A Rich Life

The Old Ideas on Saving & Investing Don't Work -- Here's What Does

“It’s a Painful Experience to Tell the Truth About Stock Investing. That’s Why So Few Do It.”

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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 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

Comments

  1. If you find things so painful that it takes longer than a year or 2 to finish anything, then certainly you need to seek mental healthcare services.

  4. It’s been a bit less than two years. I’ve been seeing the current person (who I like a lot) since October 2023. I was seeing someone else for about three months before that.

    The pace of progress on the book has picked up a small bit over the past three months. But I am nowhere close to finishing it. So I am not satisfied with the extent of the progress. I intend to stick with it for so long as I see signs of progress even if things don’t happen as quickly as I would like.

    Rob

  5. Based on the content of your website, I don’t think I see that anything has changed despite two years of therapy. Do you think the therapy might not be working or is the expectation that others need to change vs you?

  6. We need to make a decision as a nation of people that the same laws that apply in every field of human endeavor outside of the investment advice field should apply in the investment advice field as well. We are blessed that we now have 44 years of peer-reviewed research showing us how stock investing works in the real world. The news is 20 times more good than it is bad.

    To open every site to honest posting re the last 44 years of peer-reviewed research would certainly be a big change. It would be the biggest advance ever achieved in the personal finance realm. But it’s not really a change to say that we are going to apply the same laws in the investment advice field that we already apply in every other field of human endeavor. We have to come to terms with the strange set of circumstances that placed us in this exceedingly unfortunate (and yet exciting and promising!) situation. I hope to help us with that transition through the explanations offered in my book.

    Wish me luck!

    Rob

  7. Wrong. We have to decide if we want to listen to someone like you that makes up silly stories to try and make himself feel better about his failures. While it is good that you did seek out therapy, it appears that it is not helping and that you need to seek more/different assistance with your issues.