Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently posted to the discussion thread for another blog entry at this site:
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
If things don’t “work out” for you by the time you turn 65, will you finally admit you were wrong? After all, isn’t it a bit too late by that time for things to catch up for you?
There is no circumstance in which I could ever feel comfortable posting dishonestly about whether the Greaney retirement study contains a valuation adjustment, Anonymous. That’s like saying that the people who opposed slavery at some point should have given up because things had not yet worked out for them. Slavery is wrong and getting the numbers wrong in a retirement study is wrong. I am of course not saying that getting the numbers wrong in a retirement study is as bad as slavery. It’s not even close. But getting the numbers wrong in a retirement study is a serious wrong. People use retirement studies to plan retirements. So this is a big deal.
Whatever it takes is what it takes. There was a three-year time-period when things did not work out for me. Those were the three years from 1999 to 2002 when I knew about the error in the Greaney study but was too afraid to say so publicly. May 13, 2002, is the day that things started going RIGHT for me. I know all about the abusive stuff, obviously. But I would rather have all that garbage coming at me from the outside in than have my own conscience telling me that I am a creep from the inside out. Someone who sees his friends use a retirement study that gets the numbers wrong and doesn’t do anything about it is a creep. I am happy and proud that I stopped being a creep on the morning of May 13, 2002, and I have never once looked back once I made that choice.
Things haven’t gone as I would have liked them to go. That’s more than fair to say. But things have been working out for me a lot better from May 13, 2002. forward than they did from 1999 to 2002. My intent is to continue posting honestly and see how things play out. Personally, I am optimistic about the future because I believe that our nation is filled with good and smart people.
My best wishes to you.
Rob