Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently posted to the discussion thread for another blog entry at this site:
You have been all telling us the story for 20+ years about how you are going to be rich from market timing and all the buy and holders would be broke. You admitted that anything beyond 10 years is long term. More than double that time has expired and during this very long period of time, you went broke and the buy and holders have been incredibly rewarded. Meanwhile, you keep up with the same stories of disaster like Chicken Little while doing nothing to address your complete financial failure.
You’re right about the 20 years, Anonymous.
Do you think irrational exuberance is a good thing or a bad thing? I think it is a very bad thing. I think of irrational exuberance as the cancer of the personal finance world. So somehow it doesn’t impress me too much when you say: “Hey! We managed to let the cancer get more out of control this time than it ever did at any earlier time in U.S. history.” You talk about that as if it is a good thing. I think of all the human lives destroyed because people did not know the true value of their portfolio for so many years.
I would like to see honest posting at every site so that never again we do we have to go through something like this. 10 years of irrational exuberance is bad stuff. 20 years of it is twice as bad. We are coming at this from different starting points. That’s why we always end up at different end points.
If I were king of the universe, we would permit honest posting re the last 42 years of peer-reviewed research at every site. If we did that, I believe that we would never see another bull market. Which means that we would never see another bear market. Which means that we would never see another Buy-and-Hold Crisis. I could live with that, you know?
Do you see any downside?
Rob
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