Emotional Side of the Stock Investing Experience Is the Great Unexplored Continent of Our Time.”

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

“What’s the alternative? Not send things?”

Almost anything would be a better alternative as you have completely wasted your time. Flip burgers, deliver newspapers, clean toilets, etc. all of these things would have been a much more productive use of your time.

So you say, Anonymous.

But I am not convinced.

If you believed deep in your heart that I have wasted my time for the past 17 years, you would have stopped commenting on my blog entries a long, long, long, long time ago.

You personally think that Buy-and-Hold is a good strategy. I believe that much. But I think you have doubts, doubts that you are afraid to face up to just yet, My words drive you crazy because my words stir up those doubts. You are not able to walk away and ignore my words. You feel a need to crush them when they appear before you.

It’s not just you, of course. There are millions of people following Buy-and-Hold strategies today. Few are as intense in their hate of Shiller’s work as you. But most Buy-and-Holders feel at least a little uncomfortable when their investment strategy is questioned. I think that we need to get to the bottom of why that is so. I think that that’s a big deal. I think that the emotional side of the stock investing experience is the great unexplored continent of our time. It’s hard and scary work exploring it. But the benefits that stand to be gained from putting in the effort are immense.

I wish you all good things. I hope that that helps at least a small bit.

Rob