“If There Is No Such Thing As Irrational Exuberance, Buy-and-Hold Is the Ideal Strategy. If Irrational Exuberance Is a Real Thing, Buy-and-Hold Is the Most Dangerous Strategy Ever Concocted By the Human Mind.”

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 made so many crash predictions that never came true. Your fear kept you out of the market and now it is too late to make up for lost ground. Clearly, you would have done WAY better with buy and hold.

That’s not what the numbers say, Anonymous. Not when you adjust them for the effect of irrational exuberance, as the last 39 years of peer-reviewed research shows you must.

If there is no such thing as irrational exuberance, Buy-and-Hold is the ideal strategy. I’ll give you that one. If irrational exuberance is a real thing, Buy-and-Hold is the most dangerous strategy ever concocted by the human mind. I believe that Shiller’s Nobel-prize-winning research is legitimate research. Sue me, you know?

Rob