” I Take Bogle’s Ideas and Update Them to Reflect Shiller’s Research. And I Take Shiller’s Theory and Give It Practical Significance By Addressing All the How-To Aspects of the Question That Shiller Ignores.”

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

“But why do you put so much focus on where I rank? ”

There are so many out there with opinions. Shouldn’t we give more credence to those that are more expert than others?

Absolutely.

This is why I became a Buy-and-Holder. When I was putting together my binders to plan my early retirement, I became exasperated that there seemed be as many opinions about how stock investing works that there were people commenting on the subject. Then I found Bogle. He advocated using the peer-reviewed research as a guide. That made sense to me. That took things out of the subjective realm and into the objective realm.

An expert is someone who keeps up to date with the peer-reviewed research in the field. One upon a time, that was Bogle. Not today. Now he is 38 years behind the curve. So is Bogle an expert today or not? According to his own key principle (that one should use the peer-reviewed research as a guide),he is not. He is either wrong about the importance of peer-reviewed research or he is wrong to ignore the last 38 years of peer-reviewed research.

I would say that Bogle is an expert re all the stuff that he says that is not impacted by Shiller’s revolutionary findings of 1981. So, when he says to keep it simple, I am in. When he says to index, I am in. When he says to tune out the noise, I am in. When he says to invest for the long term, I am in, But when he says that there is no need to consider valuations when calculating the safe withdrawal rate, I am out.

I don’t consider myself an expert in this field. But Bogle is not really an expert anymore either. He was prior to 1981. But when he failed to update his investment advice to reflect Shiller’s “revolutionary” (his word) research findings, he fell out of the world of objective research and into the world of subjective opinion.

Shiller is an expert in the realm of theory. He is aces in that department. But Shiller rarely comments on the practical how-to aspects of the stock investing story. So I don’t think that he can be called an expert in that realm. That’s my niche. I take Bogle’s ideas and update them to reflect Shiller’s research. And I take Shiller’s theory and give it practical significance by addressing all the how-to aspects of the question that Shiller ignores.

So who is the true expert here? Bogle did hugely important stuff and then dropped the ball on other hugely important stuff. It’s the same with Shiller. I think that my work has huge importance. But all that I really did was build on the work of Shiller and Bogle. So I don’t feel comfortable saying that I rank higher than those two giants. I would say that all three of us have contributed something essential to solving the stock investing puzzle and leave it at that.

I don’t offer any apologies. But I don’t want to suggest that I could have done what I have done without a lot of help from a lot of others either. I filled in the spots that Bogle missed and I filled in the spots that Shiller missed. That’s not nothing. That’s a big deal. But I sure could not have done what I have done without a lot of help. That idea is laughable and I do not want to be associated with it.

Does all of that not make good sense?