Sublime

Looking back over the previous five years, they now saw that they’d systematically overvalued their own players whenever another team tried to trade for them. Especially when offered the chance to trade one of their NBA players for another team’s draft picks, they’d refused deals they should have done. Why? They hadn’t done it consciously. Morey th

Good VCs are good fishermen. Great VCs, like Brian Jacobs, are also great hunters.

Al Davis at Oakland (and by default, the great Sid Gillman under whom Al had served in San Diego with the Chargers);

Meriwether did not himself possess a first-rate mathematical mind. Instead, he recruited the top academic talent. No finance professor was more respected than Robert C. Merton. Merton had consulted for Salomon Brothers, so Meriwether already knew him. He agreed to come on board. Meriwether’s other great coup was recruiting Myron Scholes. As journal

Picking a stock depended not on the whim of the crowd, but on the facts. And Buffett took this to heart, partly because he saw Graham in idealized terms—as a “hero,” like his father.39 Graham had a similar effect on others.

Baseball people believed they knew the answers to those questions, and all the others. But those assumptions hadn’t been tested in decades, if ever, so it shouldn’t be surprising that many of them turned out to be wrong. From that gap between the assumed and the actual, Beane and his assistants were able to use their limited budget to construct div