“It Seems Like You Have Pretty Much Given Up on Most Everything.”

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

It seems like you have pretty much given up on most everything.  No work going on with the book.  No job.  Blog activity dropping off.  I guess you are not really worried about your perceived buy and hold crisis.

I remain worried. I haven’t given up.
There’s only so much that one person can do. I believe that I’ve done everything that one person could be expected to do. I’m at peace with that.

I work on the book every day. Progress has been exceedingly slow. But I am seeing slow progress. I remain highly confident that I will get there. That’s my primary project today.

When I talk to normal people about this matter, they have no difficulty accepting the basic realities. What’s lacking is a sense of urgency. People have never experienced the level of abusiveness that we have seen for 23 years from those posting in “defense” of Mel Lindauer and John Greaney. They often wish me luck. But they don’t feel confident of their abilities to say for sure how stock investing works. And they have zero desire to see that abusiveness turned on them. They don’t want to get involved. So they are okay with letting others solve the problem. They are complacent about it. I am not even a tiny bit complacent about it. But most people are (to the extent that they think about the matter at all). That’s where things stand.

I believe that a huge price drop followed by an economic crisis (which is inevitable sooner or later if Shiller’s Nobel-prize-winning research is legitimate research) may change that. But we’ll have to wait and see to find out for sure. If/when we see another Buy-and-Hold Crisis, I’ll do what I can to help us get out of it and to insure that we never see another one. I can do no more and I can do no less.

I am of course frustrated that we are not today seeing the benefits of such a wonderful advance in our understanding of how stock investing works. It’s painful to think about the lost opportunities. But the other way of looking at it is that we might have never achieved that advance in the first place and we did. So there’s much more good here than there is bad. We don’t need to adopt any new laws to get every discussion board and blog on the internet opened to honest posting re the last 44 years of peer-reviewed research. All we need to do is to give ourselves permission to talk about this amazing advance so that we can all reap the benefits of it. I remain confident that that change will take place.

I take comfort from the fact that so many on the Buy-and-Hold side of things have expressed a desire that honest posting be permitted at every site. We need them to do a little more. But their hearts are already in the right place. So I think there are grounds for optimism. We will experience the next Buy-and-Hold Crisis together as a nation of people. I think it may cause us to pull together and to take this to a positive place. We’ll see, you know.

I know what side I am on. I believe that each investor should be able to hear both sides of the story and to decide from himself what to do with his retirement money. I believe that the Greaney retirement study lacks a valuation adjustment and that people considering using it to plan a retirement need to know that. That’s pretty much it.

My best wishes to you.

Rob