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

Thanks for confirming that 4% has always worked.  Meanwhile VII has never worked.

To show that something survived is not the same thing as showing that it is 100 percent safe. To show that something barely survived on a tiny number of occasions actually shows that it is not safe at all, that there is a very good chance that it will fail on the next occasions on which it is tried. People acknowledge these realities in every field of human endeavor outside of the investment advice field. There should be a 100 percent consensus today that it is an urgent piece of business for us as a nation to figure out why these realities are not acknowledged in the investment advice field as well.

Human rationality is a plus. It helps us make our way through life, We should give ourselves permission to make use of human rationality in the investment advice field. It’s not just about saying whatever it takes to turn a quick buck. It can’t be. The level of success that people achieve with their stock investments affects the extent to which they achieve their life goals. This stuff matters. It affects people’s lives.

My sincere take.

Rob

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

“ But in the long term market timing always works! ”

It has never worked for anyone, including you and that is why you are broke.

It’s been 20 years and never once have any of you Goons put forward an explanation of how market timing could ever not work. i presume that we agree that valuations affect long-term returns. So stock investing risk is not stable but variable (risk is greater when valuations are higher). So market timing is REQUIRED for any investor seeking to keep his risk profile constant over time. You’re able to imagine some circumstance in which it could be a bad thing to keep one’s risk profile constant. I am not.

That said, I naturally wish you all good things regardless of what investment strategy you elect to follow, in any event.

Rob

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 people over at WadePfau’s firm have confirmed that Rob Bennett is wrong and his market timing strategy is one big scheme.

https://retirementresearcher.com/occams-cant-time-markets/

This is a good statement of the standard Buy-and-Hold line. It is well-written and every statement taken in isolation is accurate.

Of course, the problem is that, while the individual statements are accurate, the overall impression left by the article — that market timing is not always 100 percent required and in some circumstances might not even work — is entirely false and exceedingly dangerous.

This line gives away the game: “Unless you can predict the future (or are substantially better at extrapolating trends than pretty much anyone else), there’s no way to tell how the markets will move in the short to medium term. As you can imagine, this makes it incredibly difficult to successfully time the markets.”

IN THE SHORT TO MEDIUM TERM!

Yes, that’s so. But in the long term market timing always works! There’s 40 years of peer-reviewed research showing that. So why leave that part out? The answer is — If you tell people about that part, the entire Buy-and-Hold house of cards comes tumbling to the ground. There are lots of wealthy and powerful and well-connected people who do not want to see that happen., These people built well-paying careers learning about and then pushing the conventional wisdom of 1980 and, then, when Shiller revolutionized our understanding of how stock investing works in 1981, elected to pretend that he hadn’t done that and to continue pushing the same old Buy-and-Hold garbage, discredited or not.

The entire theme of the article is that investors are rational. And, if that were so, it would all hold up. Timing wouldn’t work and the safe withdrawal rate would always be the same number. But of course it is not so. Shiller’s Nobel-prize-winning contribution was to show that there are times when investors become insanely irrational and that irrationality inevitably leads to the destruction of millions of lives. It has never turned out otherwise. There is not even any way that the rational human mind could ever imagine it turning out otherwise.

Irrational exuberance is dangerous, It is a poison., It is a cancer. There’s only one way to rein in irrational exuberance — with market timing, I think it would be fair to say that market timing is 70 percent of what it takes to achieve long-term investing success. If that’s the case, then 70 percent of the advice in this field should be advice aimed at encouraging market timing. That’s obviously not what we have today. Which explains why today’s CAPE value is a national scandal.

Is there a place for articles explaining for the 5,000th time why short-term timing doesn’t work? Sure. There are some who missed the first 4,999 iterations or who need a reminder. But there is no excuse for devoting as many words as this fellow devoted to explaining why short-term timing doesn’t work without devoting any to the point that is 50 times more important — that long-term market timing always works and is always 100 percent essential.

Please mark me down as PRO market timing. All the way. I see the prohibition on discussion of the 40 years of peer-reviewed research showing how important it is that all stock investors always practice market timing as the most important public policy issue facing the United States today.

My best and warmest wishes to you.

Rob

 

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

So you now admit it was a discussion about gun safety.  Also, the thread was not about safe withdrawal rates to begin with.  You do know that people discuss a large variety of topics in casual conversations.

The entire board community was at the time engaged in discussion of my famous post from the morning of May 13, 2002, in which I asked whether we should be taking valuations into consideration when calculating the safe withdrawal rate. There is no rational case that can be made for not doing so. That’s why the Buy-and-Holders desperately turned to discussions of gun safety. If Buy-and-Hold were a real thing, they would feel no need to do things like that.

The battle is between reason and emotion. Research-based strategies can be defended without the use of gun safety discussions, Buy-and-Hold cannot.

Rob