“The Bennett/Pfau Research Shows That Market Timing Is 70 Percent of What It Takes to Achieve Long-Term Stock Investing Success. So 70 Percent of What We Hear From Investment Experts Should Be Telling Us Ways to Avoid Getting Sucked in By the Get Rich Quick/Buy-and-Hold Garbage.”

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

Well, it is the truth.  They did the work, right?  Their name is on it, right?  You admitted that Wade wrote the paper.  You admitted that JWR made the calculators (as you are not a numbers guy).  Shiller must have done the work as he got the Nobel prize.  Greaney did his work as well.  All you have really done is given us your “commentary”.

All of the people you mentioned did amazing work. Greaney got an important number wrong in his study. But there are a lot of people at the Motley Fool board who would have taken even higher withdrawal rates if not for his study. So even Greaney did some good (along with a lot of bad). The others (Shiller, Pfau, Russell) are flat-out heroes. So no argument with any of that.

But take a look at today’s CAPE value. It’s 28. Shiller’s amazing research has not gotten the job done. We all have a Get Rich Quick/Buy-and-Hold urge residing within us. Our addiction to Get Rich Quick/Buy-and-Hold investing strategies is every bit as strong as the addictions that some have to alcohol or drugs or sex or gambling. To overcome that addiction, we are going to need to open every site to honest posting re the peer-reviewed research. The Bennett/Pfau research shows that market timing is 70 percent of what it takes to achieve long-term stock investing success. So 70 percent of what we hear from investment experts should be telling us ways to avoid getting sucked in by the Get Rich Quick/Buy-and-Hold garbage. We’re not even close to that today. Shiller’s research, as amazing as it is, cannot bear good fruit until we decide as a society to begin applying the same laws in the investment advice field that we apply in every other field of life endeavor.

My job is to open every site on the internet to honest posting re the peer-reviewed research. All of my “commentary’ is aimed at achieving that goal. People have a hard time accepting that there could be 41 years of oeer-reviewed researcb that cannot be discussed. The purpose of my commentary is to explain how it happened. People need to hear that explanation to make sense of things and to help us all make it to the other side, where we all deep in our hearts want to be. That’s journalism. Good journalism has great value. My journalism work will make the valuable work done by the three people you mention (and the good portion of the work done by Greaney) bear good fruit not just in a theoretical sense but in a practical real-world sense. After we have opened every site to honest posting, we will have THOUSANDS of people doing good work in this field. As people become less and less afraid of what you Goons will do to them if they post honestly, people will develop and share more and more powerful insights. There’s huge leverage in the work that I am doing. I am proud to have been able to have played the role that I have played.

My best wishes.

Rob