“Is the Investment Advice Field Just About Turning a Quick Buck Regardless of How Much Human Misery You Cause Doing It? Or Is There a Place in This Field for Advice That Actually Helps Your Clients and Readers?”

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

The community gives us feedback that allows for an impartial view. The fact that you have been consistently warned and banned gives us this objective view.

But never once in nearly 18 years have I put forward an abusive post!

The shows the power of the Get Rich Quick/Buy-and-Hold urge that resides within each and every one of us. That’s the entire deal here. Is the investment advice field just about turning a quick buck regardless of how much human misery you cause doing it? Or is there a place in this field for advice that actually helps your clients and readers?

I believe that there is a place for honest and accurate investment advice. I believe that we are going to get there. Shiller was able to find a publisher for his book. It became a best-seller. He was awarded a Nobel prize. Wade and I were able to get our research published in a peer-reviewed journal. Thousands of our fellow community members have worked up the courage to “cross” you Goons by expressing a desire that honest posting be permitted. We are close. We are not where we all deep in our hearts want to be. But we are very close.

I agree strongly about the community feedback issue. But I don’t tale the dark view of what the community has done that you do. Yes, honest posting is banned just about everywhere today. Obviously that is an exceedingly unfortunate reality. But there have been lots of good signs. We are an imperfect people but we are a fundamentally good people. We are working ourselves to a place where we will all be able to pull together and change the world in a very life-affirming way.

I think that the next price crash will do the trick. If you look at the Bernie Madoff matter, you see that people take a very different view of Get Rich Quick approaches after they have been exposed for what they are. I think that that is what we are going to see with Buy-and-Hold. And, once there are a few people posting honestly, the floodgates are going to open. There are millions of investors who would love to have access to honest, accurate, research-based reports on how stock investing works. So there are hundreds of millions of dollars to be made promoting Valuation-Informed Indexing strategies. I don’t think it is realistic for you Goons to think that you will be able to hold back the History Train indefinitely.

I wear my many bans as a badge of honor. You can’t post honestly about the last 38 years of peer-reviewed research without getting banned in today’s InvestoWorld. I would rather be honest than be non-banned and celebrated for encouraging people to take steps that will likely ruin their lives somewhere down the road a piece. That one is not even a close call in my book. And I have a funny feeling that a lot of the people who are for the time-being keeping their mouths shut about the dangers of Buy-and-Hold feel the same. Once the floodgates open, we are going to see an explosion of honest, accurate, research-based posting.

It will be interesting to see how it all plays out in the days following the next price crash. That much is for sure. I believe that we will be seeing the greatest economic advance in our nation’s history in those days. I just wish that we didn’t need to see the widespread human misery that will come with a price crash to get us there.

My best and warmest wishes to you and yours.

Proudly Banned Rob