Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently posted to the discussion thread for another blog entry at this site:
“We need to hear the positions of both sides expressed with the full strength with which they are felt.”
That’s ridiculous. We only need to hear positions which are backed up with data. Your data-free feelings are of no value, no matter how many thousands of words it takes you to express them.
You obviously disagree. I guess we’ll see who is right, in the increasingly unlikely event that anyone ever reads your book.
Okay, Anonymous.
I naturally wish you all the best that this life has to offer a person regardless of what investing strategy you favor, in any event.
Rob
https://www.fool.com/retirement/2021/07/07/how-to-retire-with-2-million-on-an-80000-salary/?source=eptyholnk0000202&utm_source=yahoo-host&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=article
Just confirms success with buy and hold for the long term and then use a 4% SWR.
Articles like this will say something different after we have opened every discussion board and blog on the internet to honest posting re the last 40 years of peer-reviewed research in this field. Adding a Get Rich Quick/Buy-and-Hold component to a retirement plan adds nothing — it always subtracts by increasing risk and diminishing returns. The best thing to do is to Stay the Course. In a world in which valuations affect long-term returns, that requires market timing to keep irrational exuberance from getting out of hand.
The only thing holding us back today is the unwillingness of the Buy-and-Holders to say the words “I” and “Was” and “Wrong.” I have a funny feeling that, in the days after the next price crash, we will all be working together to encourage each other to engage in market timing (price discipline!) at all times and to keep irrational exuberance to a bare minimum.
We’ll see.
Rob
That funny feeling you have had for the last 19 years hasn’t really worked out for you, has it.
I has worked out for me amazingly well in that working up the courage to advance that famous post of the morning of May 13, 2002, has generated hundreds of columns and five unique calculators and a close-to-completion full-length book. None of that amazing stuff would exist today had I not worked up the courage to point out the error in the retirement study posted at John Greaney’s web site.
Your point is that I have not been able to make money from publishing all this great material. That’s because of the criminal behavior on the part of the Buy-and-Holders. The death threats. The demands for unjustified board bannings, The thousands of acts of defamation, The acts of extortion. When we bring that stuff to a full and complete stop, the money will be coming in faster than I can count it.
Will the next price crash make a difference? I think it will. If stocks continue to perform in the future anything at all as they always have in the past, we will be seeing millions of failed retirements. And hundreds of thousands of businesses going under. And millions of people losing their jobs. And an increase in political frictions.
All of that goes away forever if we open every discussion board and blog on the internet to honest posting re the past 40 years of peer-reviewed research in this field. Once investors see how important it is to always practice market timing (price discipline!), they are obviously going to do it. There’s all the difference in the world between discouraging market timing and showing people that it is the key to long-term investing success.
I obviously don;t approve of any of the criminal stuff. But stuff was a factor before I came on the scene. I have a funny feeling that I am not the first person who noticed that the Buy-and-Hold retirement studies lack an adjustment for the valuation level that applies on the day the retirement begins. Things are not going to change until those of us who believe that Shiller’s Nobel-prize-winning research is legitimate research insist on our right to post honestly. There’s no other way that it could happen.
I don’t like the bad side of this. But the good side of this has been 50 times more good than the bad side of this has been bad. Would it have been better if I had just kept my mouth shut about the error in the Greaney study?
It has all worked amazingly well. Except we had painted ourselves into quite the corner in the days before I came on the scene. That was because people who came before me and wanted to tell the truth about stock investing held back because they feared what you Goons would do to them if they went down that road. To the extent that there have been problems, they have come about because people were afraid to post honestly. Being afraid to post honestly is the problem, not the solution.
Or so Rob Bennett sincerely believes, you know?
Rob
“Would it have been better if I had just kept my mouth shut about the error in the Greaney study?”
Every member of your family would answer that one with a big fat Yes.
How lucky for the world that their opinions don’t matter.
I don’t know, Anonymous. Every member of my family lives in the United States. My mother lived through the Great Depression. She told me stories. This way, I can go to sleep at night knowing that I did everything in my power to spare the members of my family what we are going to see if the continued promotion of the Buy-and-Hold “strategy” brings on the Second Great Depression.
The crazy stuff is out of my hands. I have spoken out in opposition to it on many occasions. No one person can bring it to an end on his or her own. We are all going to need to pull together as a society if we want to see that little dream come true. ALL of the families in the United States have a role to play here. No reasonable person can deny that I have done my part and then some more on top of that and then some more on top of that.
Don’t let the bad guys get you down, my good friend.
Rob