In my experiences, most lawyers and most DRs do not earn most of their money. They may earn 25% of their income but they take the rest. They would therefore have no respect for either their, or their brokers, hard work with respect to trading. They only seek to get away with whatever they can as they feel they are entitled to a percentage of everyone else's money too. I live in one of the most DR infested areas of Washington, DC and have a PhD in this. Excellent post.
The problem is that the alternative is timing but then that's very very hard to do successfully. Buy and hold, mixing your assets up is still the best of a bad bunch for most investors. I would think that if you'd done that over a 10 year period, with ETFs, on 20 different markets, including stocks (including all the worlds markets), bonds, cash and property you wouldn't have done too badly. But put yoru money in the S&P ETF and then yes, the results aren't that good. Summary - Saying buy and hold doesn't work and then suggesting timing is better is of course 100% right, but impossible for the majority as they'll probably buy high and sell low.
The widespread belief that equity markets should, over the long term, return more than the risk-free rate needs to be shown up as the fallacy that it is. That would help immensely in helping the market bottom and restart the cycle.
but if risk is inherent in equity markets it would be impossible for the return to be inferrior to risk free markets.
Please have a look at the following thread, it might help you: http://www.elitetrader.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&threadid=143772