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>More money is lost or given up in preparing or waiting for the proverbial crash then actually has been lost in them – Peter lynch</i>
This is the sort of statement that causes all the trouble. Pros and cons have to be weighed in any purchase decision and that’s how we do it for all the things that we buy other than stocks. When the idea that it is not necessary to weight pros and cons (to engage in market timing!) when purchasing stocks becomes popular, the brakes are ripped out of the car and that generally amazing asset class become extremely dangerous indeed. I believe that we should be permitting honest posting re the last 40 years of peer-reviewed research in this field.
My best and warmest wishes to you and yours.
Rob
What do you feel you need to see and accomplish in order to feel as if you have been successful. Is it the $500 million windfall? Is it a nobel prize?
Or putting it another way. If you never get a dime of your windfall payment, you continue to be banned and your retirement fails, causing financial distress, will you consider your efforts to be a failure?
I like this question.
For me, success would be seeing every discussion board and blog on the internet being opened to honest posting re the last 40 years of peer-reviewed research in this field. I believe in the United States. I love my country. So I naturally believe that the same laws that apply in every field of endeavor outside of the investing advice field should apply in the investing advice field as well.
What I like about the idea of having U.S. law apply in the investing advice field is that it provides us all a way of getting our mistakes corrected over time. If I made a mistake and honest posting were permitted, someone would point it out and I would have to correct it. If I violated U.S. law to suppress discussion of the mistake, I would be placed in a prison cell and the rest of the nation would be able to resume its learning experience.
I love it that we have laws in place that provides for correction of mistakes in that way. There is of course a great responsibility involved in making suggestions as to how people might invest their retirement money. It gives me comfort knowing that, so long as the laws of the United States apply in this field, any mistakes that I make will be discovered and corrected. I of course want that comfort to apply for my Buy-and-Hold friends. So I argue in favor of having the laws of the United States apply in this field.
There’s nothing that could happen to me that could cause me to view my efforts as a failure. If honest posting were permitted and the ideas did not catch on, I would view my efforts as a failure. But for so long as the ban on honest posting remains in place, the failure of the ideas to catch on is of no particular significance. The discussions lack integrity for so long as no criminal acts are being employed by Valuation-Informed Indexers but are being employed by Buy-and-Holders.
If anything, the fact that Buy-and-Holders employ criminal acts suggests that Shiller’s Nobel-prize-winning research is legitimate research. Shiller showed that investors are sometimes highly emotional (Buy-and-Hold posits that investors are always 100 percent rational). It is crazy to engage in criminal behavior because there are people who follow a different investment strategy than you do. If the Buy-and-Holders were right, we never would have seen any criminal acts. All of the bad behavior that we have seen over the past 19 years could exist only in a world in which investors were highly emotional, which is the world that Shiller says exists.
I want to restore integrity to discussions of stock investing. For so long as our discussions lack integrity, we are in the soup, in my assessment. Once integrity is restored, I will be highly confident that we will end up in a good place. I love my country and it is hard to think about the horrors that are likely to follow if we don’t as a nation work up the courage to stand up to you Goons and insist that honest posting re the last 40 years of peer-reviewed research be permitted at every discussion board and blog, without a single exception.
That’s where I am coming from, Anonymous.
I naturally wish you all the best that this life has to offer a person regardless of what investment strategy you elect to follow.
Rob
“ For me, success would be seeing every discussion board and blog on the internet being opened to honest posting re the last 40 years of peer-reviewed research in this field.”
So you YOUR definition, you have failed.
“ For me, success would be seeing every discussion board and blog on the internet being opened to honest posting re the last 40 years of peer-reviewed research in this field.”
So you YOUR definition, you have failed.
Yes, thus far that is so. It is am amazing reality. But it is so.
In the event that Shiller’s Nobel-prize-winning research is legitimate research, we should be seeing trillions and trillions of dollars of irrational exuberance disappear into thin air. That would mean that millions of retirements would fail and hundreds of thousands of businesses would go under and millions of people would lose their jobs. I believe that living through that will cause a good number of the Normals to become less complacent about the need to open every site to honest posting. If I am right about that, then we will all be off to the races in the days following the next price crash.
Rob
“Yes, thus far that is so. It is am amazing reality. But it is so.”
Given that you just admitted that you have not been successful, why wouldn’t you sit down and consider the fact that you are wrong and admit it?
Because it’s not all about turning a quick buck. I have had thousands of people tell me that I am right on the merits and would be wildly successful if the investing advice field were working by the same rules that apply in every other field of endeavor. A lot of Buy-and-Holders dream of the day when they will be able to do honest work and I want to provide that to them.
Rob