People are even afraid to post anonymously in support of market timing.

My buy-and-hold critics do not post in good faith. They have no desire to learn at all. They want to suppress learning. They believe in an investment strategy developed in the 1960s, and they fear that if people were allowed to freely discuss the last 42 years of peer-reviewed research, what they would hear would cause them to lose faith in that strategy. They feel rich and smart. But I interact with critics almost every day on my blog. Why do I do that?

I don’t want to make the mistakes they made. I don’t want to decide on a strategy and close my mind to heretical ideas. I want to keep learning. I can trust critics to tell me things I don’t want to hear. And after all, they have every reason to want to be the most effective investors possible. Maybe they will notice something I missed. There is great value in having someone point out something you cannot see for yourself. So I continue to engage with critics, no matter how unpleasant their experiences may be.

Today one of them raised a point that I think is worth your consideration. I have often pointed out that thousands of community members wish we were allowed to publish honestly about the past 42 years of peer-reviewed research. they ask. So why aren’t any of these people posting on my blog? I point out all the profanity. I argue that people do not want to see the lives of their loved ones threatened. People don’t like their careers being destroyed. One of my critics observed today that my supporters can post anonymously on my blog. Why not?

That’s a good question. I think it’s worth considering the valid points critics raise.

Market timing doesn’t work

People aren’t just afraid of their loved ones being threatened or their careers being destroyed. Humans have an innate desire (thought to be hardwired into us by evolution) to remain part of a tribe. We don’t like feeling disconnected from our fellow community members. If the majority view is that market timing doesn’t work, then we want our friends to believe that market timing doesn’t work. We are not strange people. We are not outcasts. We are not cranks.

now… .

Many of us are drawn to unconventional ways of thinking. That’s why many people have expressed a preference for me to be able to post honestly about my research. The idea that market timing not only works, but may even be necessary, intrigues people. It is said. Price is important in all markets except the stock market. So I think it will be effective when buying stocks. And of course, 42 years of peer-reviewed research showing that what our common sense tells us is what it should be, shows that it has always been that way, for as long as we have records of stock prices. Experts have been saying otherwise for decades. The idea that the experts might be wrong is compelling. And it’s important to get the numbers right in your retirement research. So this is naturally a debate that interests most investors.

But the constant repetition of claims by buys and holders that the timing is not right has led to the idea that practicing price discipline when buying stocks seems too obvious, and questioning orthodoxy has become taboo in the investment advice world. . Once a taboo is established, there is no need for censorship and people censor themselves.

Make the Right Retirement Plan

I did it. The day I first tackled the Greaney retirement study, I was still a Buy-and-Holder. If you had given me a polygraph test on the afternoon of May 13, 2002 and asked me whether I thought buy-and-hold was a valid strategy, I would have said “yes” and passed the test. Isn’t that an amazing reality? I knew that buy-and-hold retirement research was flawed. I have known this for years. Creating the right retirement plan is at the heart of our investment advice project. If one of these things goes wrong, you have to go back to basics and start over. Why didn’t it occur to me to question not only the safe withdrawal rate study, but the whole Shebang?

The taboo crippled my brain cells. I am one of the humans. I want to be part of a tribe. I don’t want to be seen as stupid, weird, or a party animal. So I continued to believe something that couldn’t be true (that buy-and-hold is a sound strategy) given the other things I believed (that buy-and-hold got the numbers wildly wrong in retirement studies).

I’m not a fan of the pressure tactics buy-and-hold have used over the past 42 years of peer-reviewed research to shut people out of thinking and, as a result, help us all live better lives. But I think it’s important to note that most of the censorship we’ve seen has been self-censorship. Buy-and-Holders are telling us tall tales about stock investing. But most of the time they believe the tall tales themselves. And the main reason they keep telling us that crap is because we desperately want them to keep doing it and we’ve made it clear that we’re going to punish them if they don’t keep doing it.

We like to remain ignorant about how stock investing works. We have built a huge wall of indifference to the results of the last 40 years of peer-reviewed research so that we can remain ignorant. This is the situation today. Most of us just shrugged our shoulders and concluded: “That is impossible. Man will choose to remain ignorant forever.”

I have a journalistic brain rather than an investment brain, so knowing that we’re all afraid to talk about these things makes me want to talk about them even more. It’s only when you get a lot of hits that you realize you’re flying over your target. No topic in America today generates as much controversy as this one. Take my word for it. I’ve had a front row seat to the madness for 21 years, and we caught the tiger in this story.

Rob’s bio is here.