저자: The Motley Fool · 외국인
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Motley Fool 공동창립자는 인플레이션, 높은 밸류에이션, 생산성 향상, 혁신 가속, 부의 집중과 정치적 분열이 공존하는 지금, 투자자들이 어떻게 대응해야 하는지 네 가지 행동을 제안한다. 첫 번째 행동은 고품질 기업을 선택하되 기대 수익률을 낮추는 것이다. 시장 하락기에 현금을 활용해 좋아하는 기업을 낮은 가격에 매수할 수 있도록 포트폴리오를 세팅하라는 조언이다. 예로 든 코스트코는 회원제 해자, 가격 결정력, 탄탄한 재무상태표를 갖췄고, 연 10% 성장과 6% 배당으로 연 10.5~11% 수익을 기대할 수 있다고 한다. 필자는 이 수익률이 매력적이지 않을 수 있음을 인정하면서도, 스스로 기대 수익률을 점검해 보라고 권한다. 반면 고위험 소형주나 프로모션성 기업은 큰 폭의 하락 위험이 있으므로 경계하라고 말한다. 두 번째 행동은 점진적으로 움직이는 것이다. 과도한 계획으로 투자를 미루거나, 충동적으로 사고파는 극단을 피하고 작은 단계로 결정을 검증하라는 것이다. 매수·매도 때마다 투자 논리를 재점검하면 확신이 쌓이고 감정적 반응을 줄일 수 있다고 강조한다. 세 번째 행동은 인공지능의 빠른 발전을 이해하는 것이다. Motley Fool은 공개기업의 지배구조, 재무 건전성, 경영진 보상 등을 점수화하는 AI 스코어링 엔진에 투자하고 있으며, 젠슨 황이 AGI 도래를 말한다는 점을 소개한다. AI 인프라 확장으로 에너지 수요가 급증하고, 수익화는 2027~2029년경 본격화될 것으로 전망한다. ASML, 브로드컴, 엔비디아, TSMC는 긍정적으로, Salesforce와 Adobe는 변화에 대응하기 어려울 수 있다고 평가한다. 네 번째 행동은 개인 재무를 점검하는 것이다. 최저 생활비로 얼마나 살 수 있는지 시뮬레이션하고, 비상금을 6~12개월분 확보하며, AI로 인한 고용 변화 시나리오를 가족과 함께 검토하라고 권한다. 역사상 가장 수익성 높은 기업들이 감원을 하고 있다는 점을 들어, 수익률 극대화보다 지속 가능한 삶의 질을 우선하라는 메시지로 마무리한다.
다듬은 글
We look around us and the environment shows us inflation and high valuations and high productivity economics, a quickening pace of innovation, but a lot of wealth concentration, political division. It's hard to know is this a very promising time for me to invest, think about investment, or should I be covering up reserving all my capital for the future.
So, I have four steps to take now. And hopefully there's at least one thing that is worthy of deeper consideration about making a change in your approach to investment. And the first recommendation I have for you and your family is in your investment portfolio to start pushing yourself towards high-quality companies and lower expectations.
If you can merge those two concepts together, I think you will significantly improve the odds that you work your way through any difficult periods. Remember, there are investors when the market goes down 20%. Or 40%. Who do it in style, take advantage of those declines, take some of the cash position they have in the side of their portfolio and actually deploy it in their favorite companies at lower prices.
Right? So, what we want to do is set our portfolio up to be able to take advantage of market declines. So, what you want to do, I believe, now is to start to balance the interest of making money as an investor with not losing money, not risking capital. Right? We'd love to get low double digit returns in my opinion per year in the years moving forward right now.
And that's why I'm going to highlight a single company and that company is Costco which has an amazing moat to its business, a subscription model, the ability to buy at wholesale prices. They have pricing power in their subscription. They're able to raise prices. They don't do it aggressively, but they do do it prudently and thoughtfully over time.
They have a wonderful balance sheet. There's plenty of demand. In fact, if if there are dis dislocations in employment, which I expect given AI and AGI, companies like Costco will actually become more center stage for the average consumer looking to make bulk purchases at discount prices. If you'd like to read a lot more about Costco, I recommend reading some of Charlie Munger's opinions about the business over time.
I think Costco could deliver 10% a year and a 6% dividend per year as well. So, it might deliver 10 and a half to 11% a year. And right now in the environment that we're in, that doesn't seem very attractive because that 10 to 11% annualized return will deliver about a 2.7x result in a decade. So if you have $10,000 today, in 10 years it's $27,000 if Costco performs as I think it could.
Seems pretty low. Why would I take a 2.7x return? I've had some 2.7x returns in six months. I don't want to move my capital to a ballasted behemoth that everyone knows about. There's no significant advantage I can get informationally on the company. I'm not going to be satisfied with a 10 and a half to 11% rate of return.
You know, that's actually okay. If you choose to walk away from an investment like this and you're intentional about it and you've thought it through, I'm not going to oppose that. But I think for many many investors, even if you're not going to invest in Costco, ask yourself at the end of this first suggestion, what is my rate of return expectation?
What would I be happy to see if I could get a standard rate of return of 10 and a half% per year from Costco? Looking forward 5 to 10 years right now, how attractive is that to me? I think your answer to that question will really help you set up the right frame for your investment approach going forward, the right expectations.
So I'm advancing Costco to all of us not specifically as a recommendation but just spiritually psychologically emotionally philosophically the risk for us now in again instead of going for the higher quality business with a lower expectation going for the lower quality business with a higher expectation is that some of these companies will will fall 50 70 90% and never come back.
And if it ends up being one of your largest positions, obviously that can be quite damaging to your pursuit of financial freedom in your life. So today is not the time to chase the riskier opportunities. We continue to believe in owning 50 plus companies having an average holding period of greater than 5 years.
And I just think now alongside those foundational principles in the environment we're in, it's a good idea to look towards the Costco of the world and away from the such and such.ai small cap IPO or promotional company. I hate to call out any business, but C3 AI used to be C3 Energy, then it became C3 IoT, then it became C3 AI, and that stock is down 70% plus.
I don't know if it's going to come back. I'm cheering for companies in general, but you have to be careful about whether the businesses are substantially committed to the business that they're in and looking to build wealth and success for all of their stakeholders over decades. For my second recommended action, we're going to go into the world of behavioral finance.
We're going to talk through a little bit about what it means to make decisions in our financial life that are not driven by emotion, that are not reactive, that actually have some basic plan, some intention to them. And some of us are deep planners and we may over plan and never actually purchase a stock or we take years to make our first stock purchase when it should have happened in the first week with just a small position.
Others are down that continuum towards just jumping in and out in their portfolio somewhat willy-nilly. What we want to do is take advantage of both of those approaches in life by blending them into the middle and saying what if all of us started to think and act a little bit more incrementally in our decisions.
If we are and as I believe we are in a time of great change. It means that we are basically going to be visited by a number of opportunities to suddenly react and ask ourselves is it all over for Microsoft? Is all of their productivity suite of software going to be devastated by Frontier AI models? Are we going to watch the bottom of this drop out?
Well, if you have that thesis, you you might not be wrong. It may actually somewhat play out, but you don't know the other actions Microsoft might take. Or you may actually be right and Microsoft is going to fall apart over the next 15 years. I'm not here to make an assertion on Microsoft. Either way, I'm here to say that you're able to take incremental actions to validate those decisions you're making one step at a time.
It may be a contrary take, but it's actually a way to build conviction in your decisions. We might think that the highest conviction action we could take right now is the one that is sudden and extreme. That is conviction. I'm going to take a full position in this stock or I'm going to sell out my entire portfolio right now.
That's conviction. But I would argue that the best form of conviction is the stepby-step incremental moves where you have to rethink your thesis as you buy a stock or rethink your reasons for selling a stock in your portfolio. Of course, there are times and there are positions to take in portfolios or in our working life or in our lives to go all in or all out.
But as an investor and an investor for life, the person who's looking forward forever and ever, who's going to be reading about stocks in the final year of our lives, that type of investor really can benefit from taking incremental actions in your portfolio. It's going to require you to think it through, to be more rigorously, intellectually engaged, and it keeps your mind active.
and forces you again to rethink the other possibilities that could play out. So incrementalism in your investment life I think is a timeless classic principle because emotional reactivity is the enemy of wealth creation. And I just encourage you right now if you said over the next year all of the stocks I'm going to sell I'm going to move out of in stages.
And a few of the stocks that I'm going to buy I'm going to move into in stages. and just understand if that changes your thought process, your decision-making process at all. I believe overall if collectively across all Molly Fool members, we took a somewhat more incremental approach. I think we're going to in some cases actually get out of a position sooner than not when we should because we incrementally sold and each time we sold we realize actually a lot of confirming points about this because if you think I can only sell this all at once or I have to hold the whole position and that's this wrestling match in your mind you may hold positions for far too long.
I've seen it across the mly fool. I've seen it in my own decision- making. So I encourage you encourage all of us to really think about that incremental approach now and that's my second action to take. So step number one to find higher quality companies and to lower our expectations. Step number two to move act think incrementally to validate our thinking one step at a time.
Step number three you could almost say controvers but I want them to all hang together. Step number three is the changes of foot in the development of artificial intelligence are otherworldly. We need to understand them as well as we possibly can as a community of fools. You need to and the decisions you're making for yourself and your family.
We need to as a community of members and the Molly fool needs to as a provider of advice and guidance. We have been pouring capital into developing AI scoring engines to score every aspect of a public company. At this point, we are scoring the governance of a business, the product quality, the financial uh strength of the business, the success of their technological developments, the quality of their quarterly conference calls, the risks evident in their footnotes, executive compensation relative to their peers.
There is nothing at a public company where there is public data that cannot be scored. And training tools against each of those features of a public company and being able to compare them against their peers, against their industry, against companies in the past, against unrelated domains in the public marketplace gives a level of information, insight, depth of analysis that's never before been possible.
We experienced this at the birth of the Mly Fool. With enthusiasm, we were realizing we can talk to investors online. You're not sitting in your den at home trying to figure out what to do. You can ask other people. They may have obscure screen names. You may not know who they are, but there are actually a lot of smart people in this world.
And we don't have to just anchor and wait for a TV show to come on or a magazine to get sent into our home that may not be able to specifically answer our questions. We can actually connect online. We can get information in digital form in real time. And the cost of it is collapsing. This is going to change investing forever.
That was the race of the first 10 years the Molly fool is we were there saying this is incredible what is happening. We're in that same environment right now as investors. So we need these companies in our portfolio the ones that are pushing aggressively to understand how this tool can help them serve their customers more effectively.
And just as we've been going through that with artificial intelligence, now Jensen Hong, CEO and creator of Nvidia, company valued at more than five half trillion dollars, has told us that artificial general intelligence has arrived. You don't have to click deep in any comment section online to have a number of people saying, "Well, he's just marketing his book.
He's got a bunch of chips to sell. Of course, he's going to say that. That's not an objective call." Those things are true. He's running a business worth trillions of dollars. He has to transform society to justify a valuation of that size. So there's always going to be some marketing coming from somebody like Jensen Hong, but you also have arguably the greatest CEO in American history who has led the most remarkable path of breakthrough discoveries of any organization in American history saying we have achieved artificial general intelligence.
So I believe it is essential that we begin to share a common understanding of what these tools are making available. Now, we are going to be very smart to move it up our priority list in terms of the assessments we're making of the companies that we're invested in and the way we structure our portfolio.
So, let me attempt to make that case. The first thing is there's no universally agreed upon definition for AGI. There's no measuring stick. There's no way to understand where we are in the process. But there are some general understandings about what it represents. Artificial general intelligence is able to reason, is able to move beyond the requests that we have put to that intelligence, is able to interact with other forms of digital intelligence and make decisions and take actions without our oversight and supervision.
This presents tremendous risks in society. We know that. We're all hearing about it. We're all thinking about it. And correspondingly, as you might imagine, the reverse, the mirror of that, is it presents tremendous opportunities for us to access a level of intelligence never before available that arguably matches or exceeds human intelligence.
So now we are presented with financial decisions in our lives. Whether it's a stock that we're going to select, how we allocate our portfolio, whether we're going to have a cash position, whether the market's going to rise or fall over the next 5 years, three years, 17 years. We are able to work and will be able to work with numerous agents that are able to grab informationational resources throughout history, organize them, draw conclusions about them, debate, and bring those insights forward to you, to me, to any of us.
This is so different than what happened when the MLY Fool started in the 1990s. And we thought, "This is incredible. Computers are beingworked. I can actually talk to somebody from my college, somebody that I admire, a former university professor. I can learn from anyone all connected into my home device and I can interact with them in real time.
This is unbelievable. But now we're able to draw on interactions with forms of intelligence greater than human intelligence to gain insights. And I can say for example, a single application of that will become increasingly relevant. And that is the level and number of misdiagnoses is hard to fathom.
When you're able to now bring intelligence to your home device, reason through the situation that you have, provide data and get analysis back from agents. It's going to represent the major breakthroughs that we're seeing for example with Madna and personalized cancer vaccines. But it comes to your desktop.
So we have to use this intelligence together as a community. We're going to have to learn how to use these tools and assess our portfolio, our financial plan, any given company. Right now, the Mly Fool is investing enormous sums of money into AI scoring engines. And the more data we flow into our systems and we're able to use higher forms of intelligence to draw conclusions, we can provide better and better guidance for you, better and better insights.
And I think we can find more and more winning stocks. In fact, if you look at the new portfolios that we've been launching, whether it's Quantum Leap, whether it's data center superstars, whether it's health AI portfolio, or you go to the Micro Ball or Moneyball portfolio where I'm picking a new stock every single day, this is being driven increasingly by the intelligence emerging from our AI scoring engines.
So if we are moving into a world and Jensen Hong says, you can accuse him of marketing but a lot of very intelligent people that are in the center of this field of development living and breathing it throughout every single day are concluding we have now leveled up in intelligence. There's a new form of insights that we can access.
And therefore if we have achieved AGI what it means is that the power demands of this technology to provide 247 realtime responsive dynamic systems the through line of energy generation and delivery into these systems is going to rise exponentially. It's going to make for some amazing investments in energy and an incredible opportunity and need for the advancement in solar energy for example.
So there will be some absolutely wonderful investments in the infrastructure buildout. And then we're going to start to see creativity, imagination, and monetization really like we've never seen before in terms of new technologies. Remember the internet infrastructure buildout. It took a long time before Amazon was able to get profitable, before you started to see businesses like Google come forward.
That infrastructure buildout cost a tremendous amount of money. A lot of companies went bankrupt. All of the financing was out of control. Companies coming public even though they didn't have operations six months earlier. So that whole dynamic took a long time before monetization arrived. We're going to start to see monetization of the AI infrastructure build out in 2027 28 29 and these companies obviously we're hoping a lot of them come public but we also have to start looking in the private markets together as a community.
But AGI is not a merely marketing term to kick to the side, ignore and dismiss. I think it's central to the way we invest and the more we can understand it together both to evaluate our decisions and also to develop scores and evaluation analytical systems to study public companies and find the very best I'll just say to close if you look at companies like ASML like Broadcom like Nvidia and Taiwan Semiconductor like there is almost no end in sight to the capital X expenditures and the strength of those businesses.
Their stocks may be volatile but I think you see a pathway to continuing growth and incredible margins from these companies. Whereas correspondingly if you look at the other end of the continuum companies like Salesforce and Adobe these companies are on the receiving end of so much change and so much rewriting of their workflows.
It's going to be difficult for them to flourish. I know there are a lot of people that believe in those businesses and invest in those businesses, but I would say the former companies have a much clearer path to success right now uh than some of the large uh software makers that have flourished in the past.
So my suggested action to you would be two-prong. The first is simply to pay a close attention to the scores that we're bringing forward. We're going to do a better and better job of trying to explain where this score could be most effective. We have for example a database inside the MLY fool that's public only for a specific subscription our AI database.
The scores inside that AI database are providing patterns that can really help you figure out which software company is most at risk in your portfolio and we're going to be bringing those forward more aggressively to you. So you expect to hear even though it's a marketing term, even though it's illdefined, expect to hear a lot more about artificial general intelligence and what it's going to mean for the companies in our portfolios and then what it means for us as investors.
And in this fourth section and final section of what to do now, I want to talk more about personal finances, you and your family, and really thinking through the circumstances that we're all in. I would say that the circumstances of today call for more strategy sessions than simply going through the motions that have worked over the last 10 years, 20 years, 30 years.
And one game that you can play as a family won't be maybe the most enjoyable game and certain members of the family may not be that excited about it, but it's to simply ask yourself how inexpensively can you live for a single month with a high enough quality of life? And that'll show you what excess capital you have, what risk you're facing in your daily life.
Obviously, a lot of individuals are facing situations where they're beyond their means. Their employment structure changed or they just weren't taught the discipline of not having credit card debt at double digit interest rates. So, I think running that simulation where for a month or two months or three months, you're going to evaluate what is the lowest cost life that we can maintain and have uh highly highly satisfying time together.
How long of an emergency fund should we have? Is six months sufficient? Should it be nine months, 12 months? Because if we have reasoning intelligence emerging now and if new companies will arrive into the marketplace funded by venture capitalists and be able to provide similar solutions to customers with 117 employees instead of 2,800 employees at a larger technology company for example and if that moves from one domain to the next it means we could have a rolling wave of dislocation and employment.
We've talked about this in the past. What are the chances that that rolling wave of change could hit you or someone in your family with changes to their expected income? We have seen the most profitable, most cash generating companies with the strongest balance sheets in human history laying off employees over the last couple years.
Now, we can debate the societal implications of that, but for right now, I'm just choosing for us to look at this as investors and say, "Wow, the best performing companies in history are doing layoffs." That never used to happen in the past. The reputational damage of doing a layoff meant this business is in trouble, and it would shake the resolve of institutions to continue investing in that company.
But now, the wealthiest companies in history are lowering levels of employment. This must be an indication of the potential for dislocation and employment across many domains in society. And therefore, is it a good idea for me and my family, you and your family to sit down and run some expectations that throw in some curveballs, some unexpected twists and turns, and some worst case scenarios.
I don't want to end on that grim point, but ultimately, wouldn't it be a good idea to run the semi-orcase scenario around recession, market returns, because all we want to do is run a simulation to understand what might happen, right? We want to simulate a recession before it arrives. We want to simulate a market decline before it arrives.
We want to simulate changes in our employment before they arrive. Taking the step to improve the sustainability of a high quality life is vastly more significant and important than squeezing out extra percentage points of returns particularly in a richly priced market. So I just recommend this fourth point to you to run an assessment.
Keep it simple. Keep it light if you want to. Obviously, if you're working with a financial planner or family office or you're managing multiple members of your family's portfolios, which actually happens a lot at the MLY fool. Turns out we have the chief investment officer of the extended family frequently as a MLY fool member.
I would just want you to run the assessment on your circumstances and determine. Have you thought through clearly what risks you're taking in your search for great returns in any given month, quarter, or year relative to your need and desire to have a high quality of life sustained over long periods of time?
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