Set forth below is the text of an e-mail that I sent on October 29, 2009, to Mike Piper (author of the Oblivious Investor blog) in response to the e-mail that I sent him that was set forth in Friday’s blog entry.

Mike:

I am grateful to you for giving the idea some consideration. That’s the sort of spirit that takes us all to a better place down the road.

I love the idea of you characterizing your round-ups as “pro” and “con.” That lets people know up front that they should venture into the “con” stuff only if they indeed want to consider getting on a somewhat different track. 

I do believe you when you say that you do not want to squelch opposing viewpoints, by the way.

I’ll make a note to send you e-mails from time to time re posts of mine that seem relevant to your readers.

I don’t know how you feel about posting links to podcasts. A lot of my time of late has been spent developing podcasts (I use many of my blog entries to announce the posting of new ones). The trouble with these is that they are lengthy and it would take a good bit of time for you to check out whether they are worthy of your readers’ attention. Still, I’ll make note below of a few recent ones just in case there is a potential interest:

1) Podcast #171 — 30 Investment Myths in 60 Minutes  (This one is being announced in tomorrow’s blog entry. It gives an overview of a lot of findings in much less time than it would take to listen to the podcasts that explored each of these findings in greater depth)

2) Podcast #158 — John Bogle Says Valuation-Informed Indexing Can Work (This one is a natural for Bogleheads. There’s also a discussion of you and your blog in it (mostly complimentary words) following the discussion of the interview in which Bogle said that Valuation-Informed Indexing can work. There are also two narrative blog entires re this development, which I view as highly significant. The first gives my analysis of the Bogle interview (with IndexUniverse.com) in which he said that VII can work. The second is the text of an e-mail that I sent to Bogle asking that he help us reopen the Bogleheads.com and Vanguard Diehards boards to honest posting on valuation-related topics.)

3) Podcast #168 — The Stock-Return Predictor (The most important tool at my web site is the The Stock-Return Predictor [ a calculator that reveals the most likely 10-year return on a purchase of shares in a broad index fund]. This podcast is aimed at helping newcomers to the calculator learn how it works and what it can do to help them formulate more effective long-term investment strategies.)

4) “Humble Money Experts Are the Best Money Experts”  (This is a narrative blog entry that links to an article that I wrote for the most recent issue of The Integritive Advisor, the journal of the Association for Integritive and Financial Life Planning. I discuss here what I view as the biggest problem with the Indexing Revolution today — the unwillingness among many big names to acknowledge mistakes.)

Rob

Mike responded by saying: “Thanks for the encouragement on the agree/disagree roundup idea. I look forward to including some of your posts. As to podcasts: I know they’re great for a lot of people. I, however, am slightly hearing impaired, so I really struggle with pure audio. As such, I must admit that I’m not terribly likely to link to them.”

I responded by saying: “That’s fine.”