“Shiller’s Research Was Not Available at the Time the Buy-and-Hold Strategy Was Being Developed. So the People Who Were Putting It Together Had to Take a Wild Shot in the Dark.”

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

Do that means everyone else is lying about the reason you were banned. Just a big mass conspiracy against you.

You Goons are obviously lying. The thousands of our fellow community members who have expressed a desire that honest posting re the peer-reviewed research be permitted are obviously not lying.They are just afraid of you Goons.

The “conspiracy” is a Conspiracy of Ignorance. Shiller’s research was not available at the time the Buy-and-Hold strategy was being developed. So the people who were putting it together had to take a wild shot in the dark. There really was research showing that short-term timing doesn’t work. So they took a wild shot and suggested that maybe long-term timing (price discipline!) isn’t always 100 percent required either. Now we all need to pull together as a nation of people and get the error corrected.

That’s what the first 21 years of our discussions has been all about — how do we get that error corrected? The short answer is that we need to apply the same laws that apply in every field of human endeavor outside of the investment advice field in the investment advice field as well. No death threats. No acts of extortion. No acts of defamation. No unjustified board bannings.

Once we do that, there won’t be any problem. We will be sharing good ideas on how to invest in stocks at every site and we will all be living better and richer and fuller and freer lives.

The Greaney retirement study truly lacks a valuation adjustment. He very,very, very, very much does not want to correct the error. But the study truly lacks a valuation adjustment and anyone thinking of making use of it to plan a retirement needs to know that. I offer no apologies for posting honestly re the error in the study. The only thing that I apologize for is taking three years to work up the courage to do so.

My best and warmest wishes to you and yours.

Rob