“Having Millions of People Invest Their Life Savings in the Stock Market While Discouraging Market Timing (Price Discipline!) Is Like Driving a High-Performance Car Down a Highway With a High Speed Limit Without Brakes.”

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

“ The 2008 economic crisis is a HUGE failure associated with Buy-and-Hold. ”

Wrong. Buy and holders just kept buying and have made a fortune. Meanwhile, you stayed out of the market and fell even further behind and can no longer catch up.

There were hundreds of thousands of businesses that went under as a result of the 2008 Buy-and-Hold Crisis. Were the owners of those businesses winners?

There were millions of people thrown out of work in that crisis. Were those people winners?

We saw political frictions increase on both the left and the right as a result of that crisis — the Occupy Wall Street movement and the Tea Party movement were both fueled by it. Are we all better off because of the increases in political frictions that we have seen in recent years?

Please mark me down as saying that we need to open every discussion board and blog on the internet to honest posting re the last 39 years of peer-reviewed research in this field. Having millions of people invest their life savings in the stock market while discouraging market timing (price discipline!) is like driving a high-performance car down a highway with a high speed limit without brakes. Doing something like that always ends in tears. It is not safe to drive a car without brakes. And it is not safe to encourage people to invest in stocks without making clear to them how essential it is to practice market timing so that prices do not get out of control and bring on an economic crisis that causes an ocean of human misery.

Not this boy, you know? No can do. No freakin’ way, no freakin’ how. Not my particular cup of tea.

I do wish you all the best that this life has to offer a person, in any event.

Rob