“We All Played a Role Either in Making That Happen or in Letting It Happen and We Are All Ashamed of Ourselves for Not Doing More to Bring It To a Full and Complete Stop Many Years Ago. We Are Going to Have To Come To Terms With Our Shame.”

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

Does anyone in the investment community talk to you anymore? If so, why don’t they just post here in support and stay anonymous?

Because someone who did that would then have to live with himself. There’s never been an iota of evidence supporting the “idea” that price discipline (market timing!) is not required when buying stocks. If there had never been an efficient market theory (there never would have been one if Shiller had published his Nobel-prize-winning research in 1961 instead of in 1981), there never would have been one person in the world who would not have believed that price discipline (market timing!) is every bit as much required when buying stocks as it is when buying anything else. Every person who works in this field would love to be spreading the word with millions of investors re what the research tells us about how stock investing works in the real world. There’s only one problem —

If you tell people what the research says, you make the Buy-and-Holders look bad. If the Buy-and-Holders would have come clean back in 1981, there never would have been a problem. No one would have found fault with them for the mistake they made. But it is not 1981 anymore. It is 2021. 40 years have passed. So it looks really, really, really, really bad for someone to tell the truth re what the research shows.

You’re saying that someone could protect himself from the death threats and the threats of career destruction by posting anonymously. That’s true enough. That’s not a bad point.

How do you think a person who did that would feel about himself? He knows that the Buy-and-Hold retirement studies get the numbers wildly wrong, He knows that it was the relentless promotion of Buy-and-Hold that served as the primary cause of the 2008 economic crisis. And he says so. But he doesn’t give his name. Why doesn’t he post under his own name? Is he ashamed of what he is doing? Is he afraid of what you Goons will do to him for posting honestly? Is he a coward? Does he not realize that he would have more credibility and thereby help more people if he put his name behind his words?

We all played a role in causing this Buy-and-Hold Crisis, Anonymous. Greaney posted his study at his web site. Anyone who cared to could have pulled it up and checked whether there was a valuation adjustment in it. Why is it that I was the first one who noticed (if you go by public posts) that the Greaney study lacks a valuation adjustment? How does something like that happen? The investment advisers played a role and the academic researchers played a role and the journalists played a role and the policymakers played a role and the site owners played a role and the book publishers played a role and on and on. We’re all in on this. Every last one of us (including me) played at least a tiny role in causing this horrible situation.

Since we all caused it, we are all going to need to pull together to fix the problem. It can be done very quickly once we all work together to make us all feel safe to speak honestly. But it is not going to happen by encouraging a few people to post anonymously. I have spoken to people off-the-record. I have had people ask me questions. I have had conversations like that that have extended for hours of time. Do you know what usually happens at the end of them? The person who asked the questions usually says:”Please don’t tell anyone that we had this conversation.” Why? Are they ashamed?

They are indeed ashamed. They are not ashamed of wanting to know the realities of stock investing. There’s nothing shameful about that. They are ashamed of not having done anything to bring the cover-up to an end. We are all ashamed of that. The 19-year cover-up of the error in the Greeaney retirement study is the biggest act of financial fraud in the history of the United States. There is nothing else even in a close second place. We all played a role either in making that happen or in letting it happen and we are all ashamed of ourselves for not doing more to bring it to a full and complete stop many years ago.

We are going to have to come to terms with our shame. I believe that we will do that in the days following the next price crash. The ocean of misery that we will see appear before out eyes will just be too great for us not to finally speak out and come to terms with what the last 40 years of peer-reviewed research in this field teaches us about this important subject. You are asking people to do something (to post honestly but anonymously) that would cause them to feel even more intense shame. It’s not realistic to expect humans to behave that way. What the vast majority of us are doing is rationalizing — we are telling ourselves that perhaps the next price crash will not be so terrible, perhaps we will work our way through this somehow. We are not electing to post honestly but anonymously. It would be very hard for someone to justify doing that given how important it is to get these things right.

That’s my sincere take, in any event.

My best and warmest wishes to you and yours.

Rob