“There Is No Research Supporting the Buy-and-Hold Claim That There Is No Need to Practice Price Discipline (Long-Term Timing) When Buying Stocks. Wade Pfau Found it Hard to Believe That the Buy-and-Holders Had Been Making This Claim for Many Years and That There Was Precisely Zero Support for it in the Literature. So He Looked and He Looked and He Looked. And He Came Up Empty-Handed. There Is Nothing.”

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

You use the word “honest” as a way of trying to convince people of credibility or to subtly say that those in opposition are somehow dishonest. I could just say that I will post honestly about how the moon is made of green cheese. What you are really saying is that you will continue to post your opinions.

Secondly, you have been telling us how we should wait to see how things play out. We have already seen that. Wake up, Rob. You are now in your 60’s. You can’t afford to keep sitting around.

Yes, I will continue to post my opinions. That is certainly what I am saying.

And, yes, one reason why I frequently note that I honestly do not believe that the retirement study posted at John Greaney’s web site contains an adjustment for the valuation level that applies on the day the retirement begins is that the fact that I am okay with honest posting and the Buy-and-Holders are not suggests a credibility problem for the Buy-and-Holders. That is certainly what I am saying.

The Buy-and-Holders and the Valuation-Informed Indexers are speaking different languages, Anonymous. There really is research supporting Valuation-Informed Indexing. It exists. 38 years of it exist.

There is no research supporting the Buy-and-Hold claim that there is no need to practice price discipline (long-term timing) when buying stocks. Wade Pfau found it hard to believe that the Buy-and-Holders had been making this claim for many years and that there was precisely zero support for it in the literature. So he looked and he looked and he looked. And he came up empty-handed. There is nothing. That’s why you Goons felt that the only way to keep Buy-and-Hold going after Wade began putting up posts about the peer-reviewed research that he co-authored with me was to threaten to get him fired from his job if he continued doing so. You didn’t engage in criminal acts because you thought it was a fun idea. You engaged in criminal acts because you felt that you were backed into a corner and you couldn’t think of any other way out.

Get Rich Quick schemes are rooted in emotion, not reason. I can put forward thousands of posts making the rational case for Valuation-Informed Indexing and they won’t cause you to modify your views one iota. Your views are rooted in emotion, not reason. You want Buy-and-Hold to be a real strategy. You want the numbers on your portfolio statement to be accurate. You want stocks to be the best asset class regardless of the price you pay for them. You want crazy things, things that are a logical impossibility. But you want them really, really, really bad. I am insisting on my right to talk about strategies rooted in the peer-reviewed research. So we are working at cross purposes.

Will a price drop of more than 50 percent change investor emotions enough so that we will be able to open every discussion board and blog on the internet to honest posting re the last 38 years of peer-reviewed research in this field? I sure think so. I think that that is going to bring on the crisis that we need to as a society achieve this paradigm change.

But I am not God. I could be wrong. We are going to have to wait to see it play out to find out for sure.

I certainly wish you the best of luck with it, dear friend.

I am going to continue to post my opinions HONESTLY. There’s no give re that one. Zero flexibility.

I hope that that helps at least a tiny bit.

Still Sleeping Rob