Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently posted to the discussion thread for another blog entry at this site:
If you don’t like the price of sticks, don’t buy them. The rest of us will decide if we will pay the price. We don’t need your silly opinions. Your track record shows that people should ignore you.
You can only speak for yourself, Anonymous. Thousands of our fellow community members have expressed a desire to be able to hear what the research says and to decide for themselves how to invest their retirement money. Once a board tolerates abusive behavior aimed at supressing the discussion of the research, that board becomes a fraudulent entity.
That’s where I’m coming from re this thing.
Rob
Still waiting for even one of the “thousands” to come post over here in support of you…….hmmmmmmm……wonder why they won’t post here, even though it is anonymous?
There’s a social taboo against telling the truth about stock investing, Anonymous. You Goons are enforcers of the social taboo. But it exists without you. It exists within people’s minds. Whether other people know that they violated the taboo or not, THEY know it. They don’t feel comfortable going outside where the hive mind permits them to go.
A bull market is a highly delicate thing. The entire thing is just an emotional fantasy. One person could talk about the realities and it could all collapse. This is why the television interviewer warned Shiller before their interview to be careful what he said, he could cause prices to drop. She was right. But what she was missing was that it would be a good thing if prices dropped because that would bring them closer to reflecting the realities. In her mind, the idea was not to do that, the idea was to keep the blinders on.
To live better lives, we all need to come to understand that it is better to take the blinders off. It’s scary to be one of the first to speak up. I want things to get to a point where no one is afraid anymore, where people just say what they truly believe, just as they do in all fields of human endeavor other than the investment advice field. I want us all to feel free to learn again, to go beyond what we knew in the 1q60s, when Buy-and-Hold was developed and Shiller’s research had not yet been published.
The question is whether the onset of the next Buy-and-Hold Crisis will shake people up enough that some brave souls will start posting honestly re the research and encouraging others to do the same. I have hopes that it will. It would make sense to me that a huge price crash would break the spell. People would no longer fret about causing a recession because we will already be in a recession, so the thought would be “what the heck.” We’ll see, you know?
You always try to apply logic to this, The Ban on Honest Posting is fundamentally not a logical phenomenon. If logic controlled, there would be no overvaluation or undervaluation. All you need to know to see that logic does not control here is today’s CAPE value. If investors were logical, there never could be a CAPE value of 34. But here we are. We have a CAPE value of 34 and we have Buy-and-Hold Goon Squads patrolling the internet to be sure that no one is posting honestly re the last 43 years of peer-reviewed research. Those aren’t unrelated realities. You couldn’t have either of those two strange realities without the other.
My best wishes to you and yours, in any event.
Rob
The vast majority of investors are not following buy and hold. The majority of stock, however, is held by the top 10% and those are the real buy and holders. They have significant liquidity and can snap up cheap shares every time a market timer gets cold feet.
Your explanation doesn’t hold water.
The CAPE value is set by the entire population of investors. You don’t get a CAPE value of 34 without a whole lot of Buy-and-Holders entering the mix.
Common sense tells you that it is a bad idea to price stocks at two times their real value. How do you persuade millions of people to ignore their common sense? You tell them that you have a funny feeling that there might be an alternative universe 50 billions light years away in which everything works the opposite of how it has always worked on good old Planet Earth and so this might be the first time in history in which someone achieves long-term success in stock investing without engaging in valuation-based market timing.
Today’s CAPE value reveals the current popularity of Get Rich Quick/Buy-and-Hold thinking. A CAPE value of 34 doesn’t just pop into existence for no reason. I mean, come on.
But a CAPE value of 34 is always a very shaky thing. Let people tell the truth about what the peer-reviewed research says and that CAPE value collapses. So there need to be very, very tight restrictions on posting re the peer-reviewed research. Keeping the fantasy going is hard work. That’s where you Goons enter the picture.
Not this boy, you know? I am good with how things are done in every other field of human endeavor.
Rob
So all these thousands of people that have expressed a desire to hear from you and about VII on all these other websites won’t do the same on this website even though they can post here anonymously?
That’s correct. Those people are not today Valuation-Informed Indexers. They have a mild interest in it. If people could talk about it at sites at which they participate, they would occasionally listen in and occasionally ask a question or two. In time, some of them would become Valuation-Informed Indexers. In more time, the number that did that would increase. Eventually, Valuation-Informed Indexing would become the dominant model for understanding how stock investing works.
It has to begin with opening one large site to honest posting re the peer-reviewed research. That’s the only way it could ever happen. People are not going to just wake up one morning and say “starting today, I believe entirely new things about how stock investing works.” We need to permit people to hear both sides and eventually they will come around.
Research is not self-executing. Shiller advanced our understanding of how stock investing works in a major way. But people do not change their views just because research is published in a journal. People need to be able to explore the how-implications of the research that is published for that research to have a positive effect on people’s lives. We need to open every site to honest posting by the close of business today, if not a good bit sooner.
My sincere take.
Rob