Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently posted to the discussion thread for another blog entry at this site:
“One, I can finish writing my book.”
Talking about finishing your book, and actually finishing your book are two different things.
The evidence suggests that you are much better at talking about finishing your book than actually finishing your book.
What is your current estimate for finishing your book?
What was your first estimate for finishing your book?
It will be finished when it’s finished, Evidence. Have you written a book on the transition from Buy-and-Hold to Valuation-Informed Indexing? Has anyone else? Shiller comes the closest. His book is top notch. But he failed to address the how-to questions in his book. And the how-to questions are the most important questions. I am addressing those.
I wish that I had finished the book years ago. 100 percent. But I am ahead of everyone else on the planet re this one. I’m pretty darn proud of that one, you know? It’s hard. It’s super hard. The way that people respond on the discussion board tells you how the general population would respond if they heard the same arguments. People really loove, love, love, love the Get Rich Quick/Buy-and-Hold stuff. There’s not a lot of patience out there for discussion of what the last 42 years of peer-reviewed research says. So, every time you put a sentence down, you are wondering how people are going to react to it. It’s a super delicate mission.
Which makes it all the more important. If it were easy, there would be thousands of books doing what mine will do already out on the market. Shiller’s research is not a secret. Shiller’s Nobel prize is not a secret. My book will be the first to explore the far-reaching implications of Shiller’s research in depth (including, incredibly enough, Shiller’s book on his research). So I am proud of myself for sticking at it.
My current estimate (hope?) is that I will be able to begin the copy editing/proofing stage of the process at the turn of the new year.
Rob
“ Have you written a book on the transition from Buy-and-Hold to Valuation-Informed Indexing? Has anyone else? ”
There is a reason no one else has written a book on VII. No one wants to be known for writing a book that will lead others to a disaster. What do you think people will say when they found out the author of such a book went broke while trying to push this timing scheme?
I’ve been in social situations where I meet someone new and I tell them my story, the board bannings and the divorce and my inability to build my internet writing business and so on. I have never seen a negative reaction, People generally don’t know what to make of it. They have never heard of something like this.
About 50 percent of the time they will ask me something about investing. Most people do not feel secure in their understanding of stock investing. So they ask me to share my unconcentional take on the subject. I always go to pains to explain that Valuation-Informed Indexing is just common sense. We consider price with every other purchase we make. All that Shiller’s Nobel-prize-winning research tells us is that we should buy stocks in precisely the same way that we buy everything else — with price in mind. That’s the entire deal. There’s nothing more to it than that.
When I was a boy, whenever my family visited someone’s house, there would be ashtrays in the living room. It was considered a basic social nicety to provide ashtrays for the smokers who were visting. Most people do not place ashtrays in their living room today. No one would dare to light up a cigarette in someone else’s house without asking. If you did ask, they would probably suggest that you step outside to have your smoke.
That is a huge change. That change in social practices has caused the percentage of people who smoke to drop. When you put out ashtrays, you are sending a message that smoking is fine. When you ask people who do it to leave the house to have their smoke, you are sennding a message that it is not fine.
That’s what I am trying to achieve in the investment advice field. If people are not going to engage in price discipline when buying stocks (market timing!), I think we all should be sending a message that that’s not fine. A failure to engage in market timing hurts humans and other living things. We should all be doing what we can to see that people make better choices.
The people who hear my story don’t change their stock allocation overnight. They think over what I tell them. They ponder it. Some probably change their allocation down the road a bit after reading up and talking it over with their friends and so on. Others just forget what I told them and get on with their lives. The usual reaction is interest in the story. It’s common for people to offer a few words of sympathy for what happened to me. I have never had anyone say:” I will never consider market timing because of what I just heard.” I cannot recall one time in which someone said something like that.
If you had told people not to smoke in the early 1960s, you would have seen a somewhat bewildered reaction. That wasn’t the social norm at the time. Now it is. We need to make it the social norm for people always, always, always to engage in market timing (price discipline). Once that idea is nornalized, once there is no taboo re discussing the importanve of market timing, we will all be living better and richer and fuller and freer lives and there won’t be anyone suggesting that there might be some alternatve universe in which everything works the opposite of how it has alwsys worked here on good old Planet Earth and market timing is not 100 percent required for every investor.
Ordinary people do not hate me for telling the truth about stock investing. Thats’s a Goon thing. Ordinary people would not have elected to walk the path that I have walked, I am very much an outlier in that regrard. But people don’t hate me for it. In the days following the onset of the next Buy-and-Hold Crisis, peiple will thank me for it, they will say that they wish that they had listened more carefully. All of the bad stuff that has happened to me has happened because I walked straight into the fury behind this giant taboo against telling the truth about stock investing. I of course believe that we all need to start telling the truth about this important subject. So I soldier on.
My best wishes to you and yours.
Rob
“ I’ve been in social situations where I meet someone new and I tell them my story, the board bannings and the divorce and my inability to build my internet writing business and so on. I have never seen a negative reaction, People generally don’t know what to make of it. They have never heard of something like this.”
In social situations, they are going to be polite and not say anything to hurt your feelings. When they learn of your divorce as part of your conversation regarding investing/finance, just look at their facial reaction. They now know you are a train wreck.
The feeling that I get is that they would not have done what I have done. So there is some distancing. But often that is combined with a good bit of curiosity about the investing stuff. People are respectful of the investing ideas. I am not saying that they immediately adopt them as part of their strategy. But there is a genuine interest in the investing ideas.
And of course that interest is 100 percent consistent with what I saw on all of the boards. There’s LOTS iof interest in these investing ideas. People will need to hear more about them to feel safe adopting them. But the interest is there and is reasonably strong even at a time when the CAPE number is at very scary levels. When we see a drop in the CAPE, we should expect to see interest in the investing ideas grow.
We’ll see.
Rob