Of Diehards and Bogleheads
It's official: The Bogleheads—proud disciples of Vanguard founder and index-fund pioneer Jack Bogle—have cut ties with the Vanguard Diehards message board, which has long been the most active discussion group on Morningstar.
In fact, the Bogleheads have dropped the "Diehards" moniker altogether, reports IndexUniverse. The group's new Web address is www.bogleheads.org. Apparently, the breakup was a long time coming: A group of volunteers originally built the new site to serve as a complement to Morningstar's forum, adding an archiving system and search engine superior to Morningstar's "paltry and glitch-riddled offering," according to this back story. Last year, the group added a new discussion site called the Bogleheads forum. "To make a long story short, the new forum has far surpassed the old one, raising the question of whether Morningstar's name is really much of a draw to indexers anymore," writes Murray Coleman of IndexUniverse.
It sounds like the new Bogleheads forum won't have any trouble drawing traffic: Coleman reported that, in a month-long period in January, the Morningstar forum registered 2,833 posts over 299 conversations, while the new forum logged 19,003 new posts in 1,885 conversations in the same time period (until this week, the sites had been running simultaneously on a split-screen format.)
Concludes Coleman: "The revamped Diehards.org is better organized, easier to navigate and much more intelligently moderated than the older version," he says. "It's becoming a true social networking site."
On the left side of its home page, the Bogleheads forum still links to Morningstar's Diehards message board, which remains active.
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Reader Comments
Boglehead Censorship
My name is Rob Bennett (I am the author of the "A Rich Life" blog at www.PassionSaving.com). It was my posting on the effects of valuations on long-term stock returns at the Diehards board that caused the split-off of the Bogleheads from the Diehards. Many community members expressed great interest in hearing about these ideas (developed over the course of six years at a number of Retire Early boards), but the group that now controls what can be posted at the Bogleheads board was intolerant of these discussions and engaged in massive disruption of all valuation-related threads.
The Boglehead views are popular today, there's no question whatsoever about that. I question how popular they will be in the event that stocks perform in the future anything at all as they always have in the past (on the three earlier occasions when we have gone to price levels as high as those that apply today, we have seen an average price drop of 67 percent in the years that followed). I believe that both the Diehards and Bogleheads communities were betrayed when discussion of the honest views of a significant percentage of the contributors to these communities was blocked by a hard-headed and hard-hearted minority (the majority favors the investing views voiced by this group but not the abusive tactics it employs to silence other viewpoints).
Does it matter? I say it does.
The internet discussion board is an important communications medium of the future. We learn things on discussion boards that we cannot learn through books or magazine articles or speeches. The magic is that we get to see how real live people apply the theories they learned about in books and magazine articles and speeches. A discussion-board community that brutally censors the honest and non-abusive expression of reasonable viewpoints on questions critical to its mission is a corrupt enterprise. It is only by permitting the expression of alternate viewpoints and by over time integrating the best of the new ideas brought to its attention into the overall community message that a community achieves its full potential.
There are many smart and kind posters in both the Bogleheads and Diehards communtiies. I of course wish them both well and look forward to the day when I will be contributing to them again (posters who argued strongly that valuations discussions should be governed by the same rules as discussions of all other topics were banned from both boards). However, I cannot give my full endorsement to either of these boards until they open themselves to discussion of a broader range of indexing topics.
Rob Bennett
Hmmmm...
For a different view of Rob's "contributions", read this thread:
http://www.retireearlyhomepage.com/hocomania.html
Hocus and Al Gore
Yes, I remember when Hocus (aka Rob Bennett) continually disrupted the old Diehards conversation board on Morningstar. And, I remember when Al Gore took credit for discovering the internet.
In both cases, in my opinion, these folks have delusions of grandeur.
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