I’ve posted Entry #609 to my weekly Valuation-Informed Indexing column at the Value Walk site. It’s called Buy-and-Holders Should Be Critical of Shiller’s Research Findings.
Juicy Excerpt: We have not seen such clashes of thought in the investment advice field since Shiller published his amazing research findings in 1981. Hardly ever have we seen it. It’s an exceedingly strange reality, in my assessment. Buy-and-Hold remains dominant. There are investors who have been influenced by Shiller’s findings. They make up about 10 percent of the investing population. But rarely do they publicly find fault with the majority viewpoint that opposes their own. And rarely do the Buy-and-Holders acknowledge the presence of the 10 percent that views their take on how stock investing works as dangerous.
“ They make up about 10 percent of the investing population. ”
A totally made up number. But like everything, you just pull things out of the air with no facts to back it up.
http://www.passionsaving.com/investing-discussion-boards.html
Rob
A link to out of context posts that are 15-20 years old is to somehow convince us of your claim to the 10% estimate? Really?
Have you had even one normal conversation in the last decade?
I have normal conversations on subjects other than stock investing all the time.
All of the 101 comments from that article are as relevant today as they were 20 years ago. There is still 10 percent of the population that wants to know the realities of stock investing, who can appreciate how it would be nice to be able to retire early and all that sort of thing. And there is still 10 percent that goes completely bonkers when faced with suggestions that they give up their Get Rich Quick/Buy-and-Hold fantasies and consider what the last 41 years of peer-reviewed research teaches is all about the important subject. And there is still 80 percent in the middle, people who would never dream of advancing a death threat themselves but who have some sympathy for those who do because their financial dreams for the future depend on the Get Rich Quick/Buy-and-Hold stuff being real.
It is not the idea of looking at the peer-reviewed research that is out of the norm. It is the Ban on Honest Posting that is out of the norm. The reason why we have it is that the entire Get Rich Quick/Buy-and-Hold thing is pure emotion. People are building their retirement plans on quicksand. It scares the bejeebers out of them to consider what the research says, because the reasearh is entirely in accord with what their own common sense tells them. To ignore both your own common sense and 41 years of research takes extreme measures. But allow discussion of the researc at just a single large site and all of the fantasy stuff that sustains the bull market begins to vanish into the mist. Maintaining a bull market is a desperate business.
I believe that in the days following the next Buy-and-Hold Crisis we are as a nation going to make a tiurn toward the rational in the investing advice realm. I sure hope so. We will all have to be patieent and wait a bit to find out for sure how it is all going to play out.
My best and warmest wishes to you and yours.
Rob
“ I have normal conversations on subjects other than stock investing all the time.”
So, that is a no. Doesn’t that make you rethink what you have done and are doing? You are not saving anyone and, at the same time, destroying for financial security at a time you should have a secured retirement.
We have a very, very different perspective re all this, Anonymous.
I have a file on my laptop where I list ideas for future Value Walk Columns. I have already written over 600 of those columns. I add a new idea for a column almost every day. Not all of them turn into columns, obviously, Sometimes three might get mixed into a single column. More than 50 percent of them just get dropped because the idea does not turn out to have as much potential as it seemed to have when I wrote it down. The point, though, is that there are still new things to learn about where the last 41 years of peer-reviewed research takes us re our desire as a nation of people to come to term with how stock investing works in the real world.
I believe that the learning process needs to continue. I believe that we should be permitting honest posting at every site.
You say “oh, we have managed to hut you down for 20 years with out outrageous, criminal behavior. Give up!”
The outrageous, criminal behavior sends precisely the opposite message to my ears. The outrageous, criminal behavior tells me that the Buy-and-Holders are desperate, the Goons because they engage in outrageous, criminal behavior and the Normals because they tolerate it happening around them. The message you intend to send is: “Give up!” The message that I hear is: “Keep at it, work harder, you have a tiger by the tale re this one!”
It will be intersting to see how it all plays out.
My best and warmest wishes to you and yours.
Rob
“ I have already written over 600 of those columns. I add a new idea for a column almost every day. ”
No, you don’t have any new ideas. You just repeat and rehash the same thing. People don’t agree with you and are tired of repeating themselves. Since you don’t listen, they give up on you or block you. Imagine if you were on a chat board discussing baseball and some guy keeps telling you he thinks the Cubs should have won the World Series each year, but there was a mass conspiracy by the MLB. This same guy thinks every board should debate this topic. This guy ignores everyone else’s opinion. People grow tired of it, but he keeps on year after year. He makes claims about people making threats about him because of his opinion, yet doesn’t provide proof. Now he is more than just an irritant. He is ignored, blocked and banned. Still, 20 years later, this is all he talks about and still can’t understand why people think he is wrong and he continues playing the victim.
There’s a case that has some similarities in the baseball world. The Astros won the World Series in a year in which an extensive investigation showed that they engaged in cheating. Fans of the Astros don’t like to see the subject come up. Fans of other teams bring it up all the same.
The majority of stock investors don’t take Shiller’s Nobel-prize-winning research into consideration when making stock allocation decisions. That’s obviously so. The CAPE value could never be where it is today if that were not so. But the fact that we have seen thousands of our fellow community members express a desire that honest posting re the peer-reviewed research be permitted tells us that the discussion of the amazing how-to implications of Shiller’s research should be permitted at every site.
It was the Buy-and-Holders who came up with the idea of rooting one’s investment decisions in the findings of the peer-reviewed research. I think that was the most important thing they ever did. I was once a Buy-and-Holder myself because I was so impressed by that particular Buy-and-Hold position. But it is just in the nature of scientific inquiry that there are times when new discoveries are made and the old dogmas need to be challenged and in some cases replaced. Discussion of new research findings is part of the scientfic process. Ruke that out because you cannot bear the thought of acknowledging a mistake and you have left the world of science and entered the world of blind faith dogmatism.
Not my particular cup of tead, you know? I like the Buy-and-Hold concept as it was originally conceived – a quest for truth. Sometimes that means that questions that cause discomfort need to be entertained.
My sincere take.
Rob
“ Sometimes that means that questions that cause discomfort need to be entertained.”
People “ entertained “ them for awhile. They answered you over and over again. They don’t want to keep giving you the same answers every day for 20 years. They have moved on.
Every member of a discussion-board community is free to move on from a particular discussion at any time that he or she chooses to do so.
Advancing a death threat or engaging in an act of extortion is not moving on. Those sorts of behaviors are efforts to suppress a discussion that you do not want others to be exposed to.
I want every person on the planet to be exposed to in-depth discussions of the amazing how-to implications of Shiller’s Nobel-prize-winning research. That’s why you and me are working at cross purposes. You want to suppress those discussions and I want to see as many of them as possible.
Rob
They have moved on and there were no threats. Go ahead and just tell yourself you are the winner so that you can get on with your life. Just don’t expect the rest of the world to play along with your land of make believe.
The world is going to do what the world is going to do. It is not my place to tell the world what to do. I am going to write the best book that I am able to write and then offer it to the world and the world can decide for itself what to do with it. I will be able to sleep well at night knowing that I gave it my best shot.
Rob
Yet you expect the world to change. You want the world to allow you on THEIR boards to disrupt how you did before. Everything you say is how everything and everyone else must change, yet you never consider that you are at fault. You merely blame others. They are not interested in you, your blame game and assorted antics.
I do indeed expect the world to change in its attitude toward Get Rich Quick/Buy-and-Hold investment strategies. I believe that Shiller’s Nobel-prize-winning research is legitimate research. If that is so, we will be seeing another Buy-and-Hold Crisis within the next year or two or three and it will cause an ocean of human misery. Millions of failed retirements, hundreds of thousdands of business failures, millions of people thrown out of work, an increase in political frictions. Why wouldn’t an experience like that cause a change in our attitude toward the pure Get Rich Quick/Buy-and-Hold strategy.
I would be amazed if we didn’t see some change. And we don’t need much. We already have laws against the tactics that you Goons have employed to disrupt the conversations that millions of us want to learn from. If we ger the percentage of the population that believes that Shiller’s Nobel-prize-winning research is legitimate research up from 10 percent to 20 percent, I believe that we will be on our way and that there will be nothing that you Goons will be able to do to stop us from that point forward.
We’ll see.
Rob
It’s clear to everyone else why you are banned. Have fun living in your land of make believe.
Okay, Anonymous.
I do wish you all the best that this life has to offer a person, in any event.
Rob