FutureBlind Digest for November 21

Some interesting reading material for the holiday week:

On incentives, biases, and lollapalooza effects / Todd Kenyon discusses Charlie Munger's Mental Models and their application to the recent meltdown in the Financial markets.

Malone's Playbook / Goes over a brief history of John Malone's media companies. Also discusses his latest strategies and what he may be planing in the future. As with anything to do with John Malone, it's an interesting read. Here's a quote from Liberty's CEO regarding the split up of IAC: "[the break-up] will allow us to begin a dialogue with IAC about how we are going to work together in the next phase of our relationship."

The Evolution of an Investor / A great (and long) story on Blaine Lourd, written by Michael Lewis (author of ::amazon("0393324818","Moneyball"):: and ::amazon("0140143459","Liars Poker")::). A good quote from the article: "As a group, professional money managers control more than 90 percent of the U.S. stock market. By definition, the money they invest yields returns equal to those of the market as a whole, minus whatever fees investors pay them for their services. This simple math, you might think, would lead investors to pay professional money managers less and less. Instead, they pay them more and more."

Think Disruptive / Another article in Portfolio - this time by Andy Grove (former CEO of Intel). Grove talks about innovation, electric cars, and the benefits of being a big company.