Set forth below is the text of a comment that I recently posted to another blog entry at this site:
Why the Bogleheads forum and not other forums?
One reason is that it is so big. The Bogleheads Forum is the largest investing forum on the internet that I know about.
Another reason is that the board community there has on many occasions expressed a strong desire that honest posting be permitted. So we already have the community on board.
A third reasons is that the Bogleheads Forum has a long history of trying to deal with these issues. I put my first post to that forum on the SWR issue back in July 2005. We have had THOUSANDS of threads at that forum on The Great Debate stuff in the years since. So there is an intense and longstanding interest there in getting this stuff resolved.
Fourth, there are a good number of top-name experts who post there. Bogle. Bernstein. Swedroe. Ferri. Wade Pfau has posted there. In fact, Wade and I linked up because of what he learned about safe withdrawal rates from reading my posts there. These experts can help us spread the word about our findings. So it makes all the sense in the world to conduct our discussions there.
We also have the ability to question those experts. So, for example, I have said that Bogle’s claim that it is never necessary to lower your stock allocation by more than 15 percent is based on a number (the 15 percent number) that “he pulled out of his backside.” We should be asking Bogle where he got that number if he claims that he did not in fact pull it out of his backside. Since he is available at the forum and appears at the annual meeting, that’s the perfect place to put him on the hot seat.
Finally, Valuation-Informed Indexing is the next step in the development of Bogle’s ideas re investing. So it makes all the sense in the world to discuss VII there, where lots of people who are informed re his ideas congregate. VII is the new Buy-and-Hold, it is Buy-and-Hold 2.0. People interested in the further development of Bogle’s ideas congregate there already. Why not take advantage of that in choosing a place to do work to further develop the ideas?
Rob
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