“When You Tell the Truth About Stock Investing, You Are Pointing Out the Dangers of the Get Rich Quick/Buy-and-Hold Urge That Resides Within All of Us. You Are Finding Fault With Your Fellow Humans.”

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

“My target date for completing the book is June 1.”

Your target date was end of 2019. Then a few weeks later. Then end of 2020. Now June 2021.

Is there any reason in the world to believe you’ll meet this latest deadline? I see none. And since the job hunt conveniently follows the book completion, that gets put off forever too.

An unbiased observer can only conclude that you were never serious about either.

I kick myself for not having finished the book years ago. It “should” have been finished a long, long time ago. That much is certainly fair to say.

The other side of the story is that Shiller published his Nobel-prize-winning research showing that there is precisely zero chance that a pure Get Rich Quick/Buy-and-Hold strategy could ever work for a single long-term investor 40 years ago. Shiller has not written the book that I am close to finishing during those 40 years. Bernstein pointed out the the Buy-and-Hold safe withdrawal rate studies were off by two full percentage points for those who retired at the top of the bubble 18 years ago but Bernstein has not written the book that I am close to finishing. Wade Pfau got to see the ugliness of the pure Get Rich Quick/Buy-and-Hold approach when it is confronted with what the peer-reviewed research shows up close and personal but Wade hasn’t published the book that I am close to finishing.

I wish that I had finished the book years ago. But the full reality is that the reason why I have not is that it is a very, vary, very hard project. Intellectually, it is not terribly difficult. Anyone of average intelligence could have written this book years ago, The hard part is the emotional part. When you tell the truth about stock investing, you are pointing out the dangers of the Get Rich Quick/Buy-and-Hold urge that resides within all of us. You are finding fault with your fellow humans. The purpose is to help them live better and richer lives in the future. But still…. You are finding fault with all of the humans and that’s s a very hard thing for one of the humans to do. So it has taken a good but of time to come to terms with it all and to get the right words on paper.

I make the comparison to Galileo. I think that what Galileo did was wonderful. The humans once thought that the earth was the center of the universe and that is not so. We need to know that to make sense of things, Galileo offended lots of people when he told the truth about that matter. People had come to believe that the Bible is the revealed word of God and the Bible has words in it suggesting that the earth is the center of the universe. Galileo wasn’t hated because he was wrong, he was hated because he was right. People really, really, really wanted to believe that there were no errors in the Bible and there were. He helped us all by showing us that that was the case. But he drew some hate from his fellow humans by doing that.

I am a person of faith I believe there is a God. I believe that my soul will be judged after I die. So there is a sense in which I should be on the ant-Galileo side of the table. But I am not, If there really is a God, I believe that he would want us to learn as much as we can about the world in which we live. Learning that the earth revolves around the sun is learning something important that God did when he set up the world. So Galileo brought us closer to understanding God, in my assessment.

That’s what I am trying to do. We need to know how stock investing works. Every last one of us needs to know that. If the Buy-and-Holders got the market timing thing wrong once upon a time, then the Buy-and-Holders got the market timing thing wrong once upon a time. I think we all need to come to terms with that reality and move forward. I think that my book will help us in that effort. So I am proud to be close to completing it.

Do I wish that it had been a less difficult project? Sure. Absolutely. A thousand times over. But the book wouldn’t have nearly the same value if it were a less difficult project, would it? If it were a less difficult project, the book would already exist and I wouldn’t be making any significant contribution. It was a very difficult project, one that no one before me dared to take on. So I forgive myself for being more than a little bit slow in the completion of it. Saying something important that millions of people very, very, very much do not want to hear is an emotionally painful thing to do. But someone has to do it if we are all going to come to a better understanding of this important subject. I think it would be fair to say that I was elected. So I have put myself to the task and I am close to completing it. Late but very, very, very effectively, judging by the many passages that I have already been able to put to paper and review carefully.

I can live with all that. I wish that it had been easier. But it has been what it has been. I am not physically able to post dishonestly re the numbers that my friends are using to plan their retirements. So I took it this other way instead. I offer no apologies and I suffer no regrets.

At the end of all this, the world will have in its possession a highly valuable book that it did not have in its possession on the morning of May 13, 2002. So I did good working up the courage to advance that famous post.

My best and warmest wishes to you.

Rob