Buy-and-Hold Goon to Rob: “If Criminal Acts Occurred, They Would Be Prosecuted. If You Had a Valid Claim to the $500 Million, You Would Have a Line of Legal Firms All Competing to Represent You. If You Had a Successful Track Record With Your VII Strategy, You Would Have Millions Wanting to Invest With the VII Strategy. If You Had Any Credibility, You Would Have Thousands Posting Here Every Day.”

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

If criminal acts occurred, they would be prosecuted. If you had a valid claim to the $500 million, you would have a line of legal firms all competing to represent you. If you had a successful track record with your VII strategy, you would have millions wanting to invest with the VII strategy. If your had any credibility, you would have thousands posting here every day.

Instead, you have none of the above.

If smoking caused cancer, no one would smoke.

If driving drunk caused accidents, no one would drive drunk.

If dating the wrong person caused heartbreak, no one would date the wrong person.

Humans are not perfectly rational creatures, Anonymous. We are capable of acting rationally. But it does not come automatic. We need to work it. CAPE is the tool that stock investors can use to identify when they have become dangerously irrational and to make corrections. There is a good reason why Shller was awarded a Nobel prize. His finding that stock investors often behave in dangerously irrational ways empowers us all to do better (higher returns, less risk) in the future than we have ever done in the past. It is by talking over the far-reaching implications of Shiller’s research that we come to a deep understanding of his findings and achieve the insights needed to live far richer and fuller and better lives than we ever before imagined that we could live.

If investors were 100 percent rational, the safe withdrawal rate would always be the same number. But they are not. Learning that was the breakthrough. We have wasted 40 years that could have been spent developing Shiller’s insights. We will never get those 40 years back. But there is no law that requires us to waste additional years. It’s a matter of us learning to say the words “I” and “Was” and “Wrong.” Or, at the bare minimum, “I’m” and “Not” and “Sure.” That much would at least open the door to learning about the most amazing 40 years of stock investing research in the history of investment analysis.

My sincere take.

And my best and warmest wishes to you.

Rob