“If a Guy With a Ph.D. in Economics Was Being Taken in By the Buy-and-Hold Stuff, Anyone Could Be Taken in By It. We Don’t All Hold a Ph.D. in Economics. We Don’t All Have 16 Months of Our Lives to Direct to Studying This Stuff in Great Depth.”

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

“ But you can’t say that that’s so for the millions of good people who have been denied access to the discussions they need to engsge in to be able to make informed decisions.”

Everyone has had full access to all the information. Given that the majority of stock is held by the top 10%, your premise is also false. Stock price does not cause business failure. Lack of capital is the cause. Business failure statistics have been available for decades.

You don’t have to dig very deep into our twenty years of discussions to come across numerous accounts of people who clearly did not have access to all the information. Wade Pfau held a Ph.D. in Economics from Princeton. He spent 16 months of his life researching my investing ideas and concluded that they all checked out. At the end of the 16 months, he said: “Yes, Virginia, Valuation-Informed Indexing works!” In numerous emails to me he described his wonder at discovering what the research showed. He told himself for a time that he must be making some sort of mistake because he had heard so often that timing doesn;t work and yet the research showed clearly that long-term timing always works and is always required.

If a guy with a Ph.D. in Economics was being taken in by the Buy-and-Hold stuff, anyone could be taken in by it, We don’t all hold a Ph.D. in Economics. We don’t all have 16 months of our lives to direct to studying this stuff in great depth.. We should be permitting honest posting re the last 41 years of peer-reviewed research at every site, without a single exception. I think that’s the answer, Anonymous.

I know it is!

Rob