“The Answer Is Not for Me to Stop Speaking Up about My Doubts re Buy-and-Hold. The Answer Is for Everyone Else Who Entertains Similar Doubts to Insist on His or Her Right to Express Them Clearly and Unapologetically.”

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’re saying that the only possible reason why Shiller, Wade and everyone else don’t think like you, or act the way you want, is because they are frightened little rabbits. No other reason is possible. No other explanation will be considered. Yup, it’s hard to even imagine a more unhelpful mindset.

“But I know from long experience that there is a large number who very, very, very much want to hear the message and I believe strongly that they have every right to hear it.”

I agree they have that right. And I will immediately cede the floor to them. First one I see.

Shiller and Wade and millions and millions of others should of course be expected to disagree with me on matters of substance for a wide variety of reasons.

But, no, there is no other possible explanation for their failure to speak up in opposition to death threats and demands for unjustified board bannings and thousands of acts of defamation and threats to get academic researchers fired from their jobs than that they are frightened little rabbits. They don’t want what was done to me to happen to them and so they keep their mouths shut.

And that of course makes the problem worse. If every person who since 1981 came to entertain doubts about the merits of the Buy-and-Hold strategy had said so in clear and firm and bold and unmistakable terms, there would have been no “controversy” when I advanced my famous post from the morning of May 13, 2002, asking whether we should be considering the effects of valuations when calculating the safe withdrawal rate. It is because not too many had had the courage to speak up before I did that we experienced a disconnect between what lots of aspiring early retirees believed and what the peer-reviewed research in this field showed to be so. That disconnect supplied the energy that produced the nuclear reaction that followed.

The answer is not for me to stop speaking up about my doubts re Buy-and-Hold. The answer is for everyone else who entertains similar doubts to insist on his or her right to express them clearly and unapologetically. When enough people play it in the way that I have played it for the past 16 years, the “controversy” will vanish into the mist and it will be possible for us all to be friends again. We hold different views re how stock investing works, no more and no less. No biggie. No major deal. What I said on the morning of May 13, 2002, was perceived to be a major deal by some because they had never been exposed to the other side of the story. And they were never exposed to the other side of the story because too many of us Valuation-Informed Indexers act like frightened little rabbits when it comes to these matters.

This is my sincere take re these terribly important matters, in any event.

My best wishes to you.

Rob