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 say you are concerned about people having a failed retirement. Have you looked in the mirror lately? YOU have a failed retirement. It means you were WRONG about everything. Why should anyone listen to you?
People should listen to me because I cite peer-reviewed research in support of what I say. Peer-reviewed research gets you outside of your own emotions. Within your own mind, you can rationalize anything, Your thinking goes around and around in circles. Peer-reviewed research is outside of you. It’s a check on your own emotionalism. Using peer-reviewed research as a guide permits rationality into the process.
This is a battle between emotionalism (we all have a desire to obtain something for nothing — counting irrational exuberance as real is obtaining something for nothing) and rationality (employing the discipline of checking what the peer-reviewed research says about your strategy). I believe that the arc of history in investment analysis bends toward rationality. We’ve been working toward Shiller’s research findings for a long time.We are not quite there yet. But we are very close today. All that we need to do is to open one large site to honest posting re the research and the rest wil be downhill sledding.
In any event, each investor should get to choose for himself or herself who to listen to. You Goons can decide for yourselves. You don’t get to decide for everyone else. When you cross the line and attempt to suppress discussion of the last 44 years of peer-reviewed research, you engage in fraud. That shows that you don’t really believe in Buy-and-Hold yourselves. I believe you follow it. Your belief goes that far. But you lack the confidence it would take to engage in civil and reasoned discussions of the merit of your strategy. Your behavior shows that you do not have confidence, only bravado. Not this boy, you know?
Rob
You said you were unable to finish your book and get a job due to emotions. I guess that means you don’t like what the research really says.
What has affected me is the feeling of being an outcast. It’s a very painful thing.
What Shiller showed is just common sense. OF COURSE valuations affect long-term returns! How else could it be.
But Shiller merited his Nobel prize for confirming that what common sense says must be so really is so. Because we really, really, really don’t want to believe that. We want Get Rich Quick strategies to work. We want irrational exuberance gains to be real. We love adviser who push Buy-and-Hold and we hate people who remind us of what the research says.
It’s a painful experience to tell the truth about stock investing. That’s why so few do it.
The more sites there are that permit honest posting re the research, the easier it will be to tell the truth and the sooner we all will be able to achieve financial independence. That’s why I feel so strongly that we need to move in that direction. But it hasn’t been easy being a pioneer. It’s an important story to tell. But it hasn’t been a fun experience trying to tell it.
Rob