Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently posted to the discussion thread for another blog entry at this site:
Do you think your mental status will improve once you get a job?
I think that the financial future of everyone who lives in the United States will improve once you Goons are placed in prison cells, where you belong, and the rest of us are free to talk over what we have learned about how stock investing works from the last 38 years of peer-reviewed research. Being afraid of you doesn’t help. When one of us shows fear of you Goons, it causes others to become more afraid. When one of us works up the courage to stand up to you, it helps others to work up the courage to stand up to you. Each of us has an effect on the community as a whole. We each have to consider how our actions affect the actions of everyone else.
Criminal acts reveal desperation. Your reliance on criminal acts shows that Shiller is right, investors are NOT purely rational creatures, investors are at times HIGHLY emotional. So we need to adjust the numbers that we get when we assume 100 percent rationality with additions or subtractions relecting the effect of investor emotionalism.
Evidence of your abusiveness is part of the research that we need to be looking at to come to a full understanding of how stock investing works. The data that Shiller and Pfau and Russell and Arnott look at helps. But we also need to look at the death threats and demands for unjustified board bannings and the thousands of acts of defamation and threats to get academic researchers fired from their jobs. That stuff is just as important. It was Greaney’s first death threat and the fact that 200 of my fellow community members endorsed it that told me that Buy-and-Hold is a big pile of smelly garbage. Everyone needs to be able to see that it is emotion that rules the Buy-and-Hold mind.
Those of us who are trying to help people come to a deeper understanding of how stock investing works (high prices are caused by emotion and do not not last!) should not be afraid of the Buy-and-Holders (the Get Rich Quickers!). We have the law on our side. The Get Rich Quickers do not.
Will those laws be enforced immediately? They will not be.
Will those laws be enforced after millions have been hurt by the Get Rich Quick/Buy-and-Hold stuff in very serious ways? I believe so. And then we will all have to come to terms with what we did to ourselves by not incorporating Shiller’s insights into our understanding of the subject going back to 1981.
We need to go through what we are going through today to get to the place where deep in our hearts we all want to be tomorrow. What we are seeing from you Goons (out-of-control emotionalism on the subject of stock investing) is what causes price crashes. I don’t like how price crashes hurt people. So I am going to tell the story of what causes them. And we now have 17 years of Post Archives available to us for the telling of the tale.
I think that the book that I am writing will be the most important book ever published in the field of personal finance. Others don’t want to write it because they don’t want to face all of this ugliness. But it is by facing the ugliness that we come to terms with it and overcome it and free ourselves from it in the future.
I think that the mental status of the community of investors will improve once my book is published and we experience the price crash that brings it a big readership. We have to go through this dark stuff to unlock in a practical sense the magic that Shiller tried to deliver to us 38 years ago.
That’s my take, Anonymous. Call me madcap.
Mental (In the eyes of Buy-and-Holders) Rob
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