Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently posted to the discussion thread for another blog entry at this site:
How have things worked out for you? Have you received backing by the financial experts? No. Do you have successful outcomes supporting VII? No. Has your retirement plan been successful? No. Did your crash predictions come true? No. Did you finish your book on time? No. Did you get a job at the beginning of the year as you previously said? No.
What have been your successes? Setting a record for board banning? Longest streak of repetitive posts? Avoiding real work?
It was a huge success to work up the courage to point out the error in the retirement study posted at John Greaney’s web site.
It was a huge success to have thousands of our fellow community members express gratitude to me for starting the most exciting investment debate in the history of the internet.
It was a huge success to have a Ph.D. in Economics ask me to co-author research with him showing the superiority of Valuation-Informed Indexing over Buy-and-Hold and for him to conclude after 16 months of in-depth explorations that “Yes, Virginia, Valuation-Informed Indexing works!”
The biggest success will come in the days following the next price crash. We are going to have to rebuild our broken economic system at that time, are we not? I think it would be fair to say that we are not going to rebuild it with even more promotion of the pure Get Rich Quick/Buy-and-Hold “strategy.” We are going to need to open every discussion board and blog to honest posting re the last 40 years of peer-reviewed research in this field. I think it would be fair to say that we will all enjoy the greatest surge of economic growth in our nation’s history and that there will not be one person looking back with longing to the Buy-and-Hold days. For someone who has a deep love for his country, that is going to feel like a big success.
Do I wish that Greaney had corrected his study within 24 hours of the moment he learned of the error he made in it? Obviously. Of course.
Do I believe that the good we have seen over the past 19 years has been 50 times more good than the bad that we have seen over the past 19 years has been bad? Obviously. Of course.
My best and warmest wishes to you and yours.
Rob
Your headline sounds like someone pitching a get rich quick scheme.
I agree that it sounds that way. One of the problems with promoting Valuation-Informed Indexing is that it sounds too good to be true. Shiller’s “revolutionary: (his word) Nobel-prize-winning research is just a major advance in our understanding of the subject. Whachagonnado?
Rob