The hedgehog and the fox.

This was the title of an essay by philosopher Isaiah Berlin, intended light heartedly but still referred to regularly. It categorises people into two types, the hedgehog who has one defining idea and the fox who draws from many sources. An excerpt from Wikipedia summarises.

Berlin expands upon this idea to divide writers and thinkers into two categories: hedgehogs, who view the world through the lens of a single defining idea (examples given include Plato, Lucretius, Dante, Pascal, Hegel, Dostoevsky, Nietzsche, Ibsen, and Proust) and foxes who draw on a wide variety of experiences and for whom the world cannot be boiled down to a single idea (examples given include Herodotus, Aristotle, Erasmus, Shakespeare, Montaigne, Molière, Goethe, Pushkin, Balzac, Joyce, Anderson).

Turning to Tolstoy, Berlin contends that at first glance, Tolstoy escapes definition into one of these two groups. He postulates, rather, that while Tolstoy's talents are those of a fox, his beliefs are that one ought to be a hedgehog, and thus Tolstoy's own voluminous assessments of his own work are misleading. Berlin goes on to use this idea of Tolstoy as a basis for an analysis of the theory of history that Tolstoy presents in his novel War and Peace.

In trading terms, I'm also a fox who wants to be a hedgehog. The disciplines of technical trading are the simple idea but a lateral thinking mind means I'm not perfectly suited to this approach.

Why do I persist with the approach? As I said yesterday, it's because it provides a set of intellectual blinkers and it works reasonably well. Could I improve things or provide an outlet for the repressed fox? Yes, it would definitely be healthier and I have an idea what it is. But more about that later.

Anyway, today I am a hedgehog. I couldn't find anything better than LYC for a short term trade and I still had some left. The stock had made a buy signal on the break of a minor correction when looking at the 30 minute chart. There was a pre-market announcement that Mitsubishi had taken a 10% stake and although nobody expects a takeover bid, it was a vote of confidence. I bought some more stock at 192 but so far that hasn't worked out with an easing back to 190. My stop is below the swing low at 185 although I might get out of the extra stock before then if the overall market continues to look vulnerable.

By the way, the index has broken support and I'm out of LYC at 188.