Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently posted to the discussion thread for another blog entry at this site:
“Because they are afraid to say these things, Anonymous. They are afraid that what happened to me will happen to them.”
And there is no link to them making a statement like this, so we just have to take your word for it, right. Just like the death threats and job threats.
No.
There are scores and scores of places where all kinds of people who work in this field say that they are afraid to tell the truth about Buy-and-Hold. That’s the entire story. The fact that the Buy-and-Holders made a mistake re market timing is trivial. Who cares? We all make mistakes. We say “sorry” and move on. That hasn’t happened re the mistake re market timing for 39 years. That’s why we had an economic crisis in 2008. That’s why we are likely going to see another in the next year or two or three. That’s the entire story. Drop the intimidation stuff and we all enjoy an amazing learning experience and we all move forward together. It’s all upside and zero possible downside.
I have that list of 45 comments by Wade Pfau that I post frequently in response to your comments. He has several comments in that group in which he says that he is afraid of what you Goons will do to his career if he continues doing honest work.
Rob Arnott wrote me an e-mail telling me that the stuff at my site is “solid.” He also said that he has seen the same intimidation tactics that I have reported on. He said that academic researchers who were planning to do research backing up his ideas were taken aside by Buy-and-Holders and told that publishing such research would be a career limiting move.
Carl Richards wrote to me to tell me that my stuff is amazing. He congratulated me for doing work of huge importance. And he banned me from his site. Because his Buy-and-Hold readers said that they would stop reading his stuff if he did not ban me. He sees great value in the work. But he is afraid of the Buy-and-Holders.
Shiller doesn’t include any how-to information in his book. It is not possible that that is not because he is afraid of what the Buy-and-Holders will do if he calls them out on their b.s. The first thing that an editor of a book on investing would look for is the how-to stuff. That’s what people buy investing books to see. So why the heck would you leave that out of a book on stock investing if you were not afraid that the people following the old model would freak out? It’s the only possible explanation.
And on and on and on and on and on. Remember Scott Burns? I told him about the errors in the Buy-and-Hold retirement studies and he said that he was going to write an article about it. He did write an article but he did not mention my name and he did not offer his own view as to whether the studies are in error. Huh? I wrote to him to ask what the deal was and he said that it was “catastrophically unproductive” of me to point out the error. Isn’t the idea to get the numbers in retirement studies right and not wrong? There’s nothing catastrophically unproductive about pointing out an error in a retirement study. That’s what we all are supposed to do. Scott didn’t like it because he did not himself have the courage to point out the error and it made him look bad someone else to do it.
We will have to decide as a society whether we are going to permit honest posting after the next price crash. I think that will end this. People will not feel threatened to hear about the dangers of treating irrational exuberance as something real after the irrational exuberance portion of their portfolios has disappeared. So we will be able to move forward in our understanding of how stock investing works at that point. And we will never again see one of these horrible bull markets that end up destroying so many lives.
We’ll see, you know? I am not capable of saying that I believe that Greaney included a valuations adjustment in his retirement study. So I am just going to continue walking down the path that I have been on for the past 18 years and see how things play out. I believe that we are a good people deep down inside. So I believe that we are going to end up in a good place. And at that point I do not believe that there will be any controversy any more as to whether honest posting re the last 39 years of peer-reviewed research should be permitted or not. But, again, we will just have to wait and see to find out for sure.
I naturally wish you the best of luck in all your future life endeavors.
How about this one — Brett Arends in the Wall Street Journal:
“For years the investment industry has tried to scare clients into staying fully invested in the stock market at all times, no matter how high stocks go. It’s hooey. They’re leaving out more than half the story. Anyone who followed the numbers would have avoided the disaster of the 1929 crash, the 1970s or the past lost decade on Wall Street…. I wonder how many stayed fully invested because their brokers warned them ‘you can’t time the market’.”
Why wasn’t that on the front page? The editors of the Wall Street Journal have consciences. They want to do what they can to get the word out that Buy-and-Hold is a scam. But they don’t put it on the front page because they fear the reaction they will get from the millions of people who have been taken in by this Get Rich Quick garbage and have their retirements riding on it.
It’s never been a problem getting people to acknowledge privately that Buy-and-Hold is a big pile of Get Rich Quick garbage, a dishonest strategy that does a good job of turning a quick buck. The trouble comes with persuading them to state things clearly and not to back down in the face of death threats and demands for unjustified board bannings and extortion.
My best wishes.
Hooey Free (I Hope!) Rob
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