Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently posted to the discussion thread for another blog entry at this site:
Bigger than Watergate? What a joke. It is all a silly waste of time.
You wouldn’t fight so hard if you thought it was a silly waste of time. You very much do not want to acknowledge that you made a mistake. That’s clear enough. But your behavior for 20 years now shows that you see that the stakes here are very, very high.
People need to know how much money they have in their retirement account if they are to plan their financial future effectively. And the numbers they get are entirely different if they take irrational exuberance into consideration from what they get if they do the calculations pursuant to the Buy-and-Hold Model.
Rob
You act like you are worried about other people’s retirement, yet you don’t care about your own or your wife’s retirement. Why is that?
There shouldn’t be any conflict. When I do good journalism work, that should help the people who read my stuff while also helping me financially. It alarmsed me when I learned that that is not the way it works today in the investment advice field — anyone who writes honestly about the lastr 41 years of peer-reviewed research becomes a pariah because it will make the Buy-and-Holders “look bad” for people to learn the truth about how stock investing works.
I believe that we are fundamentally a good people. Otherwise, Shiller would never have been awarded a Nobel prize. We are in the process of working these things out. If I just continue doing honest work, I will be rewarded in the end — both in a personal, financial sense and through the feeling of fulfillment that comes with helping millions of people. So that’s the road I remain on.
My best wishes to you.
Rob
“ There shouldn’t be any conflict. When I do good journalism work, that should help the people who read my stuff while also helping me financially. ”
Since you haven’t earned a dime, you must be doing poorly with journalism. This has been going on for over 20 years. Perhaps you should have sought other work after the first 5 years of failure.
The Greaney study had not been corrected at the end of five years, Anonymous.
Is it my failure if many Buy-and-Holders did not call for the study to be corrected even though it is obvious to anyone who checks that it lacks a valuation adjustment?
Rob