“I Don’t Need to Ask Wade Pfau Questions. I Need Him to Get Over His Fear of What Buy-and-Holders Will Do to Him If He Speaks Openly About What He Believes About Stock Investing. He Tried Doing That for a Bit and Those Were the Happiest Days of His Life. So It Is Something That He Personally Wants To Do. But He Does Not Want To Suffer Career Setbacks for Doing It.”

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

Rob,

There is a new subscription based forum where you can ask direct questions of Wade Pfau and other experts. You should join.

I know what Wade thinks of the Buy-and-Hold safe withdrawal rate studies. He said they are “dangerous.”

And I know what Wade thinks of Valuation-Informed Indexing. He said: “Yes, Virginia, Valuation-Informed Indexing works!”

And I know what Wade thinks of market timing. He co-authored a research paper with me that shows that stock investors who are willing to practice long-term market timing can thereby reduce the risk they are taking on by investing in stocks by nearly 70 percent.

I don’t need to ask Wade questions. I need him to get over his fear of what Buy-and-Holders will do to him if he speaks openly about what he believes about stock investing. He tried doing that for a bit and those were the happiest days of his life. So it is something that he personally wants to do. But he does not want to suffer career setbacks for doing it.

That’s the change we need to see. As a society, we all need to make Wade Pfau and all others who work in this field feel safe to tell us what they believe about how stock investing works. It makes all the sense in the world that we would make them feel that way since we all need to know how stock investing works. But there’s a problem. Learning how stock investing works means giving up our Get Rich Quick hope that there might be some magical world where it is not necessary to practice price discipline when buying stocks.

There’s no fee that I can pay to get us to that new and wonderful world, Anonymous. I believe that we are going to get there. But I believe that it is going to take an ocean of human misery to get us there. If stocks continue to perform in the future anything at all as they have always performed in the past, we will be seeing that ocean of human misery in the not-too-distant future. I don’t think that we are going to need to be paying fees to get good people like Wade Pfau to speak out at that time. I think that Wade and others will be speaking out at that time because their hearts will have been touched by what they have seen taking place around them.

We’ll see.

Rob