Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently posted to the discussion thread for another blog entry at this site:
“I don’t deny my bias.”
Yes, you do.
No, I don’t.
I think that I am right. If I didn’t think that I was right, I would not say what I say.
But of course the funny thing about bias is that it is often the case that a person is not aware of his own bias and the effect that it has on his thinking. A bias can blind a person. And that blindness can extend to the existence of the bias itself.
I certainly possess a bias. I hope that it does not influence my thinking re these matters to any great degree. But, if it did, there’s a good chance that I would not be aware of that. This is one of those darn paradoxes of human existence.
My best wishes to you.
Rob
If you were right, you would have had 10’s of millions in your retirement account by now, yet you admitted this past year that you need to seek employment.
That comment doesn’t make even a tiny bit of sense. The average return in the stock market is 6.5 percent real. Following a research-based strategy (one that calls for market timing!) permits one to earn a somewhat higher return at greatly reduced risk. How does that translate into tens of millions of dollars? And Valuation-Informed Indexing is something that only works in the long run. We are not there yet! The proper time to assess which strategy works better is after the irrational exuberance has disappeared. That has not yet happened.
The only way that I am going to make tens of millions (and I believe that I will) is with my journalism work. I believe that I will make hundreds of millions with my journalism work. But I cannot male a penny until I can the story out before people. And there is a strong resistance to that. For the very reason why I will make so much money telling the story. This matter is of urgent importance to everyone alive in the United States today. The more important a story is, the more money it brings in. And the more important a story is, the more resistance to the telling of it there is among those trying to maintain the status quo.
I don’t believe that I am going to be able to get this story out on a widespread basis until after the next price crash. That’s a frightening reality. If stocks continue to perform in the future anything at all as they always have in the past, millions of people are going to be hurt in very serious ways in the next price crash. So I am horrified by the idea that I going to have to see all that pain play out before me. But you know what? At least we will be able to say that this is the last time that we will all have to live through something like that. Once we have opened one large site to honest posting, people will start becoming able to make money promoting research-based strategies and then things start getting better and better and better. So the good guys (all of us!) win in the end, after a good number of truly harrowing incidents.
Or at least this Rob Bennett fellow (a journalist, not an investment expert!) sincerely believes, you know?
I hope that you can at least wish us all the best of luck with it. I certainly do that re you.
My best wishes.
Rob
This is about investing, not journalism. We are investing for our retirements. If your market timing scheme worked, you would have 10’s of millions as you claim to do better than the market.
People are not coming to investment forums to learn about journalism.
The tens of millions stuff is just crazy talk. The peer-reviewed research that I co-authored with Wade Pfau shows that an investor who makes the switch from Buy-and-Hold to Valuation-Informed Indexing will thereby reduce his risk by nearly 70 percent while also permitting himself to retire earlier. There is nothing in there about tens of millions. That is pure Goon nonsense.
People come to investment forums to learn about investing. But people need good journalism to keep investment forums clean. There is always going to be a huge inventive for people who work in this field to favor Get Rich Quick/Buy-and-Hold strategies. Those are the short-term money makers. But people need to be able to hear both sides of the story for knowledge to advance over time. That’s where good journalism comes in.
People don’t go to the grocery store to hear about FDA regulations. They go to the grocery store to buy meat. But the quality of the meat they can buy there is greatly influenced by the presence of FDA regulations. Without those regulations, each meat producer would feel strong temptations to offer a poisoned product. With their competitors all doing it, they really wouldn’t have an choice, But those regulations impose penalties on those who offer poisoned products and thereby make it possible for people in that field to behave ethically. Which works to the good of all of us.
So it is in the investment advice field. There are LOTS of people in this field who would LOVE to feel free to do honest work. But look at what the Buy-and-Holders do to those of us who step out of line and give it a try. We are destroyed. I believe that the money-making idea of offering poisoned investment strategies (strategies that do not call for market timing!) will come to an end in the days following the next price crash, when good journalists will be able to tell people where most of their retirement money went. And, from that day forward, we will all (including our Wall Street Con Men friends) be able to live better lives.
Good journalism matters. Good journalism is important. Good journalist adds to our lives. We may not always see it. Sometimes it is working in the background. But when we stop enforcing the laws that permit good journalism to be practiced, we all pay a price. I believe that we all are going to see up close and personal how that works in the days following the next price crash.
My best wishes to you.
Rob
It is the results/outcomes. It tells us all we need to know. If you had superior outcomes, people would follow what you say. But your outcomes and predictions failed.
The peer-reviewed research that I co-authored with Wade Pfau showed outcomes for those following Valuation-Informed Indexing strategies vs. those following Buy-and-Hold strategies going back to 1870 and the Valuation-Informed Indexing strategies were shown to be far superior over and over and over again by every measure that Wade employed to look at the question.
We don’t have outcomes data for today because the irrational exuberance that is keeping market prices up has not yet disappeared. Subtract for the effect of irrational exuberance, as the last 39 years of peer-reviewed research shows you must, and you get very different answers from what you get if you count Get Rich Quick gains as real. In the days following the next price crash, the Get Rich Quick/Buy-and-Hold/Irrational Exuberance gains will have disappeared. People will be better able to assess then whether going pure Get Rich Quick/Buy-and-Hold proved to be a good thing.
I voted for letting people hear both sides of the story on the morning of May 13, 2002. I still vote that way. But I only get one vote. There’s a lot of money to be made pushing a pure Get Rich Quick approach and that money has been able to drown out the voices of thousands of people who have expressed a desire that honest posting be permitted. I believe that that will change in the days following the next price crash, when we will all be able to see up close and personal where the Get Rich Quick/Buy-and-Hold/No Market Timing stuff always takes us. We’ll see.
I naturally wish you all the best that this life has to offer a person, in any event.
Rob