“The People Who Developed the Buy-and-Hold Concept Did Not Have Shiller’s Amazing, Nobel-Prize-Winning Research Showing That Valuations Affect Long-Term Returns Available to Them When They Were Doing So.”

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

What formal education/training do you have to tell experts that they need to correct their studies?  Why haven’t you done your own studies yourself?  Why are you broke and divorced?  Why have you sat on your lazy a$$ for the last 25+ years moaning and complaining?

I have enough formal education to be able to examine the Greaney retirement study and determine whether or not it contains a valuation adjustment. That’s all that anyone needs to see that this Buy-and-Hold stuff is garbage.

I don’t say that it started out as garbage. I like everything that the Buy-and-Holders came up with other than the loony-tunes “idea” that valuation-based market timing is not always 100 percent required for every investor. But, I mean. come on. Getting the numbers right in retirement studies is pretty darn important. People use retirement studies for help in planning their retirements.

I get it that the people who developed the Buy-and-Hold concept did not have Shiller’s amazing, Nobel-prize-winning research showing that valuations affect long-term returns available to them when they were doing so. That’s unfortunate. But that’s the way things go sometimes. We humans sometimes have to take a wild shot in the dark when trying to figure something out. When we take a wild shot in the dark, there’s always that chance that the wild shot in the dark will end up being off the mark. It’s just one of those things.

The other side of the story is that we now have 43 years of peer-reviewed research showing how stock investing works in the real world. My extensive formal training as a walking/talking human who doesn’t make a six-figure salary pushing the long-discredited Buy-and-Hold garbage tells me that we should be talking about the far-reaching how-to implications of that amazing research at every discussion board and blog on the internet, without a single exception. Talk about the benefits of formal training! Yowsa!

Correcting one’s retirement study when one learns that one got the numbers wildly wrong is important. Who’d a think it?

I wish you all good things, old friend.

Buy-and-Hold! Buy-and-Hold! Buy-and-Hold! Turning a quick buck is all that matters in this field. What happens to the poor investors following the long-discredited “advice” matters not a whit. Makes sense!

Hang in there, man.

Rob