Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently posted to the discussion thread for another blog entry at this site:
No one has ever said they agree with your conclusions about Greaney. Your spin is not convincing anyone. No one has agreed with you that there were any death threats. You are just making it up.
I said that the Greaney study lacks a valuation adjustment and should be promptly corrected before it does more damage to more human lives. Wade Pfau looked at it and concluded that the Greaney study is “dangerous.” That’s agreeing with me.
No one has ever said they disagree with me. Greaney himself has not pointed to a section of his study that contains a valuation adjustment. Evidence-Based Investing is the gooniest of goons and he acknowledged a few weeks ago that the Greaney study lacks a valuation adjustment. When you’ve lost Evidence….
The problem is the criminal stuff. That is hurting us all in a very serious way. We know how stock investing works today. We have known for 40 years. But we need to be able to talk about what we know for it to do us any good. We all have a Get Rich Quick/Buy-and-Hold urge residing within us. It takes work to overcome that urge. Anytime someone posts honestly re the peer-reviewed research, that helps us. Anytime someone is intimidated into silenced by your criminal acts, it sends us all backwards.
I believe that we will get the Greaney study corrected in time. But it looks like we are going to see millions of people hurt in very serious ways before we work up the courage to make it happen. It’s a sad situation. But the good news here is 50 times more good and the bad news here is bad. We are poised to experience a huge economic surge. I am looking forward to seeing it (although I obviously am am not looking forward to the ocean of misery that we will be seeing with the next price crash even a little bit).
Rob
The Motley Fool says Rob Bennett and his timing scheme are wrong.
https://www.fool.com/investing/2021/02/16/stop-waiting-for-the-next-stock-market-crash-or-yo/?source=eptyholnk0000202&utm_source=yahoo-host&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=article
It seems to me that the thing to do is to “Stay the Course.” Ir’s true that you don’t know when the next crash is coming. So why not just tune out all the noise and Stay the Course? Where I differ with the Buy-and-Holders is that they say that Staying the Course means sticking with the same stock allocation at all times. I say that Staying the Course means sticking with the same risk profile at all times, which of course requires market timing (adjusting your stock allocation in response to big shifts in valuations so that your risk profile remains constant over time). If you don’t know what’s coming, why not just Stay the Course and not worry about what’s coming? That way, you are prepared for whatever happens.
The peer-reviewed research that I co-authored with Wade Pfau shows that doing it that way permits an investor to retire many years sooner and while taking on much less risk. It shows that that one change of being willing to Stay the Course by engaging in market timing as needed permits the investor to reduce the risk of stock investing by nearly 70 percent. I can live with that, Anonymous.
If you don’t know what’s coming, why not just Stay the Course? Why permit your risk profile to jump around in all kinds of crazy ways for no good reason whatsoever (except that at one time there were some academics who thought that market timing was not required and they have not wanted to correct their error for the 40 years since the error was brought to their attention through the publication of peer-reviewed research that is viewed as so important that its author have been awarded a Nobel prize)?
Rob
You ignored the entire point of the article in that the market has always returned and has gone on to new highs. Timing has never worked.
I agree that the market always goes on to new highs. That doesn’t justify letting your risk profile go wildly off course. Keep your risk profile where it should be (by market timing!) and you will benefit to the greatest extent possible from those new highs. Let your risk profile go wildly off course, and you will greatly limit the extent to which you are able to benefit. Getting your risk profile right matters. Market timing is the key to successful long-term stock investing.
The best thing to do when you determine that you have made a mistake is to acknowledge it and move on with your life.
My sincere take.
Rob
You have to be right on timing and you have demonstrated that you haven’t been right yet on market crashes. Buy and hold has always worked. Timing has not.
You are proven right on timing on the day you engage in the timing. It doesn’t matter when prices change. Your aim is not to know when prices will change. Your aim is to keep your risk profile constant. On the day you engage in timing, you have done that. The market can do whatever it is going to do from that point forward. But you have already been proven right by keeping your risk profile stable. Because that is what always works in the long term. That is what has been working for the 150 years for which we have good records of stock prices and that is what human rationality tells us will continue to work forever into the future.
How could it ever be a good thing to let your risk profile change willy nilly for no good reason whatsoever? It’s a logical impossibility.
Robert Shiller’s Nobel prize-winning research taught us all something of great importanvce.
Rob
Yet you can’t show just one person that has been successful with timing. Meanwhile, we see millions are successful with buy and hold.
The peer-reviewed research that I co-authored with Wade Pfau shows that long-term market timing has been successful for every investor who has employed it for 150 years now, which is as far back as we have records of stock prices. That’s why you threatened to destroy Wade’s career if he continued to post honestly re that research. Extortion is a crime in the United States. It is a felony. That means prison time. Not this boy, you know?
I wish you all good things, Anonymous.
Rob
Every investor? Show us just one.
The rest of your post is just lies in which you try to divert away from the point discussed.
Go to the library and find a phone book for one of those 150 years. Go to the first page — say that the name is “Mike Adams.” There’s you guy.
It is a logical impossibility that there could ever be a single investor who would not benefit from keeping his risk profile where it should be. Market timing always works. It is always required.
Now —
It is possible that someone might do it wrong. That’s possible with anything. So market timing does not get good results on every single occasion on which it is employed. That’s why we need to open every discussion board and blog on the internet to honest posting re the past 40 years of peer-reviewed research. The more people we hear from re market timing, the better we are all going to get at it. We learn about these things by talking them over amongst ourselves. Now that we have 40 years of peer-reviewed research showing that market timing is 70 percent of what it takes to become a successful long-term stock investor, we should be talking about it all the time, always trying to become more effective market timers.
The horror of Buy-and-Hold is not just that it’s wrong. It’s that it is so wildly wrong that it pains the Buy-and-Holders to hear anyone else discussing what is right, what really works. They insist that everyone else get it equally wrong or else they engage in criminal acts to keep knowledge of the how-to implications of Shiller’s Nobel-prize-winning research spreading far and wide. Um — not this boy, you know?
Mike Adams benefitted from keeping his risk profile constant over time, to the extent that he did so. So did every other investor who ever lived. It is a logical impossibility that there could ever be an alternate universe in which price discipline/market timing would not be a positive. Any suggestions to the contrary are marketing garbage with precisely zero support in the peer-reviewed research. So says Rob Bennett, in any event.
My best wishes.
Rob
Your “Mike Adams” is a fake character. Try again, show us just one.
Anonymous. That’s a good one. Use that one.
You would do better in the long term if you practiced market timing to the extent needed to keep your risk profile constant over time.
You will come back and tell me what your portfolio value is today. But you will not subtract for irrational exuberance. Which means that I will not be persuaded.
Shiller showed that irrational exuberance is real. So we have to account for it. Or else we have to stop saying that we are advocating research-based strategies.
My sincere take.
Rob