Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently posted to the discussion thread for another blog entry at this site:
Rob’s, you’re living 50 miles away from Purcellville, shacking up in a shared room in some townhome. This really is sad. There’s definitely mixed feelings from me, and I suspect the others. I’m glad that you failed to succeed in selling your bad retirement advice to others. It is sad to see this happen to you and your family regardless of that silver lining.
If it was up to me, we would have opened every discussion board and blog to honest posting on the evening of the day that Shiller published his Nobel-prizr-winning research showing that valuations affect long-term returns. There wasn’t even an internet in those days. But people had other ways to communicate. They had books and magazines and speeches and conferences. They could have talked about the amazing and far-reaching implications of Shiller’s research findings at those sorts of venues. And we would be 41 years ahead of where we are today in our development of the Valuation-Informed Indexing concept if we had done that.
It’s like the story of the two economists who are walking on a path when one stoops down to pick up a 20-dollar bill. The other one says: “Why are you doing that? If there were reallly a 20-dollar bill there, someone would have picked it up before we came along.” Except in this case, it’s a 20-trillion-dollar bill. All of the research is done. All that the rest of us need to do to live better and fuller and richer lives is to stoop down and pick it up. I say that we should do that. We are not as a nation of people going to make it to the magic place that Shiller pointed out to us until a larger number of us work up the courage to point out that there’s a 20-trillion-dollar bull sitting on the sidewalk and the sensible thing is to stoop down and pick it up.
That’s pretty much it.
Rob
There has been money laying on the street for the last 20 years, but you refused to pick it up (it’s called getting a job).
There is no more important job in the United States today than getting every investing site opened to honest discussion of the far-reaching how-to implications of Robert Shiller’s Nobel-prize-winning research showing that valuations affect long-term returns and that therefore long-term market timing (price discipline!) is 100 percent required for every investor who hopes to Stay the Course in a meaningful way (that is, to keep his risk profile constant over time). Getting the word out re this amazing research is of critical importance to every single person living in the United States today. I am confident that the work I have done during the first 21 years of our discussions will be well-compensated when we all get to the other side of the next Buy-and-Hold Crisis and appreciate the importance of launchng a national debate on the realities of safe withdrawal rates and scores of other critically important investment-related topics.
My best wishes to you and yours.
Rob