Buy-and-Hold Goon to Rob: “Who Gets to Decide What the Research Really Says?”

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 now Shiller doesn’t get the $500 million.

Who gets to decide what the research really says? Who gets to decide what they think is honest? You decide what you are going to block on this board, so shouldn’t others have the same choice?

Each community member gets to hear both sides and to decide for himself or herself which strategy to follow, so long as the published rules of the various sites are followed and no laws are broken. Of course that’s not what we saw happen. Those who engaged in abusive behavior are responsible for the losses of those who could have invested more effectively if only honest posting re the peer-reviewed research had been permitted. In the event that stocks continue to perform in the future at least somewhat as they have always performed in the past, those losses will be in the many trillions of dollars.

Not good.

The other side of the story is that, once we have opened every site to honest posting re the last 41 years of peer-reviewed research, we will likely see the biggest surge of economic growth in our nation’s history and we will all live better and richer and more fulfilled lives from that point forward. So, even with the downside, I think it would be fair to say that the good stuff that we have seen over the past 20 years has been 20 times more good than the bad stuff that we have seen over the past 20 years has been bad.

We’ll see.

Rob