저자: HowardMarks · 외국인
요약 보기
2008년 금융위기 때 Oaktree가 약 110~110억 달러 자금을 투입해 주당 약 5억 달러씩 15주간 집행한 경험을 회고한다. 시장이 계속 하락해 초기에는 성과가 부진했고, 공동투자자를 설득하고 추가 자금을 모아야 했다는 점을 언급한다. 핵심 교훈은 투자 판단이 항상 맞을 수는 없으므로 하락 중에도 분석을 끊임없이 재점검하고 감정을 통제해야 한다는 것이다. 하락은 매도 신호가 아니라 투자 기회일 수 있다는 관점도 강조한다. 2016년 시장 급락기에 '시장이 무엇을 아는가(What does the market know)' 메모를 쓰며 시장이 항상 효율적이지 않고 비합리적 공포로 과도하게 하락할 수 있다고 주장했다. 2008년 10월 Lehman 파산 직후 당시에는 금융시스템의 향후 향방을 증명할 수 없었지만, 선순위 부채를 매우 낮은 가격에 매수했다. 기업이 과거 LBO 가격의 1/3~1/5로 평가되더라도 원금 회수가 가능하다는 계산이 근거였다. 결론적으로 시장 전체를 예측하기보다 객관적으로 싼 자산을 사는 것이 핵심이며, 매수하지 않았는데 금융시스템이 무너지지 않았다면 자신들이 임무를 다하지 못한 것이라는 논리를 제시한다. 특정 한국 종목이나 자산에 대한 언급은 없다. 현재 시점의 가격 방향에 대한 구체적 예측은 없고, 과거 사례 회고 중심이다.
다듬은 글
so let's just dwell on the 2008 experience because that was remarkable actually what oak tree did so lima just collapsed you had 10 or 11 billion dollars on the shelf ready to deploy and you did deploy at the rate of half a billion dollars a week right 15 weeks right um and you weren't immediately looking it wasn't immediately looking like you were right because markets were still falling so that was a difficult period i think you even perhaps had to go back to co-investors to convince them that you should continue perhaps raise more money did you ever have a crisis of confidence and think that perhaps you weren't getting it right um what was what was the mindset at that time well max i i i don't remember having a crisis of confidence uh of course if you buy and then the price goes down and you buy more and the price goes down further if you're not questioning and a little scared then you're a but but you know i i think that one of the important things that i have realized and incorporated into my thinking is that you're never going to get it exactly right sometimes if we're lucky we know what's going to happen we never know when and so if you accept that then it kind of gets you off the hook that means you buy today at nine it goes to eight you buy more you go you eight you buy it eight it goes to seven you buy more you don't say oh my god i bought it nine it went to eight i must be a and i must be wrong you you you understand that the nature of this and you know warren buffett says i like hamburgers uh and when hamburgers go on sale i eat more hamburgers so you know if you if you did an analysis at nine and if the analysis was sound and it goes to eight you should buy more uh now of course in our business there's always a question of when does uh resolve uh turn into hubris and there's no easy answer uh but it always goes back to it always go back to rechecking your analysis and ultimately to your analysis being correct uh which of course you i mean it's your analysis you always think it's correct but you have to you have to have be very vigilant and you have to believe that it's correct for good reason uh but you know i wrote a memo you probably since you know them all uh you know i wrote one in i think it was february of 16 called what does the market know and see what what happened is in 16 the market got off to its worst start in history and it was really collapsing all markets and uh so i wrote a memo called on the couch because i i said that every once in a while the market needs a trip to the shrink and that it was really the victim of uh irrational fear so i went on bloomberg the next day usually when i put out a memo i go on bloomberg the next morning and the hosts kept peppering me and saying well if stocks are collapsing isn't that a sell signal isn't that a sell signal so i ran went back to my office and i wrote a memo that day called what does the market know and that this is really a very important concept the market is supposed to be efficient know everything we know it doesn't know everything and i believe there are times when it doesn't know anything and and so you know i said you can't let falling prices be a sell signal because falling prices are the equivalent of investments being put on sale how can they be a sell signal if anything they're a buy signal uh etc so i went through this whole business on that subject and then i said and you know what however when we you know bought high-yield bonds in 1990 when they were collapsing and when we uh sold into the tech bubble in 99 and when we bought in the period you're describing et cetera i never want to give anybody the impression that we don't do it with trepidation you know you can have if you're if you have great advantages you can have a strong intellect and you can act on the basis of your intellectual analysis and you can control your emotion but that doesn't make you right and there's always the possibility that you're wrong and we must bear that in mind and and uh so you know and since we're only human when we do these things when we buy in october 08 it terrifies us but if you think about it buying at the low point has to terrify you i guess there's a sense of and i think you've you've said this that having raised the money seeing the valuations that you saw it was a case of if not now then when yeah and yeah well well look a couple days lima went bankrupt on the 15th and as i recall i put out a memo on something like the 18th into or 19th entitled what now or maybe it was now what but but but uh you know what i said in there by the way believe me if you weren't there it was impossible to figure out what was going to happen it was impossible to prove that the financial system of the world either would or would not collapse in in general we can't prove anything about the system uh in the future and that's particularly true when we're going through an uh an event that's never occurred before so there was nothing intelligent to say about the future of the financial system at that time so what made us buy well number one objectively speaking the things we were buying were extremely low prices we were buying the senior debt of companies that had been the subject of lbos one or two years earlier and we were buying the senior most debt at prices where if the companies turned out to be worth a third or a quarter or a fifth of what these great buyout firms had paid a year earlier we would have broken even and we figured out well and you know who i'm talking about but we said well sometimes like when you go to buy a car and you negotiate with the car salesman you know you say well i i probably could have gotten another five percent off right do you negotiate car prices in this country okay good so so so you sometimes you come away and you say i probably gotta could have gotten another five percent off but did you ever say well i probably paid too high by a factor of four you know i bought that car for sixty thousand if i'd only negotiated a little i probably could have paid 15.
you know so similarly we concluded that the great private equity firms who had done all that due diligence probably did not overpay by a factor of three four or five but then the other thing is we reached the conclusion that what i said what i wrote is if we buy today and the financial system falls apart doesn't matter what we did but if we don't buy and the financial system doesn't fall apart then we didn't do our job so we should buy and that was it it's that's about as profound as it got so that that experience was uh was incredible for those that were through it very painful at the time but actually was incredibly uh powerful and useful as a lesson to be left for later
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