Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently posted to the discussion thread for another blog entry at this site:
If you haven’t been able to fully find your retirement by investing with the VII strategy, why should anyone follow your advice?
Four reasons:
1) Common sense tells us that market timing (price discipline!) must work. Price discipline is essential in every other market that has ever existed;
2) We now have 40 years of peer-reviewed research confirming that what must be so really is so;
3) The behavior of you Goons. If you Goons truly believe that the Greaney retirement study contained a valuation adjustment or that market timing was not required, we never would have seen any of the abusive behavior that we have been seeing for 20 years now; and
4) The behavior of many of the big names in the field Few are willing to state openly that Buy-and-Hold/Get Rich Quick is dangerous garbage. But many have slipped little bit of honesty in with the big ball of Get Rich Quick/Buy-and-Hold advice that they feel they need to get behind to turn a quick buck in this field. The perfect illustration of the phenomenon is Bill Bernstein, who included language in a book published in May 2002 that an investor needs to subtract 2 percentage points from the 4 percent rule to identify the safe withdrawal rate that actually applied for retirement beginning at the top of the bubble. Bernstein could have brought all the nastiness to a full and complete stop with a simple declaration that OF COURSE the Greaney study was in error and needed to be corrected. He never did that. But he never denied the words in his book showing that to be the case. That one paragraph of Bernstein’s book alone shows the entire Buy-and-Hold thing to be a gigantic scam. If Buy-and-Hold was a real thing, the Buy-and-Holders would want any errors discovered in Buy-and-Hold retirement studies to be corrected within 24 hours of the moment when they were brought to public attention.
My sincere take.
Rob
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