저자: JoelGreenblatt · 외국인
요약 보기
대담 결론: 특수상황(스핀오프·구조조정·합병 등) 투자와 가치투자는 '적정가치를 알고 훨씬 싸게 사는 것'이 핵심이며, 시장은 비효율적이어서 좋은 분석은 결국 보상받는다. 그레이블랫은 위험차익거래에서 출발해 특수상황 투자로 옮겼다고 설명. 위험보상비율이 1달러 벌고 10~15달러 잃는 구조가 싫었고, 대신 복잡하거나 소외된 기업 이벤트에서 기회를 찾았다고 함. 와튼 재학 중 벤저민 그레이엄을 접한 뒤 가치 개념을 정립: 본질가치를 추정하고 큰 안전마진을 두고 사는 것. 책 제목은 출판사 사정으로 바뀌었다는 일화도 언급. 핵심 비유: 배관공이 한 번 두드리고 200달러를 청구하는 일화처럼, 어디를 두드릴지 아는 것이 가치이며 복잡한 것보다 쉬운 게임을 찾는 것이 유리하다고 주장. 버핏식으로 1피트 장애물을 넘는 것이 낫다는 논리. 가치와 성장은 분리된 개념이 아니라고 봄. 초기에는 '담배꽁초' 방식(청산가치 이하 종목)에 의존했으나, 시간이 지나며 품질 좋은 기업을 싸게 사는 방향으로 이동. 기업이 성장하면 안전마진이 유지·확대된다는 논리. 경쟁 측면에서는 과거에 비해 헤지펀드와 컴퓨터가 늘어 어렵다는 질문에, 특수상황 전문가가 성공해 커지면 작은 기회를 떠나므로 새 참여자 여지는 항상 있다고 답함. 시장 관점: S&P500은 1996~2000 두 배, 2000~2002 절반, 2002~2007 두 배, 2007~2009 절반, 2009 이후 약 세 배로 여전히 광기가 있으며, 평균 안에 선호/비선호 종목 간 큰 괴리가 존재한다고 진단. 적정가치 대비 저평가 기업을 분석하면 2~3년 내 시장이 인정한다는 입장(90% 기준, 분산 포트폴리오는 더 빠름).
다듬은 글
You wrote a book about investing in special situations, where you listed many ways to make money on spin-offs, recapitalizations, reorganizations, bankruptcies, mergers, etc. Since you wrote this book, and there were no similar publications before you , how did you learn to invest in this way and how did you understand what is important and where you can and cannot make money?
Well , you're right. That's a great question. Ahem. Well, actually, my first job was at a company that wasn't called a hedge fund back then, but it was a risk arbitrage firm , or merger arbitrage , which involves buying shares of a company after a merger is announced in the hope that the deal will go through.
Typically, the risk- reward ratio in this business is: if the merger goes through, you make a dollar, and if it doesn't, you lose $10 or $15. And that risk-reward ratio didn't really appeal to me. So I started looking for other ways. I was looking for mergers with interesting securities. I studied ways to pay for these mergers.
I was looking for extraordinary events in companies, whether it was recapitalizations, spin-offs, or anything else where I could exit the business with the opportunity to make a dollar at the risk of losing 10 or 15. So, I was just looking for something a little bit non-trivial. I really started learning when I was at Wharton.
And at that time, uh, Wharton School of Business followed the efficient market theory in the way they taught. And that didn't resonate with me. In my junior year, I happened to read an article about a man named Benjamin Graham. As soon as I read this article, I said, "Oh, that makes sense to me." And I started reading everything he wrote and looking at the world through a different lens.
This prism was not related to my first work in risk arbitrage . It consisted of determining the true value of things and paying significantly less, leaving a large margin of safety. And it was these special situations that gave me this opportunity. I started, uh, I started the book "You Can Be a Stock Market Genius"—one of the worst titles ever given to a book.
It was supposed to be called " Any Fool Can Be a Stock Market Genius." But my editor at the time was dealing with “The Motley Fool,” which was very popular. So he said, "Oh, you can't use the word 'fool.'" And my dad said, "How about calling the book 'How to Become a Stock Market Genius'?" And then in parentheses: "even if you're not very smart." I laughed a little, and since they only gave me a day to change the name, I just agreed.
And this, this was not the best choice. But I start the book with a story about my relatives who used to live in Connecticut for part of the year and spend their time looking for antiques : going to country auctions, yard sales, looking for undervalued works of art and antiques. When they found a painting at a village auction or sale, they asked themselves: if they saw a work by an artist whose similar painting in size, genre, or other characteristics had just been sold at auction for two or three times the price they could have paid for it, they would buy it.
This is a completely different question than, "Will this artist be the next Picasso?" This is a much more difficult task. So I start the book by saying that the special situation—it's a little bit like that. You know, you don't have to be smart enough to know who the next Picasso is. You want to look a little off the beaten path because it's a little more obscure stuff.
This is a smaller market capitalization. There's something strange going on here, and the average person who follows it doesn't pay attention because it's too complicated, or you have to read a 400- page document , or the company being spun off is n't really the reason people bought the parent company's stock.
They did n't buy them for the small business that stands out now. So these were discarded assets. This was my way of simplifying the task—finding things that were selling well below their fair value. You know, it wasn't that difficult. I ended the first chapter of How to Become a Stock Market Genius with a story about a plumber who comes to your house, knocks on the pipe once, and says, "You owe me $200." You know, he fixes pipes and says, "You owe me $200." And you say to the plumber, "What does $200 mean?
You came here and hit the pipe once." He says, "Oh, no, it's only $5. It's $195 for knowing where to hit." So, that's how I see investing in special situations, just making things easier. And so, I'd rather be a little less smart and a little lazier, but I'd rather choose, as Warren Buffett would say , foot-high barriers.
Why look for ten-foot barriers to jump over when you can find one-foot ones? So I don't have to be very smart to be successful if I look in the right places. You know, Joel, in January 2014, I wrote a note called "Getting Lucky. " In it, I told a story about a guy who was trying to become a better poker player.
He studied the probability of getting the right cards, the chances that his hand would beat others, and the clues that indicate whether an opponent was bluffing. And his uncle said to him, " You're wasting your time trying to become a better poker player. Why do n't you just find an easier game?" And it seems to me that's exactly what you were doing— looking for what you thought were simple games.
Yes, the last story I told in the book that illustrates the same moment is when I lost a bet, and the loser was supposed to invite the winner to the best restaurant in New York at the time—"Lutèce." There was chef Andre Saltner, who at the time was considered perhaps the best chef in the world. At first I called and they didn't want to book me a table.
I thought I said, "I'll come any time, any day." "And they said, 'Sorry.'" I, I, I, I didn't understand this. It turns out they had a 30-day window where they only accepted bookings 30 days in advance. And all the seats were taken. So I kept calling. Finally I managed to get in. We arrived at the restaurant, and I didn't really pay attention to who came to take the order, but I took out the menu, pointed to one of the appetizers, and innocently asked, "Is this dish delicious?" So, Andre Saltner turns to me and says, "No, it stinks ." Well, you know, the best chef in the world.
I ask him if you know if what he just cooked is even remotely good. And the point was, I think he wanted to say, that everything on the menu was good. This is the best restaurant in the world. And so I tried to buy in the best places where almost everything is good and I just have to distinguish between a bunch of different good things.
So, Joel, you mentioned buying things for significantly less than they cost, and that provides a safety margin. Yes. Would you say these are the core elements of value investing, and do you want to expand on this definition, or is this enough? Well, okay. And one more question: you mentioned that you didn't think it would be the best idea for your relatives to try to find the next Picasso.
Would you compare this to investing in growth? Sometimes. I mean, my definition of value investing is: find out how much it costs and pay a lot less. This has nothing to do with a low price-to-book ratio or a low price-to- sales ratio. And that's exactly how many companies like Russell or Morning Star would classify value investors .
So, they probably would n't classify me as either a value or a growth investor. It's like they don't know what to do with us. And, as Buffett said, growth and value are inextricably linked. I mean, part of what creates value is investing in a business that can grow over time. So, they are not two different things as classified by, say, Morning Star or Russell.
Perhaps the " cost" has much lower growth, and the " growth" has much higher, and that's how they present it. But I'm looking for good companies that are cheap. You know, Ben Graham said: find out how much it costs. Pay much less. Leave a large margin of safety. There is a great gulf between these two things .
Warren Buffett , his greatest student, took one small step that made him one of the richest people in the world. Buffett simply said, "If I can buy a good business cheaply, that's even better." Part of the " good" is a business that can grow over time. And so, um...I gradually leaned, maybe not fast enough, at least during the first decade of investing, more towards the way Warren Buffett invests.
He looks for good and cheap businesses, and growth is sometimes part of what makes a business good. But Buffett wasn't initially so enthusiastic about good businesses. He was known for starting with a " cigar butt" approach when he wasn't looking for quality. He was just looking for cheapness. But then he too made the transition.
Yes. I mean, my master's thesis at Wharton, or what it became with my friends Rich Pazina and Bruce Newberg, was a paper we wrote and later published in the Journal of Portfolio Management about buying " cigar butts." You know, they were called "net-nets" —buying stocks that were selling below their liquidation value, and it showed that if you buy cheap enough, you could make a pretty good profit, and that's how Warren Buffett got his start.
But if you think about why we're moving to quality: let's say you find a stock that's worth $10 and is on sale for $6. That's pretty cheap. But if you don't control the business and it's not a very high-quality business, your margin of safety may decrease over time . This means that $10 can turn into $8 if you don't actually control those assets.
And what you're really looking for—or at least what looks better to me—are businesses where that $10 can grow to $11 or $12, increasing your margin of safety. So I could accept a smaller margin of safety if I thought it was growing. But there is something more . Buying things cheaply works. I mean, cheapness alone works.
I have nothing against that. You just need to get out of this in time. So, it's not easy for Buffett, who manages a hundred billion or something like that, to spend 5 billion and then resell it to someone else who will pay more for that 5 billion. This is too big a scale. So when he said—as recently as 2000—that if you gave him a million dollars, he could make 50% a year on it, because there are a lot of options, but your set of options narrows as the business gets bigger.
If you can invest in anything, if you have a little money, you can invest in thousands and thousands of companies. Buffett is currently looking only at the 300 largest companies because the smaller ones won't change the overall picture. So there is a lot that can be done in special situations. One thing that I'm often asked by students, you know, this has been happening every year, probably for the last five or six years, and the question they ask me at some point in the semester is, "When you were younger..." ( because you're so old, they skip that part, but you really are old) and when you were younger, everything was easier.
That's so clear. Well , I just said that, but anyway ......everything was simpler. There was less competition. There were fewer hedge funds. There were fewer computers. Fewer smart people went into this business. I mean, when I came into this business—I told Howard earlier— the market hadn't gone up for 13 years when I got on Wall Street.
So it was a place that didn't attract too many people. So they say: "It was easier for you, but it must be harder for us now ." "You know," I say, "you stupidly wrote a book about it , and now a lot of people are doing it, and of course, not just because of the book." "It's harder for us because you got everything the easiest." So my answer is: people who are very skilled, especially in special situations...I have two answers.
One of them: people who are good at investing in special situations really look for unconventional ways, like liquidations, recapitalizations, spin-offs, or something like that. Many of them are liquidity constrained. You know, Warren Buffett started making a lot of money doing this, but he got too big.
So I say to them, "Listen, you know what happens to people who become very good at analyzing businesses in this area?" What happens to them is that they make a lot of money and become too big to stay in that niche . So there's always a new group of people who can come in and look at these smaller situations, because the ones who are really good get too big to take advantage of the smaller or lesser-known cases.
So, there is always room for new people in this field. And then, on a broader scale, you know, because people still preach efficient market theory and say, "Hey, you know, active investing doesn't work," and even Warren Buffett says, " Buy ETFs or indexes," I'll say this : For most people, that's true, because they don't know how to value businesses.
But I will give a counterargument, and that is what I tell my students, most of whom are around 27 years old. I say to them all: let's go back to when you were about 10 years old, when you might have started to notice some of these things. And let's look at the most followed market in the world, which is the United States.
And let's look at the most followed stocks in the world, in the most followed market in the world, which are largely the S&P 500 stocks. And let's look at what's happened since you turned 10. Look at the S& P 500 index. It doubled from 1996 to 2000 . From 2000 to 2002, it fell by half. From 2002 to 2007, it doubled.
From 2007 to 2009, it fell by half, and from 2009 to today ... It has, in fact, tripled. That's my way of saying that people are still crazy. And it's very unfair to say that, because the S&P 500 is the average of 500 stocks. Within this average, there is a huge gap between stocks that are currently in favor, that people emotionally love, and those that people hate.
So the situation is actually much worse than I just described. There's a huge dichotomy between what people like and what they don't like, what's in favor and what's not—within that average, all this chaos happens. This average smooths things out. So if you believe what Ben Graham said: here's the fair value , and here's the market price.
It's like a wave around fair value. And if you have a disciplined approach to valuing companies, and you buy more of your share when they're at the bottom, and maybe sell if you're playing short positions, and you're very disciplined. What I mean is that I give two guarantees to my students on the first day of class.
The first guarantee is this. If they do a quality job of valuation, I guarantee them that the market will agree with them. I just do n't tell them when. It could be a few weeks, it could be two or three years. But I tell them that the market will agree with them. And the consequence of this is this , and this is a very strong argument.
I tell them that 90% of the time for an individual stock, two to three years is enough for the market to recognize the value they see if they have done well. When you assemble a group of companies, on average it happens even much faster. So, you know, both of these statements are very strong. It simply means that good work will be rewarded.
So I do n't think people can't beat the market because it's efficient, or close to efficient, or not emotional. He is very emotional, and it is quite possible to do this. There are a multitude of institutional, agency, and other reasons why they do n't. But because prices are efficient, one only has to pick up a newspaper, watch what's happening, or remember what I've been telling my students since I was ten , and it becomes abundantly clear that people are still crazy, and the opportunities are there.
Comments 0