Rob Bennett’s critics

I have been contacting numerous people, letting them know about my article reporting on The Silencing of Academic Researcher Wade Pfau by The Buy-and-Hold Mafia.

Yesterday’s blog entry reported on my correspondence with Robert Savickas, Associate Finance Professor at the George Washington University Business School. Set forth below is the text of his response to the e-mail of mine reported on at the earlier blog entry:

Hi Rob,

You got me interested. Can you send me a full version of Wade’s paper?

I know that buy-and-hold creates more risk than necessary. My whole complaint about it is that it works “on average” because we deal with average returns. So, if you use buy-and-hold for your retirement savings, you will do pretty well “on average” There is one little problem with this. The problem is: we have only one life and we get to invest only once. We do not live many lives and invest many times for retirement, so on average, across all those lives, we do well. You get one shot, not the average. So, if that shot is the unlucky one, who cares about the average. That’s where a risk with buy-and-hold is, to my mind. This is also what justifies more active trading, because if you make one mistake, you still have the time to make up for it. About 10 years ago, I wanted to write an academic paper about this, but got busy with more urgent things.
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But I don’t understand the “risk is optional” idea. Risk is always there, because due to our limited minds and knowledge, uncertainty is always there (unlike in the case of God, who knows everything, so there is no uncertainty for Him).

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Wow, I did not realize you achieved this much success and have many devoted believers/followers. That’s great, then ignore the opposition. It is great to have opposition: that means you are doing something right.

Robert