“There Is Something Rude About Disagreeing With Me Repeatedly At My Own Blog”

Set forth below is the text of an e-mail sent to me on October 27, 2009, by Mike Piper (author of the Oblivious Investor blog) in response to my e-mail to him set forth in yesterday’s blog entry.

Rob-

The fact that you disagree with me isn’t the point. I completely agree that diversity of opinion is a wonderful thing in general and that it’s an integral part of what makes our financial markets work. The issue is that you feel the need to continually bring up your disagreement and that you do so on my blog.

To illustrate, let me bring up Neal Frankle (aka Wealth Pilgrim). His investing viewpoints contrast my own far more than yours do. (He’s an advocate of short-term market timing using actively managed funds.) He invited me to write a guest post for his blog explaining my contrary viewpoint. I did so. He replied explaining why he disagreed. We talked it through in the comments. End result: Neal and I still disagree. Adamantly. Yet we don’t bring it up over and over at each other’s blogs.

What we do though is continually write about our own beliefs/philosophies/thoughts on our own blogs, putting forth the ideas that we’ve come to believe in. I write about why I think actively managed funds are a terrible choice. And Neal writes about why he thinks the opposite.

You wrote that “It makes me feel that there is something wrong or dirty or rude or not nice about challenging Passive Investing at your blog with the strongest arguments that I can muster against it.” There’s nothing wrong rude about disagreeing with me. And there’s nothing rude about disagreeing with me on my blog. But, frankly, I think there is something rude about doing so repeatedly on my own blog.

If you believe that you should repeatedly “make the strongest case” you can against what I’m recommending, then go for it. But, please, have the respect to do it on your own blog.

Thank you.

-Mike