“Lots of People Have Doubts About Buy-and-Hold But Are Afraid to Give Them Public Voice Because They Know That Millions of People Have Their Retirements Riding on the Validity of the Strategy. We Are Social Creatures.”

Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently posted to the discussion thread for one of my columns at the Value Walk site:

The May 2002 post you speak of was not the cause of you leaving your job. You told all of us you quit. You know you were wrong about your May 2002 post and you apologized. Wade Pfau even confirmed you were wrong. None of this has anything to do with why you quit your job and why you haven’t gone back to work yet. Why do you continue to look to blame others for your refusal to work?

You’re right that I thought that I was wrong at one point and that I apologized for raising the issue. I wasn’t wrong. It was intense social pressure that caused me to think that I was. That’s what we are facing as a society. Lots of people have doubts about Buy-and-Hold but are afraid to give them public voice because they know that millions of people have their retirements riding on the validity of the strategy. We are social creatures. We will get beyond Buy-and-Hold once we give ourselves permission to talk openly about what the last 38 years of peer-reviewed research says about it. But we have to hear lots of people talk about those flaws in an open way to gain confidence that we really need to move on.

Wade also was subject to intense social pressures. Wade loves Valuation-Informed Indexing. Loves it, loves it, loves it. He sent me scores of e-mails telling me so. He researched the issue for 16 months. He told me that he couldn’t sleep at night because he was so excited about what he was learning. He told me that he was thinking of submitting our research to the most prestigious journal in the field. He wrote at the conclusion of his research that: “Yes, Virginia, Valuation-Informed Indexing works!” That’s what he really believes.

But, yes, when you Goons threatened to get him fired from his job, he wrote to me to tell me that he was scared about what would happen if he continued saying what he really believes re these matters. He had seen what you Goons had done to me and he was worried that he would be in for the same treatment. Would anyone stand up for him if you sent defamatory e-mails to his employer or would he too end up being an unemployable whistle-blower?

I say that we should permit Wade and every other researcher in this field to say what he or she truly believes. An amazing learning experience will follow. People need to feel safe to speak up. We need to enforce our laws in a reasonable manner. We all benefit from advancing in our understanding of how stock investing works. So we all need to be united in speaking up on behalf of those who work up the courage to blow the whistle on the Buy-and-Hold stuff.

That’s my sincere take, in any event, Sammy.

Rob