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 I strongly believe that language of the type set forth above should be required in any Buy-and-Hold study.”
You certainly do.
But no one else thinks such language should be added.
And you have failed miserably to make the case as to why such language should be added.
I was HUGELY successful in making the case.
That’s why I was banned at so many places.
Bans are not the norm. If I had not been hugely successful, you Goons would never have insisted on a single ban.
I mean, come on.
Rob
You were hugely successful in making a case, yet you can’t get anyone to post over here anonymously. Sounds like you were a huge failure.
It would be fair to say that that’s so in a short-term sense.
I don’t think that it’s so in a long-term sense.
There was a thing that Martin Luther King said about civil rights. It was something along the lines of: “The ark of history bends toward justice.” There were lots of setbacks. lots of frustrations. But things things continued to move gradually under the surface in the right direction and in the end huge progress was made.
I believe that the ark of history in the personal finance realm bends toward rationality in stock investing. There’s where things are headed. I obviously wish that it didn’t have to be so hard or take so long. But I continue to believe that that’s where things are headed.
The behavior of you Goons is one reason why. Your behavior is not normal. It is 100 percent outside the parameters of normal human behavior. There has to be some explanation of that. I think it is that you desperately want Buy-and-Hold to be a real thing but you have zero evidence to point to in trying to argue that valuation-based market timing is not always 100 percent required for every investor. All of the evidence points in one direction and no evidence whatsoever points in the other direction. So you are in a tight spot. So we see this crazy behavior as your means of coping with this difficult reality.
I don’t believe that that approach is sustainable. It’s too weird. It has “worked” in a way for 22 years. You have managed to keep enough people in the dark to keep Buy-and-Hold going for a long time. But there is just too much evidence that valuations affect long-term returns for it to remain a viable strategy for the long term. So I think that both your strategy of intimidation of anyone who refers to the peer-reviewed research and Buy-and-Hold itself will fall in time. And that that will be a wonderful day for the people of the United States. If there had never been a Buy-and-Hold, we all would have become Valuation-Informed Indexers a long time ago.
We are as a nation of people undergoing a struggle. Everyone should be on the side of wanting to see the debate that we need to have go forward. Each time someone permits himself to be intimidated into silence, it makes it worse for all the others who want to do real, honest work. Each time someone works up the courage to stand up to you Goons, it makes it better for all the others.
We are not where we need to be. But we are much more closer than surface indications suggest.
Or so I sincerely believe, you know? I am not God. I theoretically could be wrong. I certainly never thought that the abusive stuff would continue for 22 years. But that’s what I believe. So that’s why I continue to insist on my right (and the right of all others) to post honestly re the last 43 years of peer-reviewed research.
Rob