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 you think your book will save the world, why are you wasting your time posting on the internet?
I always want to remain open to hearing thoughts coming from people on the other side of the table, Anonymous. I of course get it that you Goons have zero good intent. That became evident on the afternoon of May 13, 2002. But I absolutely believe that you yourselves follow Buy-and-Hold strategies. There’s a mountain of evidence supporting that conclusion. And I have never seen any evidence of a lack of intelligence on the Buy-and-Hold side. So we have smart people following a strategy that has been discredited by 41 years of peer-reviewed research. Huh? What the f?
It is my job to figure out that puzzle. Listening only to people who agree with me is not going to get me there. I wish that you Goons would be more honest and balanced in your comments. That would be a huge help. But I do not think it would be smart for me to refuse to interact with you at all. I call you out on the b.s. abusive stuff. I do that all the time. But I also listen closely for the grains of genuine insight mixed in to your comments from time to time. I feel that it’s worth wading through all the muck to get to those little nuggets of gold if capturing those nuggets of gold enhances my understanding of this unfortunate moment in U.S. history in some way.
I believe that my book will play a role in taking us all to a much, much better understanding of how stock investing works than we have ever possessed up until this time, that’s so. But the publication of the book is not going to do that by itself. For us as a nation to achieve that advance, we are going to have to give ourselves permisson to TALK about the book and of couese about the peer-reviewed research findings at the core of it. As a nation we are going to have to overcome the social taboo against acknowledging the importance of market timing (price discipline!) that has been holding us all back for 41 years now.
You Goons are the primary advocates of suppression of discussion of what the peer-reviewed research teaches us all. So I think it makes sense to listen to what you have to say when you are able to present it in a way that is not 100 percent abusive intimidation garbage. There are times when you are not able to quite meet that standard. But there are also times when you do.
I hope that helps at least a tiny bit.
Rob
“ I always want to remain open to hearing thoughts coming from people on the other side of the table, Anonymous.”
I think your ex-wife and priest would disagree with that statement.
There’s some truth in that comment but it does not express the complete truth.
I once asked my priest whether he felt that I had committed a sin in making the choices that I had made. He said that someday in the future we would need to sit on the porch and have a long talk examining all the angles of the matter. If I had not listened to the other side at all, I think that that would have been a sin because of the damage that was done to my family. So I think that my priest was signaling that he believed that there was a bit of listening going on on my end.,
There certainly have been times when my ex indicated that she did not believe that I was listening to the other side. But we had a recent conversation in which she expressed the view that she believes that I am “a good soul.” So I think that she too is of two minds re this matter.
It’s hard for people to accept that there could be 41 years of peer-reviewed research showing that market timing is always 100 percent required and that there still could be a ban on honest posting at every large site on the internet. How could something like that happen? It boggles the mind.
I believe that people’s minds will change when they see the human suffering that we will experience in the days following the next Buy-and-Hold Crisis (I am presuming here that stocks will continue to perform in the fututre at least somewhat as they have always performed in the past). Then they will be concluding that it is the Buy-and-Holders who have been too closed to hearing the other side of the story.
We’ll see.
Rob
You just confirmed my statement. If your priest and wife agreed with you, they would say so.
Okay, Anonymous.
Rob
Now that you are divorced, I guess ther3 is no pressure on you to finish the book and get a job.
There’s huge pressure to finish the book.
I don’t believe that we can know when stock prices will collapse. It could be next week. it could be three years from now. When it happens, it is going to be of huge importance that the irrational depression that always follows a time of irrational exuberance not get too out of control. One of the earlier occasions on which Buy-and-Hold/Get Rich Quick thinking got out of hand produced a Great Depression. We obviously don’t want that. The more we come to terms with the realities of how stock investing works, the less likely we are to see a Second Great Depression.
I hope that my book will offer some help in that regard. That’s certainly one of its most important intended purposes.
Rob
Now that you are divorced, you won’t need to split any of your windfall, right?
I’m not legally required to share any of my settlement payment with my ex. However, it is my intent to share something with her. She was put through a lot of anguish as the result of your Campaign of Terror against our board and blog communities. I would like to see her receive compensation for what she was put through.
Rob
What campaign of terror? Where is the link to this claim (not links to your accusations).
Take a look at the Greaney study and check whether it contains a valuation adjustment 20 years after the error was pointed out to him. That’s the answer to your question.
Rob