“My Hope Is That I Will Be the Catalyst for Setting Off the National Debate that We Need to Have re These Matters. If I Pull That Off, People Will Not Just Benefit from Things I Say but from Things that Thousands of Others (on Both the Buy-and-Hold and Valuation-Informed Indexing Sides of the Table) Say Once They Feel Free to Express Their Sincere Views Openly and Clearly and Frankly. The Leverage Here Is Just Off the Charts.”

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

Evidence just blew up the Rob-logic in one simple post. Based on your responses, you know it too, Rob

Okay, Anonymous.

The way that I would say it is that Shiller blew up the Bogle logic in one simple book and in one simple piece of peer-reviewed research and in one simple Nobel prize.

I have the greatest possible respect for Bogle and for Fama and for all other Buy-and-Holders. So long as their ideas are presented in a civil way, I think they should be taken seriously. That’s why I spent some time approaching what Evidence said from several perspectives. I am not personally a Buy-and-Holder. But I know that there are millions of good and smart people who are and I think that their beliefs need to be taken seriously.

I don’t buy into the idea that there are two sides. There are two models for understanding how stock investing works. There are two very different sets of beliefs. But we are all on the same side. We all want the same thing — to learn what we need to learn to invest as effectively as possible.

My hope is that I will be the catalyst for setting off the national debate that we need to have re these matters. If I pull that off, people will not just benefit from things I say but from things that thousands of others (on both the Buy-and-Hold and Valuation-Informed Indexing side of the table) say once they feel free to express their sincere views openly and clearly and frankly. The leverage here is just off the charts.

That’s why I think that the work that I have been doing for 17 years now is so important. That’s why I think that I will be receiving a settlement check for $500 million when we all get to the other side of The Big Black Mountain. Our national debate re these matters should have begun in 1981,when Shiller published his amazing and “revolutionary” (his word) research findings. Once it got put off, it got more and more difficult to talk about this stuff because people got more and more defensive about the fact that the critical debate was delayed for so long. We have to get there sooner or later and I don’t see any way that it is going to happen until some more people do what I have done, just insist on their right and on the right of everyone else to post honestly and without hesitance or apology. I believe that we are a great country and that we will be able to pull it off in the days following the next price crash.

I am grateful for the comment posted by Evidence. I hope that people will take his comments seriously and that perhaps I will be seen by one or two to have added something to the discussion down the line a bit. We’ll see, you know?

My best and warmest wishes to you and yours in any event, dear friend.

Rob