Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently posted to the discussion thread for another blog entry at this site:
Shiller, Pfau, Bernstein, Ferri, Swedroe, Burns………they all would have to be in on this conspiracy. When Jack Bogle was alive, he would have to have been playing a big role in this conspiracy as well……………or Rob Bennett is making all this up. What is more believable?
Brett Arends wrote an article titled “The Market Timing Myth” in the Wall Street Journal on October 14, 2010. It stated that: “For years the investment industry has tried to scare clients into staying fully invested in the stock market at all times, no matter how high stocks go. It’s hooey. They’re leaving out more than half the story. Anyone who followed the numbers would have avoided the disaster of the 1929 crash, the 1970s or the past lost decade on Wall Street…. I wonder how many stayed fully invested because their brokers warned them ‘you can’t time the market’.”
Everybody in this field reads the Wall Street Journal. So everybody in this field is in on it. Everyone knows that Buy-and-Hold is “hooey” and that the idea that market timing is not required is a “myth.” People don’t want to see their high-paying careers come to an end. So they keep their mouths shut. I think that we all should be speaking up. I think that we should be pointing out that the emperor is wearing no clothes. That’s my contribution, to state that plainly.
Please understand that all of the people who are in on it rationalize their behavior. They tell themselves “oh, it will be okay.” I think it is going to be harder to say that in the days following the next price crash. We’ll see.
Everyone is in on it to one degree or another. Everyone over the age of seven understands that it is a logical impossibility that there could ever be an asset that is worth buying at any possible price. That is a perfectly ABSURD claim.
Rob
One big vast conspiracy against Rob Bennett and his magical VII timing scheme…………Right……….
It’s a vast conspiracy of the humans against the humans, Anonymous.
Galileo was put under house arrest when he said that the earth revolves around the sun rather than the other way around. What he discovered was a huge advance. We needed to accept that before we could learn many important things that we have learned in the years since. But instead of accepting what he said, we fought it and fought it an fought it. It was very threatening to see that there were things written in the Bible that weren’t quite right in the way that they were said. So we humans engaged in a vast conspiracy against ourselves aimed at holding back our progress for a time.
We eventually got over it. I believe that the same thing will happen in the stock investing realm in time. The “idea” that market timing might not work or might not be required is silliness. Market timing is price discipline and price discipline is what makes markets work. So it is essential. But the humans did not always know that and so we made this mistake of coming to believe that market timing is not absolutely essential. I think that we will get over it in time and permit ourselves to live far better and more enriching lives from that point forward.
We’ll see, you know?
I wish us all luck.
Rob
You compare yourself to Galileo? Really?
I compare Shiller to Galileo.
I am one of the many people saying that we should listen to Galileo, that it is foolish to try to shut him up. Learning new things is a positive.
Rob
You are the one that needs to learn something.
We all need to be open to learning all that we possibly can.
My sincere take.
Rob