Is Buy and Hold Dead? Part II

I found some thoughtful quotes on the topic:

From John Bogle (former CEO of Vanguard):“Our emotions tend to lead us in the wrong direction. We are usually optimistic when the market is high and pessimistic when the market is low. So the odds of being able to time the market are not good. The stock market isn’t a place for betting. The place for betting is Las Vegas.”

From Don Phillips, Managing Director of Morningstar:“No one’s used market timing successfully in a mutual fund over time.”

From Janet Bodnar, Editor Kiplinger’s Personal Finance
“With so many of us eager to make up market losses, we’re sitting ducks for new products and strategies – or new twists on old ones - that promise to recover lost ground quickly. Lately I’ve spent time on the road listening to what financial engineers and others in the profession are cooking up, and this is my advice: Proceed with caution. For instance, after the “lost decade” it was inevitable that buy-and-hold investing would be declared dead and that some pros would try to revive market timng. But at the Morningstar investment conference, nearly everyone seems happy to let market timing rest in peace. ‘It’s really dangerous,’ warns Chris Davis, the respected manager of Selected American Shares”.

From Jeremy Siegel, Professor at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School
"Stock-market investors are an unhappy bunch. Standard & Poor's 500-stock index is no higher than it was 12 years ago, and over the 10 years ended in May, stocks have returned a dismal minus 1.7% per year. So it's no surprise that investors wonder whether 'buy and hold' and 'stocks for the long run' are discredited concepts.

The short answer is that stocks are still the best long-term investments. As bad as the past decade has been, there have been other ten-year periods during which stocks have recorded even bigger losses. Yet over periods of 20 years or longer, stocks have never lost money, even after inflation. Including the latest bear market, stock returns have averaged 7.8% per year over the last 20 years and 11% annually over the past 30."