“The Thing That Is Consistent About Buy-and-Holders Is That They Always Do the Emotional Thing. Buy-and-Holders Hate the Peer-Reviewed Research Because the Research Supports the Reason-Based Approach (Practicing Price Discipline!) and Letting Reason Become a Factor Makes It Very Hard to Continue Following a Purely Emotional Approach (No Market Timing!).

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

Anyone selling as you described is market timing. Show me the link to posts by Taylor indicating he sold off in the crash.

As for Bernie, he was not buying stocks, just like you.

The thing that is consistent about Buy-and-Holders is that they always do the emotional thing. When prices are insanely high, they insist that they will never sell. When prices fall, they say that anyone who continues to hold stocks is nuts. We know that they sell because the CAPE always drops to 8 at the end of a bull/bear cycle. That couldn’t happen unless the people who were bragging about their great results following Buy-and-Hold didn’t sell after they saw that it had failed.

It’s a question of reason vs. emotion. Buy-and-Holders hate the peer-reviewed research because the research supports the reason-based approach (practicing price discipline!) and letting reason become a factor makes it very hard to continue following a purely emotional approach (no market timing!).

It’s reason and research for me. Call me madcap.

Rob