저자: 미상 · 외국인
요약 보기
Jeremy Siegel의 『Stocks for the Long Run』을 소개하는 영상. 1802년 이후 미국 주식 실질수익률 연 약 6.7%를 강조하며 장기 투자 원칙을 설명. 1929 대공황·2000 닷컴버블·2008 금융위기를 사례로 들고, 저평가(value)와 가격의 중요성, 지수 투자, 손실회피·본전심리 같은 행동재무 함정을 경고함. 특정 종목·자산에 대한 향후 가격 전망은 없음.
다듬은 글
Hello, welcome to another conversation here on The Deep Dive. Today we're going to dive headfirst into one of the most important books ever written about investing, a true bible of the stock market. And the recommendation came from a reliable source, Professor Saldanha. Exactly. We're talking about Jeremy Seagle's stocks for the long run.
Our mission here is simple. Let's squeeze the juice out of this book, take what really matters, and understand why it remains so, so relevant. And it's relevant because the central thesis is both very simple and incredibly powerful. Basically, he tells us: "Forget the noise of everyday life, the crises, the bubbles, the panics, right?
If you look at history, but real history, with over 200 years of data, one asset class stands out as the big winner for those who want to build wealth in the long term. Stocks. And he doesn't just stay with the thesis; he brings the number that anchors the entire book, and it's a jaw-dropping number.
Since 1802, the real return on stocks in the United States, that is, already discounting inflation, which is what matters, right? which is what matters, has been around 6.7% per year, consistently. This has weathered wars, depressions, pandemics, everything. It's a consistency that seems almost impossible.
That's exactly the strength of the argument. It 's not an analysis of a good decade like the 90s or the last 20 years. It's two centuries of data. This allows them to separate what is passing noise from what is a fundamental pattern of the economy. It changes the perspective, it changes It completely changes the game for the investor.
Okay, let's unravel this. One of the coolest things about the book is how it shows that our relationship with stocks is almost a love-hate cycle. Uh-huh. It transports us to the 1920s at the height of euphoria and quotes a phrase from a General Motors executive, John Hascob, that summed up the spirit of the time: " Everybody all to be rich." Exactly.
The idea was that anyone should take a little money and put it in the stock market. An idea that, of course, ended in tears with the 1929 Crash. And the trauma was so profound that it generated an aversion to stocks that lasted for decades. I know. Many families came to see the stock market as a dangerous casino, a place where you lose your retirement money.
Seel shows that this traumatic memory shaped the behavior of an entire generation. And then the pendulum swings to the other side. He describes the great bull market from 1982 to 2000, one of the greatest bull markets in history. Optimism returned. With everything. And at the end of that period, the tech bubble, the dot-com bubble.
I remember that time well. It seemed like any company with a dot-com in its name was worth billions, even without ever having made a single cent of profit. Exactly. And it's in this context that Alan Greenspan, who was the chairman of the American Federal Reserve, issued the famous warning about irrational exuberance in '96.
He was already seeing it, so he was seeing the signs of the bubble forming, but the market ignored it for another 4 years and in 2000 the bubble burst spectacularly. The point is that this cycle of greed and fear is not an anomaly, it's human nature itself interacting with the market. And here's his key insight, in my view, for those who invest in the long term, all this volatility, this emotional rollercoaster, is not a flaw, it's the price you pay, it's the price of admission, right?
That's it. The price of admission to have access to those superior returns of 6.7% 7% to Year. Those who can't stomach a fall don't deserve to enjoy the rise. That's the bottom line. Exactly that. Volatility drives away those who lack discipline and rewards those who have patience. It's the psychological entry barrier that preserves the risk premium of stocks.
Right? But then we arrive in the 20th century and Sigel's thesis faces its trial by fire. This is where the 2008 global financial crisis gets really interesting. The worst crisis since the Great Depression. Exactly. How does a thesis about the superiority of stocks in the long term survive a collapse that almost brought the world financial system to ruin?
Sigel dedicates a significant part of the most recent edition of the book to dissecting this crisis, and his analysis gets straight to the point. He points out the egregious error of the SNP credit rating agencies in classifying subprime mortgages and stamping them with the highest safety rating, triple A.
Wait a minute, how is that possible? How does something that is by definition high risk get the highest safety rating? It seems like a contradiction. The explanation is almost unbelievable. They based their analysis on statistical models that looked at... They looked at the past and saw that real estate prices in the United States had never fallen nationally.
All at the same time. I understand. Their model concluded that the chance of this happening was practically zero. They confused the absence of an event in the past with the impossibility of it occurring in the future. And with this seal of approval, everyone bought into the idea. The book has graphs that show the real estate bubble in a frightening way.
Yes. Between 1997 and 2006, prices simply skyrocketed, without any relation to family income or the cost of rents. And the big banks, trusting in these ratings, leveraged themselves to the max, buying trillions of dollars worth of these supposedly risk-free assets . Precisely. And when the unthinkable happened, real estate prices began to fall across the country.
The house of cards collapsed, and the collapse of Lemon Brothers was the trigger. It was the trigger that generated systemic panic. Credit froze worldwide. Healthy companies could no longer roll over their debts. It was a moment of absolute terror. So, what Does all this mean? How does Sigel fit this financial apocalypse into his optimistic long-term vision?
The fascinating thing is that he doesn't downplay the crisis. He describes it as devastating, but argues that it doesn't invalidate the thesis. On the contrary, it reinforces it. He recalls a quote from Kees from 1937, during the Great Depression, which stated that investing based on genuine long-term expectations is extremely difficult.
In other words, this is nothing new, it 's not a recent phenomenon. The 2008 crisis was just another one of those brutal tests that ultimately proved that those who didn't despair and sell everything at the bottom were rewarded with a strong recovery in the following years. The thesis survived, wounded, but intact.
This leads me to one of the points I found most surprising in the book, almost a paradox. He does an incredible mental exercise. Uh-huh . If you had built a portfolio in 1957 with the original 500 companies of the S&P 500 and never touched it again, only reinvesting the dividends, right, your result...
It would have been better than the S&P 500 index itself, which is dynamic, constantly changing the companies. How does that make sense? It makes perfect sense when you understand the psychology of the markets. The S&P 500 index, by frequently updating itself, adds trendy companies near the peak of their popularity valuation.
Oh, sure. Think of the technology companies that entered the index in 1999 or 2000 at the height of the bubble. Investors paid exorbitant prices for them. I understand. So, we pay too much for novelty, for growth that everyone is already seeing. And the companies that are removed from the index, the old ones, nobody wants anymore.
So, they are cheap. And those that simply remained there, the survivors, are the ones that carried the burden. The older, established companies, often boring, that aren't in the headlines. The value stocks. Exactly. And the book proves with data that in the long run, value consistently outperforms growth.
And the example it uses to illustrate this is simply perfect. The case of Philip Morris, the tobacco company... This is the same company that was the best-performing among the original 500 companies in the S&P 500. How can a company in such a controversial industry, the target of billion-dollar lawsuits, outperform the darlings of technology?
It's the central paradox of value in its purest form. Sigel has a great phrase for this. But good news for the company can be good news for the investor. Interesting. All the pessimism, all the lawsuits, all the negative publicity kept Philip Morris's stock relatively cheap for decades. And because it was an extremely profitable company, even with all that, it paid very high dividends to compensate for the perceived risk.
Right? Exactly. And then the magic happens. Each dividend that was reinvested bought an ever-increasing number of shares because their price was depressed. Compound interest working in turbo mode. That's it. Fueled by market pessimism. Sigel calls this the dreamer's return versus the realist's return .
Dreamers paid dearly for new technology, while realists bought proven profits at bargain prices. That is Brilliant. And this logic that the price you pay matters more than the narrative makes me wonder, does the same rule apply to countries? Great question. If we follow this logic, the obvious strategy of investing in China with its explosive growth would be the best of all, wouldn't it?
And then, Seigel throws another bucket of cold water on conventional wisdom. His research shows something shocking: a historically negative correlation between a country's GDP growth and its stock market return. Wait a minute. This goes against everything you hear about emerging markets. The investment thesis in countries like China is entirely based on this phenomenal growth.
He's saying that this entire thesis is wrong. He's saying that the thesis is dangerous if it ignores a crucial factor. The price, the reason is exactly the same as for growth companies. Uh-huh. When a country is the hot topic, as China has been for decades, global optimism is immense. Investors pay very high multiples for the shares of Chinese companies, anticipating all that future growth.
But growth rarely justifies such high prices. Stratospheric. Exactly. The good news is already more than priced in. The book does give compelling examples of this . It shows periods when China, the fastest- growing country in the world, delivered some of the worst returns for stock market investors.
Meanwhile, markets with much more modest GDP growth, such as Mexico or even Brazil, right, gave much higher returns, simply because initial expectations were lower and entry prices more reasonable. What great historical warning illustrates this? Japan, in the late 1980s, Japan was the China of that time.
The economy was a powerhouse. The Tokyo stock exchange was worth more than the New York Stock Exchange. Prices were absurd. The collapse that followed was so brutal that the Japanese market took more than 30 years to return to its peak. Wow. The lesson is crystal clear. A growth narrative without valuation discipline is a recipe for disaster.
Right? The message was to think long-term, prefer value to growth, and be wary of overly optimistic narratives. But all this is easier said than done. What to do. How do we apply this in practice? Knowing that our brain seems programmed to do the opposite. This is the final and perhaps most practical part of the book, where it delves into behavioral finance.
It shows that it's not enough to know the right strategy; you need to understand the traps of your own mind. And the main one is loss aversion. Exactly. That pain we feel when we lose R$100, which is much greater than the joy of gaining the same R$100. Psychologically, the pain of loss is twice as heavy as the pleasure of gain.
This leads us to do irrational things, right? Totally. The main one is holding onto a losing stock for too long. We don't want to realize the loss, so we keep hoping it will return to break-even. The book brilliantly calls this "Get Even Its Diseasy." The disease of breaking even. Who hasn't been there, right?
I think every beginner investor has gone through this. You look at that loss and think: "I just need it to go back to the price I paid." And then I sell. It's a terrible emotional trap, because the company's fundamentals may have worsened and that price may never return. And while you wait, your money is stuck in a bad asset, losing opportunity cost.
Exactly. And someone with loss aversion has another powerful mental trap that he describes, anchoring, which is when we fixate on a past price as a reference. Is that it? Like, oh, this stock was worth 100, so now at 50 it's definitely cheap. Exactly. You anchor your perception of value to that old peak, completely ignoring whether the company's reality has changed.
Maybe it lost market share, maybe a new technology has made its product obsolete. The price of 100 from the past means nothing today. And these biases together lead us to do the opposite of what we should. Buy in euphoria and sell in panic. Exactly. So, what is the practical conclusion? As it suggests that we fight against our own brain, in this case, its guidelines are very clear.
First, the most obvious, but the most difficult. Think and Act with a long- term focus. Have a plan and don't deviate from it. Second, indexing, right? He advocates for many low-cost index funds. Yes, for most people it's the best way. It eliminates the risk of choosing the wrong stocks, or trying to time buying and selling.
And he even suggests a more sophisticated approach to this. Talking about indexes with fundamental weighting by dividends or earnings, which already gives you a natural inclination towards value. Exactly. Which leads us to the third guideline. Lean towards value. Give preference to strategies that focus on companies with solid fundamentals and reasonable prices.
And lastly, invest globally. This is to diversify, but always with the same principle. Pay attention to the price you are paying. Don't be swayed solely by the growth story. So, to tie it all together, the central message of Stocks for the Long Run is a hymn to patience and discipline. History shows that the stock market rewards those who can withstand volatility.
Uh-huh. The real risk for the long-term investor isn't a 30% drop. In a year of crisis, the opportunity cost of staying out of the greatest engine of wealth creation that capitalism has ever invented is enormous. There is a final thought: Sigel's work is a powerful reminder in investing that the most important news is not what's on today's front page, but what's in the data from the last two centuries.
It's a complete shift in perspective . The great challenge, the real test for any investor, is not understanding this intellectually, but having the conviction and courage to act on that knowledge, precisely when short-term panic is screaming at you to do the opposite. And for those listening, there's the reflection of Benjamin Franklin: investing in knowledge yields the best interest.
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