“People Who Bring Exciting New Ideas to the World Have Been Encountering Hate From People Who Are Making a Good Living on the Old Ideas Ever Since the World Began…. If Buy-and-Hold Causes Us to Get the Numbers Wrong in Retirement Studies, What Else Did It Cause Us to Get Wrong?…. Either Market Timing Isn’t Required or Valuations Affect Long-Term Returns. It Cannot Possibly Be Both.”

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

When did Bill Gates get banned on websites because of the value of his ideas?

People who bring exciting new ideas to the world have been encountering hate from people who are making a good living on the old ideas ever since the world began, Anonymous. It’s the oldest story in the book. Do a search for graduation speeches by Steve Jobs if you want to figure out what is going on here.

The trouble is not that this is hard to figure out. It is as easy as pie to figure out. The trouble is that you do not want to figure this one out. Figure it out and Greaney has to correct his retirement study and you do not want that. That’s been the entire story from A to Z going back to the morning of May 13, 2002. Some guy got an important number wrong in a retirement study posted at his web site and he really, really, really does not want to acknowledge it. That’s been the 19 years.

I really, really, really want him to acknowledge it. Or at least to have thousands and thousands of people in the field to acknowledge it so that it doesn’t really matter anymore whether he personally acknowledges it or not. In part because I don’t want people to be taken in by the false claims made in the study. But also more importantly because what it tells us about the investment advice field in the year 2021 that there is an error in a retirement study that was brought to public light in May 2002 but that has not been corrected for 19 years now. If Buy-and-Hold causes us to get the numbers wrong in retirement studies, what else did it cause us to get wrong?

All kinds of things. That’s why we are living under the threat of a CAPE value of 38 today. We pull together to bury Buy-and-Hold 30 feet in the ground, where it can do no further harm to humans and other living things, and all that goes away. I believe that Robert Shiller’s Nobel-prize-winning research is legitimate research. Sue me, you know? Either market timing isn’t required or valuations affect long-term returns. It cannot possibly be both. We should all be permitted (and encouraged!) to make use of basic logic and common sense when making decisions about how to invest our retirement money.

I naturally wish you all the best that this life has to offer a person regardless of what investment strategy you elect to pusrue.

Rob