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 people don’t care to know where most of their retirement money went, them people don’t care to know where their retirement money went. I cannot post dishonestly re the numbers that my friends are using to plan their retirements in any event. It’s important to me that I be able to sleep at night.”
So you say you are worried about people with insufficient retirement accounts, but that is where you are right now. Doesn’t that seem ironic?
There are lots of ironies associated with this matter.
It is ironic that it was the Buy-and-Holders who came up with the idea that investors should use the peer-reviewed research to guide their investment choices but then either supported or tolerated a ban on honest posting re the peer-reviewed research from 1981 forward.
It is ironic that it was John Bogle, not Robert Shiller, who played the primary role in helping me to understand that it is a logical impossibility that the safe withdrawal rate could be the same number at all times (Bogle wrote in “Common Sense on Mutual Funds” that “Reversion to the Mean is an iron law of stock investing.”
It is ironic that each of you Goons was required to agree to follow posting rules that prohibit your most abusive posting practices before you were permitted to post at any of the boards but the site owners who crafted those rules have never removed you from those boards but only the posters whom you attack for posting honestly about the peer-reviewed research.
It is ironic that, in the years since Shiller showed the horrors that follow from us permitting irrational exuberance to get out of control and gave us the tools we need to contain it, we have seen more irrational exuberance than at any earlier time in the stock market’s history.
Yes, it’s ironic that I have’t been able to earn a dime in 20 years because I provided my fellow community members with information that thousands of them have praised in the most effusive terms imaginable.
Ironies abound.
There’s nothing that I can do about it. I am happy to help out in whatever way I can. I believe that circumstances will change in the days following the next price crash. I sure hope so, We are all going to need a lift in those days and I think that it would be fair to say that opening the entire internet to honest posting re the past 40 years of peer-reviewed research in this field will provide one. We’ll see, you know?
My best wishes to you, Anonymous.
Rob
Market Declines are Normal
by Larry Swedroe, 2/14/22
https://www.advisorperspectives.com/articles/2022/02/14/market-declines-are-normal
“Investors who abandoned their plans due to panicked selling not only missed out on those great returns, but they were then faced with the extremely difficult decision of determining when it was safe to get back in. That’s one of the problems with market timing – you have to be right twice, not once”
I know of one investor who has been waiting for about 25 years to get back in.
It’s not hard to know when to lower your stock allocation and when to increase your stock allocation. You lower it when the CAPE value has risen so much that you are now taking on more risk than you determined was the proper amount of risk for you. And you increase it when the CAPE value has dropped enough so that you are taking on less risk than you determined was the proper amount of risk for you. In short, you engage in market timing for the purpose of keeping your risk profile constant over time.
You don’t want to be right one time or two times or three times. You want to be right for every day in which you have money invested in stocks. The good news is that, so long as you are always certain to practice market timing as needed, you always have confidence that you indeed are right. There’s 40 years of peer-reviewed research supporting Valuation-Informed Indexing, based on 150 years of return data. That’s a lot more than the zero years of peer-reviewed research supporting the pure Get Rich Quick/Buy-and-Hold “strategy.” And it’s not a terribly close call.
My sincere take.
Rob