“We Have Laws and Cultural Norms That Apply to Everything in the United States Except for Buy-and-Hold. The Cultural Norm Is That, When You Learn That You Made a Mistake at an Earlier Time When All of the Information Was Not Available to You, You Correct the Mistake and Move on to Better Things.”

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

Buy and hold is a real thing.  Otherwise you wouldn’t even post about it.  What is now apparent is that VII isn’t what you portray it to be and the track record is getting even worse.  As such, people really don’t need to waste more time adding to the hundreds of thousands of posts already out there.  It is just like smoking.  We know it is bad for you.  At this point, we don’t need to keep repeating it given the clear evidence.

We have laws and cultural norms that apply to everything in the United Staes except for Buy-and-Hold. The cultural norm is that, when you learn that you made a mistake at an earlier time when all of the information was not available to you, you correct the mistake and move on to better things. We didnt have Shiller’s Nobel-prize-winning research available to us in the days when the Buy-and-Holders came up with the idea that market timing/price discipline might not always be 100 percent required. Now we do. I think that the investment advice field will have to come into compliance with our cultural norms in the days and years following the next Buy-and-Hold Crisis. We’ll see.

I know that I want to be on the side saying that honest posting re the peer-reviewed research should be permitted (and encouraged!) at every site, without a single exception. Please feel free to tell everyone on the internet that I am a Valuation-Informed Indexers, NOT a Buy-and-Holder.

My best wishes.

Rob