“Is There Any Way to Mess Up Such a Great Asset Class? You Could Encourage Investors to Push Prices Up so High That You Turn that 6.5 Percent Return into a Negative Number. That’s What the Buy-and-Holders Did,”

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

The markets go up and down every day. No 30 year period has ever failed. As such, your comments are not relevant.

To the opposite, if you are not fully funded by your 60’s, you have a failed retirement.

You are trying to make up a story about how a system that has always worked will potentially fail and at the same time talk about a system that has never worked will somehow magically become successful.

Every 30-year period has failed. Every 20-year period has failed. Every ten-year period has failed. Every five-year period has failed. Every one-year period has failed.

Stocks are an amazing asset class. They offer a 6.5 percent real average annual return. Is there any way to mess up such a great asset class? You could encourage investors to push prices up so high that you turn that 6.5 percent return into a negative number. That’s what the Buy-and-Holders did,

The trick to stock investing is to always, always, always practice price discipline and to always tune out the Wall Street Con Men who say that they have a funny feeling that it’s all going to turn out different this time. What if it doesn’t turn out different? What it it turns out the same> That’s the one that keeps me up at night.

I believe that we should permit honest posting re the peer-reviewed research at every site. It solves a lot of problems and it creates a lot of exciting opportunities. Yes, it means that the people who developed the Buy-and-Hold strategy in the days before Shiller’s Nobel-prize-winning research was published to say the words “I” and “Was” and “Wrong.” Who cares, you know? I can live with that.

Rob