Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently posted to the discussion thread for another blog entry at this site:
I haven’t seen honest posting banned anywhere else but here. Perhaps you can give us examples of what you are talking about.
Every comment you put forward illustrate the problem. Not every comment you put forward contains a death threat. Some do, some don’t. But every comment contains a hostile tone. That is the issue.
If Buy-and-Hold were a real thing, Buy-and-Holders would not be hostile to the idea of hearing challenges to their beliefs about how stock investing works. The hostility shows that Shiller was right — investing is not a 100 percent rational endeavor but a highly emotional endeavor.
That changes everything. Absolutely everything.
One thing that it changes is that, in a world in which investors are highly emotional, the safe withdrawal rate is not a single number but a number that changes from time to time depending on how emotional investors are at the various times. Shiller gave us the tool (CAPE) that permits us to distinguish the highly emotional times from the less emotional times. And of course identifying the risky times helps us to reduce risk. Once we know that it is there, we can tell people about it and people can then do something about it and then it is not there (at least not as much) anymore.
The job of an investment adviser is to help people cope with stock investing rusk. One does that through market timing. Market timing lowers risk by not permitting irrational exuberance to get out of control. Buy-and-Hold pushes risk to the highest possible level by encouraging investors to ignore it.
Your hostility is the story, Anonymous. The biggest reason why you don’t see people posting here, even anonymously, is that it embarrasses people to confront you re your emotional approach to stock investing. When people point out how emotional you are, they are not just saying something negative about you. They are saying something negative about all human beings. You did not personally pull the CAPE value into the 30s. We ALL did that as a people. When I say that today’s CAPE value is insane, I am saying that the humans are insane. And they are. Those same humans drink themselves to death and gamble themselves into poverty and racism themselves into deep social conflicts. And on and on.
But all is not lost! Those same humans also go to AA and overcome their drinking problems and make Shiller’s book a best-seller and award him a Nobel prize and express a desire on discussion boards that Rob Bennett be permitted to post honestly. We humans are screwed up and wonderful, both at the same time.
I think that we are going to pull together and overcome your hostility once we see how much human misery we end up causing with our screwed-up-ness. That’s what I sincerely believe. But we are just going to have to be a bit patient in letting things play out before us to find out for sure.
Grrrr….
My best wishes to you, dear Goon friend.
Rob
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