The hedgehog vs the fox

The economist John Kay in his book Obliquity relates the famous essay by Isaiah Berlin about the hedgehog and the fox in the context of financial markets.

The hedgehog is someone who knows one big thing, while the fox is someone who knows a little about many things. The taxonomy was later used by political scientist Philip Tetlock over the course of two decades to assess the predictions of pundits to major events. While he found, according to Kay, the ‘experts’ were not very good at anticipating the future, he did find the foxes performed better in terms of the quality of their judgements than the hedgehogs. However, the hedgehogs received more public acclaim. As Kay says, in financial markets the two most well-known investors, famous f...