“Any Minority Opinion Can Get Banned If Site Administrators Decide on Who Gets Banned by Taking a Vote. Valuation-Informed Indexers Are Outnumbered by Buy-and-Holders by 10 to 1.”

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

You have had plenty of time to post and you did so profusely. It is your behavior the led to your banning.

The behavior that you are talking about is that I said that the Greaney study lacks a valuation adjustment. That caused people to lose confidence in the Greaney study and Greaney does not want that. Greaney wants people to maintain confidence in the study and, to achieve that goal, he needs to have me banned everywhere. I want people to appreciate how dangerous the study is. So we are working at cross purposes.

The bottom line is that Buy-and-Hold cannot work if Shiller’s research is legitimate. The Buy-and-Holders act as if Shiller does not exist. I do not, I say that he exists and I say that it is perfectly appropriate for me and everyone else who cares to to discuss the implications of his research.

Shiller’s reseach and Buy-and-Hold cannot co-exist. If valuations affect long-term returns, then the idea that market timing is not required is crazy talk. The Buy-and-Holders recognize the threat and so they insist that discussion of the implications of Shiller’s research be banned. I think that a ban on honest posting is the wrong way to go, I advocate open discussion of the peer-reviewed research so that we can all over time come to a better understanding of the realities.

Any minority opinion can get banned if site administrators decide on who gets banned by taking a vote. Valuation-Informed Indexers are outnumbered by Buy-and-Holders by 10 to 1. But I say that the published rules of the sites and the statutes of the United States should determine who gets banned, not a popularity poll. It is Greaney and the others who have participated in criminal acts who should be banned, not those of us who have properly pointed out that his retirement study lacks a valuation adjustment.

An invalid retirement study that tells people what they want to hear is still an invalid retirement study. Buy-and-Hold is popular because it tells people what they want to hear (that the numbers on their portfolio statement are legitimate), not because there is any good reason today to believe that the market is efficient (as many believed was the case in the days before Shiller published his Nobel-prize-winning research).

Rob