“The Story of What Has Happened Over the Past 19 Years Is an Amazing One. But the Reality Is That It Is Not the First Amazing Thing That Has Ever Happened in the History of the United States. I Find It Amazing That There Was a Time When Women Were Not Able to Vote. That Changed. But the Change Did Not Come Easily. There Was Lots of Resistance to the Positive Change. That’s What We Have Seen With Our Efforts As a Nation to Move from Buy-and-Hold to Valuation-Informed Indexing. A Lot of People Are Dug in re Buy-and-Hold and Are Not Willing to Hear What the Last 40 Years of Peer-Reviewed Research in This Field Is Trying to Tell Us All.”

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

It is amazing that a few unknown goons have been able to block these thousands of supporters from posting.  They must be sophisticated hackers that can track down those thousands and put up those barriers.  It is so amazing as to how you have all these answers and know everything, so that us stupid morons can learn everything from you.  Shiller should be working on getting you nominated for a Nobel prize of your own.  Will he be one of the many experts writing recommendations for your new book?

The story of what has happened over the past 19 years is an amazing one, Anonymous. You won’t get any argument from me. But the reality is that it is not the first amazing thing that has ever happened in the history of the United States. I find it amazing that there was a time when women were not able to vote. I find it amazing that there was a time when there were large numbers of people who defended slavery.

Those things changed over time. But those changes did not come easily. There was lots of resistance to the positive changes. That’s what we have seen with our efforts as a nation to move from Buy-and-Hold to Valuation-Informed Indexing. A lot of people are dug in re Buy-and-Hold and are not willing to hear what the last 40 years of peer-reviewed research in this field is trying to tell us all.

I won’t be asking Shiller to write a blurb for my book when I finish writing it. But I certainly believe that he will be part of the national debate that I believe we will be having re these matters after we see the damage that the next Buy-and-Hold Crisis will do to millions of people and that Shiller and I will engaged in extensive conversations about all sorts of matters in those days and that he will agree to write a blurb for the book when it is picked up by a major publisher. Why wouldn’t he?

Re how much I know about these matters at this point, I know a lot because I abandoned Buy-and-Hold on the evening of August 27, 2002, when Greaney advanded his first death threat and over 200 of my fellow community members endorsed it (while about 50 endorsed a post taking issue with the tolerance for death threats by Buy-and-Holders). There is no one else on the planet who has spent 19 years of his or her life studying these matters at the level of intensity that I have devoted to them in the 19 years since my famous post of May 13, 2002.

Yes, I have learned a lot. I believe that Valuation-Indexing is the future of investing analysis and that Buy-and-Hold is the past. I believe that it makes sense to devote my energies to preparing for the future. I encourage all others doing work in this field to do the same. The more hands we have working these fields, the more forward progress we will make and the sooner that forward progress will be achieved.

Rob