Yesterday’s blog entry reported on an e-mail that I sent to Morningstar.com site administrators on April 18, 2006, reporting on death threats advanced by John Greaney at an earlier time that were being used by Mel Lindauer, co-author of the book “The Bogleheads Guide to Investing” at that time to intimidate Vanguard Diehards community members into not posting honestly on the errors in the Old School safe-withdrawal-rate studies. Set forth below is the text of the response I received from Morningstar on April 18, 2006, followed by my reply to that response. I did not receive a response from Morningstar to the question I posed in that reply.
Hello Rob,
Thank you for writing. Unfortunately we are not concerned with the goings-on in other forums outside of Morningstar and have no control over other forums. If the post where you were threatened did not occur on the Morningstar boards, then why bring it back to life on the Morningstar boards? As far as we can tell, this constitutes as a posting of misleading information. Consider this a formal warning.
If you have any additional questions or comments, please don’t hesitate to reply to this email and I will be happy to further assist you.
Best Regards,
Matthew B
Morningstar Support
Matthew:
I certainly agree that the Greaney matter should not be brought to the Morningstar boards. The reality is that it has been brought up there by a number of posters. My post was an attempt to explain to my fellow community members the background as to why this was happening. I did this only after the matter had been injected into discussions held at Morningstar on numerous occasions.
I certainly am okay with the idea of not making further reference to the Greaney matter at the Morningstar boards.
Would it be helpful if I were to notify you on future occasions on which the Greaney matter is brought into the discussions at Morningstar by other posters?
Rob
Diversified Investor says
Can I assume that you plan to return to your verbal assault on Wade Pfau tomorrow?
Rob says
I expect that I will be writing about that horrible, horrible man who showed us all how to obtain far higher returns while taking on dramatically less risk for as long as I have fingers to type, Diversified.
I mean — how dare he?
He makes people who advocate strategies other than Valuation-Informed Indexing look just awful!
Rob