“The Buy-and-Holders Still Act As If Their Strategy Is the Only Game in Town. They Still Move to Silence Those Who Challenge Their Dogmas. It Is the Ban on Honest Posting That Is as Odd as All Get-Out. It Is 100 Percent at Odds With Both Our Laws and With Our Cultural Norms”

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

You’ve never actually met Scott Burns. Or Greaney. Or Wade. Certainly not Shiller. And any online contact with them ended at least a decade ago. Yet here you are, still dropping their names, as if you talked to them just yesterday.

This is quite possibly the oddest blog still in operation.

Shiller published his Nobel-prize-winning research showing that there is precisely zero chance that a pure Get Rich Quick/Buy-and-Hold strategy could ever work for a single long-term investor in 1981. The normal thing would have been for a national debate to be launched at that time. It wouldn’t be reasonable for every investor to switch from Buy-and-Hold to Valuation-Informed Indexing in one day. So the normal thing would have been for there to be a transition period. Some people would write in support of Buy-and-Hold, some people would write in support of Valuation-Informed Indexing, some would take a position in the middle. In time, we would all work it out together.

That debate has not been launched to this day. The Buy-and-Holders still act as if their strategy is the only game in town. They still move to silence those who challenge their dogmas by making reference to the last 40 years of peer-reviewed research. That’s the odd thing, not that I craft articles from the perspective of someone who believes that Shiller’s Nobel-prize-winning research is legitimate research. We should have thousands of people doing that on a daily basis. The odd thing is that there is any controversy about it.

No one knows everything. We all are capable of making mistakes. The Buy-and-Holders made a mistake when they came to believe that market timing does not always work and is not always required. Once they are able to acknowledge the POSSIBILITY of a mistake, we can as a nation launch the debate that should have been launched 40 years ago and have everything in this field return to normal procedure. Buy-and-Holders will advocate Buy-and-Hold, Valuation-Informed Indexers will advocate Valuation-Informed Indexing and those who believe in middle positions will advocate middle positions. No death threats. No extortion. No criminal stuff of any kind. In fact, no non-criminal intimidation stuff. Just an amazing learning experience that helps us all to live better lives from that point forward.

It is the Ban on Honest Posting that is as odd as all get-out. It is 100 percent at odds with both our laws and with our cultural norms. Nobody should have lost their head when I pointed out that the retirement study posted at John Greaney’s web site lacks an adjustment for the valuation level that applies on the day the retirement begins. People planning retirements and being exposed to the claims made in that study (Greaney said that a 4 percent withdrawal rate was “100 percent safe” even at the time when the safe withdrawal rate was 1.6 percent and a retirement plan calling for a 4 percent withdrawal had only a 30 percent chance of surviving for 30 years) needed to know that. I offer no apologies for working up the courage to post honestly re that matter, regardless of how odd it seemed to sdo o in a context in which a Ban on Honest Posting re the peer-reviewed research had come to be accepted as the norm in this particular field.

My best and warmest wishes to you and yours.

Rob