“The People Who Developed the Buy-and-Hold Concept Did Not Start Out With the Idea of Bringing on Yet Another Economic Crisis. THEY MADE A FREAKIN’ MISTAKE.”

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

Only Rob Bennett is right.  Everyone else is wrong.  Everything is a conspiracy to try and keep Rob Bennett from winning.  If not for the mass conspiracy, Rob would be the foremost investing expert alive today.  Rob would have $500 million in his bank account.  Rob’s name would be on the front page of The New York Times.  Rob would have a Nobel prize.  Congress would create a national holiday in Rob’s name since Rob would be saving the entire world from financial disaster.

It’s not just Rob Bennett, Anonymous.

Thousands of our fellow community members put up posts expressing a desire that honest posting re the research be permitted.

John Bogle taught me (through his book) that there is zero chance that the safe withdrawal rate is always the same number years before I read Shiller’s book.

Bill Bernstein publushed a book the day after I advanced my famous post of May 13, 2002, saying that the safe withdrawal rate at the top of the bubble was 2 percent.

Wade Pfau spent 16 months trying to find any support in the literature for the idea that long-term timing doesn’t work and came up empy-handed.

John Walter Russell devoted eight years of his life to investigating my investing ideas without receiving a dime of compensation because he found them so excited.

And on and on and on and on.

The people who developed the Buy-and-Hold concept did not start out with the idea of bringing on yet another economic crisis. THEY MADE A FREAKIN’ MISTAKE. Shjiller’s Nobel-prize-winning research had not yet been published at the time. So they took a shot in the dark in thinking that, since short-term timing doesn’t work, perhaps long-term timing isn’t always 100 percent required either. People make mistake. It’s something that has been known to happen in this world. If this particular mistakes has not already caused so much misery, they would have corrected it years ago. The Buy-and-Holders want to help people, not destroy their lives. Would you consider giving them a break and letting them do that.

We are all in this together. We all want the same thing. We all need to know how stock ijnvesting works in the real world. Every last one of us is on the same side and there’s plenty of credit to go around to everybody. We just need to acknowledge that and let all the good stuff happen.

Rob