저자: BillAckman · 외국인
요약 보기
Ackman는 사업 품질(예측 가능성·경쟁우위 보호)을 최우선으로 보고, 시장 공포로 가격이 크게 내려갈 때 우량 기업을 매수한다고 설명. 10~15개 집중 포트폴리오, 장기 복리 관점, 감정 통제(감당 가능한 자본만 투자, 레버리지 회피)를 강조. 과거 $40억 손실 경험과 실패 대처의 중요성도 언급. 특정 자산에 대한 1~3개월 가격 예측은 없음.
다듬은 글
I've made bigger mistakes in the investment business than almost anyone. I lost $4 billion on one investment. You're kind of biologically incentivized to do precisely the wrong thing at the wrong time. One of the great competitive advantages you can have in life or as an investor is just having the long view.
You're unprepared uh for what's coming. This is Bill Aman, one of the most successful and controversial investors of our time. Today we are breaking down his recent Baker School of Business interview where he revealed five lessons every investor needs to understand. These aren't academic concepts. These are insights from someone who's experienced spectacular wins and devastating losses.
By the end, you'll know not just how to find great investments, but how to actually succeed over the long term. Let's start with a simple question. What makes a great investment? The most important thing for us is what we call business quality. So we look for businesses that one, we can predict what they're going to look like with a high degree of confidence over a long period of time.
So the value of any financial asset is the present value of the cash the business will generate over its life. If you can't predict what the business looks like 5 years, 10 years from now, 15 years from now, you really can't figure out what it's worth. So we try to find businesses that are first predictable and then we and in order to for the business to be predictable it's also has to be protected from the various forces in the world.
The hardest thing to do as an investor is to figure out or determine you know is this a disrupt business that's going to be disrupted by two citadel students working in a garage or is it a business that's going to survive whatever technological changes occur AI etc. That's the hardest part about investing.
But once you found a business that meets that criteria um you know we sort of have a library of these kind of companies and then we track them on a regular basis and even the best businesses in the world at various times of sometimes for reasons completely unrelated to the business become available at really cheap prices right every stock on the S&P went down you know something like 10 or more percent in the couple days after the tariff announcement uh some businesses are materially affected by tariffs others are not if you if you do suffic work, you know, the businesses well.
Um, because of the volatility in markets, every once in a while, a really great company becomes available at a really cheap price and we just wait for those moments. And so, it's not like we're figuring it out before other people. It's just that we know a meaningful number of companies. Um, when the stock prices move significantly, you know, become a lot cheaper, we update our work.
If if it's still as interesting as we thought before, now available at an interesting price, we buy. What I love about this approach is that Aman isn't trying to be smarter than everyone else. He's trying to be more patient. He builds this library of highquality businesses, companies he truly understands, and then he just waits.
He waits for the market to panic. He waits for something unrelated to the business to push the price down. Because here's the thing, quality doesn't go on sale often. But when it does, when a great business drops 20 or 30% because of tariff fears or a bad quarter or whatever the market is panicking about that week, that's when we act.
But to do this, we need to know what the business is actually worth. And if you want to learn how to value companies yourself, head over to stockinvesting.academy and check out our company valuation course. It will teach you the four most commonly used valuation methods so you can confidently know when a great business is truly on sale.
And that brings us to the next lesson because once you find great businesses at the right price, you need the right mindset to truly benefit from them. The problem being young uh is that uh you want to get rewards as quickly as possible. Uh and um you know time seems to pass really really slowly. Uh but value is very rarely created overnight.
It takes a very long it takes a long time can take decades to be created. And it's going back to my you know compounding something you really should spend a little time studying understanding the curve of compounding. Um doesn't really show much progress you know it's a bit like COVID right people didn't notice COVID in the early days of COVID compounding but it was compounding 100% a day or some number like that and then eventually it exploded.
Um once you understand the power of compounding once you understand it takes a long time to create value uh and that many people are short-term focused uh if you one of the great competitive advantages you can have in life or as an investor is just having the long view uh because some of the best opportunities the the benefit of that opportunity doesn't show itself you know for a number of years and by the way that's what that's how you should think about it as a young person right the biggest advantage you have is time.
You know, you've got extra years of compounding. Here's an interesting stat. Warren Buffett when he was 50 years old. What percentage of Warren Beuffett's net worth did he create after 50? And 50 sounds old everyone in the room. The answer is 99 and a half% of Buffett's net worth he created after 50 years old.
And now he's 94. Um, so anyway, think long term. That Buffett statistic always blows my mind. 99.5% of his wealth was created after the age of 50. That's not because he suddenly became smarter at 50. It's because compounding needs time to work its magic. This reminds me of what Morgan Hel wrote in the psychology of money.
Good investing isn't necessarily about making good decisions. It's about consistently not screwing up. The investors who build real wealth aren't the ones making brilliant trades every week. They are the ones who find great businesses and then do nothing for decades. But here's what's interesting. Understanding quality and having a long-term mindset actually changes how you should think about portfolio construction.
The other thing we do is we just concentrate. meaning we own 10 things. Um, most investors own, you know, a typical mutual fund might own a hundred securities. Typical investor, most investors make the mistake of owning too many things. And the reason for that is diversification protects you from ignorance, right?
If you don't know what you're doing, just do a lot of things, right? If you if you you know, most business people know a ton about their own business and they're super concentrated in their own business. estimate. You know, if you look through the Forbes 400, the wealthiest people in the country made their money generally in one company.
They had a portfolio of one. I mean, that's an incredible degree of concentration, right? So, you know, 10 12 stocks is more than adequate diversification if you're investing in really high quality companies. This is where Aman parts ways with conventional wisdom. And honestly, it's one of the most important lessons here.
Most financial advisors will tell you to own 30, 50, even 100 different stocks. But as Aman says, that's just protecting yourself from ignorance. Think about it this way. If you truly understand a business, if you know it's protected from disruption, if you are confident about its future, why would you put the same amount of money into your 50th best idea as you put into your best idea?
Now, that doesn't mean you should put everything into one stock. That's reckless. But it does mean that if you've done your homework, your research, 10 to 15 really highquality businesses is probably better than owning 100 companies you barely understand. But here's the hard part. Even with the right strategy, markets will test you.
And that's where psychology becomes crucial. I'm an emotional person. Um, but I'm a very unemotional person about investing. And uh, you know, Warren Buffett talks about what he calls temperament as being a key factor. And what's interesting is, you know, if you think about how human beings evolved, um, usually it was actually a very good idea if all the other people in the village are running that way to run with them, right?
Because the enemy is probably coming. Um but investing usually the best thing to do when everyone is running that way is to like you know go the other direction. So it's it's kind of inhuman in a way. Uh which is why it it requires a kind of a dispassion. Um, and the reason why markets are so volatile is because when people see their 401k accounts go down, you know, 10% in two days, uh, people panic and they you're sort of in you're kind of biologically incentivized to do precisely the wrong thing at the wrong time.
And that's just there two things that help. One is you should never put yourself in an investment position where the assets you have at risk if they were to go down 50% tomorrow you'd have to move out of your house or it would have some meaningful effect on your kind of life. So, you know, getting yourself to a place where you're sort of independent enough that you can that the capital you're investing you don't it doesn't matter where it the value of it six months from now, a year from now, two or even three years from now.
What matters is what it's worth in 10 years, 15 years, 20 years. If you can get yourself to that place, it's easier to be sort of dispassionate. Whereas, if you have 100% of your net worth invested in the market and you use borrow money, uh, borrowed money, then it your emotions are probably there's no way not to be emotional about it.
So, get yourself to a place where you can be dispassionate, emotional, but a lot of it is just training, you know, getting getting used to the volatility. This is so important [clears throat] and I think it's where most investors fail. Not because they pick bad companies, but because they can't handle the emotional roller coaster.
Aman is absolutely right. Our biology works against us in investing. For thousands of years, following the crowd kept us alive. But in markets, following the crowd usually means buying high and selling low. Howard Marx talks about this in his book, The Most Important Thing. He says, "Being too far ahead of your time is indistinguishable from being wrong." What he means is that being a contrarian isn't about being different for the sake of it.
It's about having the courage to act on your convictions when the market disagrees with you. But the key insight from Bill Aman here is that you can only be emotionally stable if you are financially stable. Never invest money you can't afford to lose. Never use leverage you can't afford to pay back.
Because once you are in that position, rational thinking goes out the window. And this brings us to the final and perhaps most important lesson because even if you are doing everything right, you will still fail sometimes. One of the things I say to uh when I talk at business schools uh and colleges and I I go to a lot of great schools is I the speech I give or the the advice I give is that if you're here you're unprepared uh for what's coming.
And the reason for that is most of the places where I speak, you have students who did really well in high school, did well in their SATs, they got into a really good college. Uh they did really well there. um they got a job for a couple years, they did well in their job, now they're at Harvard Business School, uh they're about to graduate.
And I said, "The problem is that if you're here, you've had no experience with the most important thing that you need to understand in order to be successful. You've had no experience with failure and you're going to fail. It's going to happen. And life is like that." Every successful person I know has uh their key to success was how they dealt with failure.
My biggest piece of advice is that be prepared for the unknown. Be prepared for the uncertain. Be prepared because you're you're going to fail. You're going to go bankrupt. Something. But the great thing about this country is that there's always a second act. And actually, people like betting on people uh that that have failed.
If I look at my trajectory, it you know, it was not a straight line up. uh it I've had, you know, significant moments of major setbacks in business and personal life and otherwise. [snorts] You know, if you find yourself in a deep dark hole, you just power through one day at a time. And this thing that teach you in business school about compounding and the laws of, you know, the power of compounding, it applies to saving yourself from challenges.
Meaning, just make a little bit of progress every day. You won't notice the progress for the first 30 days. 90 days in, you're starting to notice the curve is starting to move. Six months in, you've made huge progress. I'm a good example of that. So, I' I've made bigger mistakes in the investment business than almost anyone.
I lost $4 billion on one investment. And despite that, all of my investors who stayed with me over time have done extremely well. You know, I took my own advice, made little progress every day, used good judgment, and I'm way better off uh
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