come we analysts must go to school to the older established disciplines. We must study their ways of amassing and scrutinizing facts and from this study develop methods of research suited to the peculiarities of our own field of work.
The final element of the Hippocratic method is the judicious construction of a theory.” In our initial quotation, Henderson emphasizes the modest nature of any such theory based on medical observation. It is to be “only a useful walking—stick to help on the way.”
So, too, in security analysis, we need theories which stem from experience and close observation, but which are appropriately limited in their scope and modest in their pretensions. We must steer a middle course between starry eyed doctrinairism on the one hand and vacillating opportunism on the other. It is precisely this judicious admixture of the theoretìcal and the practical approach which characterizes the truly successful security analyst— and the outstanding physician.
