“Everybody Doesn’t Give Up One Way of Thinking About a Subject in the 24 Hours After Amazing Breakthrough Research Is Published. People Need Time to Talk Things Over and Think Things Over. In Time, the New Ideas Spread. That’s Where Things Went Haywire.”

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

“Yes, it all has to be a mass conspiracy since rich people are always wanting to get investment advice from a broke guy.”

We didn’t know all there was to know about how stock investing works when Buy-and-Hold was being developed in the 1960s. Shiller didn’t publish his amazing research showing that valuations affect long-term returns until 1981. So I would chalk up the error that the Buy-and-Holders made to an understandable mistake rather than to a mass conspiracy.

Everybody doesn’t give up one way of thinking about a subject in the 24 hours after amazing breakthrough research is published. People need time to talk things over and think things over. In time, the new ideas spread. That’s where things went haywire. At some point a number of Buy-and-Holders began engaging in intimidation tactics aimed at suppressing discussion of the new research. That’s how we got to where we are today, with 44 years of peer-reviewed research ignored in almost all discussions of stock investing.

That’s what needs to change. we need to open every investing site to honest posting re the research. That way we can all get up to speed in time. I would have voted to open every site to honest posting re the research on the afternoon of May 13, 2002. I said so at the time. That way, we would be 23 years farther along in our development of the Valuation-Informed Indexing concept. We would all be living richer and freer and better lives today.

Rob