Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently posted to the discussion thread for another blog entry at this site:
So you now admit it was a discussion about gun safety. Also, the thread was not about safe withdrawal rates to begin with. You do know that people discuss a large variety of topics in casual conversations.
The entire board community was at the time engaged in discussion of my famous post from the morning of May 13, 2002, in which I asked whether we should be taking valuations into consideration when calculating the safe withdrawal rate. There is no rational case that can be made for not doing so. That’s why the Buy-and-Holders desperately turned to discussions of gun safety. If Buy-and-Hold were a real thing, they would feel no need to do things like that.
The battle is between reason and emotion. Research-based strategies can be defended without the use of gun safety discussions, Buy-and-Hold cannot.
Rob
“ The entire board community was at the time engaged in discussion of my famous post from the morning of May 13, 2002”
Your post was not and is not famous. Secondly, the discussion was not about your post. We can all read the thread.
If my post pointing out the error in the Greaney retirement study wasn’t famous, why do you still come her every day to discuss it 20 years later?
There’s no reason for a thread on guns to appear at a retirement planning site except as an act of intimidation, Many were indeed intimidated. But the use of intimidation to “defend” an investment strategy is a desperate choice, When it becomes common practice to call out such acts of intimidation on investment sites, But-and-Hold will go down. And that will be a very good thing for all of us. When Buy-and-Hold goes down, it becomes possible for us all to move on to something better — Valuation-Informed Indexing, which is Buy-and-Hold with market timing added to the mix.
Rob