“We Should All Have Wanted to Know What a Giant Like Bogle Truly Believed About Market Timing. But of Course to Find Out We Would Have Had to Have Opened Every Site on the Internet to Honest Posting. The Reason Why Bogle Hesitated to Frequently Offer His Pro-Market-Timing Views Is That He Was Afraid of What Mel Lindauer and His Goon Squad Would Do to Him If He Spoke With Complete Honesty About What the Last 41 Years of Peer-Reviewed Research Teaches Us About This Important Subject.”

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

Jack Bogle explains why Rob Bennett is wrong:

https://www.kiplinger.com/article/investing/t052-c016-s001-resist-the-folly-of-market-timing.html

John Bogle, founder of the Vanguard Group of mutual funds, wrote of market timing: “After nearly 50 years in this business, I do not know of anybody who has done it successfully and consistently. I don’t even know of anybody who knows anybody who has done it successfully and consistently.”

John Bogle has been consistent and Rob Bennett has been wrong about market timing.

Bogle said what you quoted him as saying.

He also said this:

“Big moves out of stocks should not be done at all. But “tactical asset allocation — I should say strategic asset allocation rather than tactical — can be done at very rare times, so rare and so difficult to observe, maybe six times in an investor’s lifetime, three times when the market is stupidly high and three times when stupidly low.”

And Bogle endorsed Bill Bernstein’s book, in which Bernstein said that the 4 percent rule was a full two percentage points off the mark at the top of the bubble. To say that valuations affect the value proposition of stocks that much is to implicitly say that market timing (going with a lower stock allocations when the value proposition of stocks is low than what you go with when the value proposition of stocks is high) always works and is always required,

Bogle was all over the map when it came to market timing. He even engaged in it himself! There was an interview in which he said that he lowered his stock allocation in 1999, in part because of the insane valuations that applied at the time, And of course he benefited from doing so. If Bogle truly believes that he has never known anyone who engaged in market timing successfully, he should have introduced himself to himself. He was a nice guy. And smart as the dickens too. I think he would have come to like himself if he has given himself half a chance.

We should all have wanted to know what a giant like Bogle truly believed about market timing. But of course to find out we would have had to have opened every site on the internet to honest posting The reason why Bogle hesitated to frequently offer his pro-market-timing views is that he was afraid of what Mel Lindauer and his Goon Squad would do to him if he spoke with complete honesty about what the last 41 years of peer-reviewed research teaches us about this important subject.

I wanted to know what Bogle thought! And I want to know what people in this field think today! So I favor opening every site to honest posting. I think that the Goon stuff is garbage. It hurts us all. It is holding us all back.

My best wishes to you.

Rob