“We Would Like to Believe That Market Timing Is Not Absolutely Required, That for the First Time in History We Might Be Able to Get Away With Creating a Mountain of Irrational Exuberance and Not Pay a Terrible Price. If We Are Going to Tune Out the Get Rich Quick/Buy-and-Hold Noise, We Are Going to Need to Have Some People Citing the Last 41 Years of Peer-Reviewed Research at Every Site We Visit.”

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

Yep.  Everyone else has been wrong for the last 20 years and continues to be wrong. Meanwhile, only Rob Bennett is right.  Because of a secret society of goons, Rob Bennett has been kept from the spotlight as the one and only financial guru that has figured it all out.

I’m not the only one. We have seen thousands of our fellow community members express a desire that honest posting re the last 41 years of peer-reviewed research be permitted at every site. Bill Bernstein wrote in his book that the 4 percent rule was wildly off the mark at the top of the bubble. Rob Arnott wrote to me and we had a back-and-forth discussion in which he said that all of my ideas about stock investing check out. Wade Pfau spent 16 months researching my ideas and concluded that: “Yes, Virginia, Valuation-Informed Indexing works!” Robert Shiller was awarded a Nobel prize for his research and his book was a best-seller. And on and on and on.

About 10 percent of the population today believes that long-term market timing (price discipline!) is required. Once we open every site to honest posting, I believe that we will be able to get that number up to 20 percent within about six months. It will take much longer to get it to 40 percent but in time we will do it. And then eventually we will get it to 80 percent. We will all be able to live better and fuller and richer lives from that point forward than we ever imagined possible during the Buy-and-Hold Era.

But it needs to be every site permitting honest posting. We all have a Get Rich Quick/Buy-and-Hold impulse residing within us. We would like to believe that market timing is not absolutely required, that for the first time in history we might be able to get away with creating a mountain of irrational exuberance and not pay a terrible price. It has never yet happened and our common sense tells us that it is impossible that it could ever happen. But, like an alcoholic who tells himself that maybe it won’t be such a terrible thing if he takes just one drink, we do very much want to believe it. If we are going to tune out the Get Rich Quick/Buy-and-Hold noise, we are going to need to have some people citing the last 41 years of peer-reviewed research at every site we visit.

I believe that we will get there in the days following the next Buy-and-Hold Crisis. It will be interesting to see how things play out.

My best wishes to you.

Rob