저자: HowardMarks · 외국인
요약 보기
시장은 순환하며 직선으로 움직이지 않는다. 과도한 탐욕과 공포가 호황·붕괴를 만들고, 극단적 고점·저점에서만 예측이 유용하다. 현재 S&P500은 공정가치보다 약간 위(PER 21 vs 전후 평균 16, 약 20~25% 고평가로 추정)이나 하락이 예측 가능할 정도는 아니다. 시기 예측은 피하며, 주식시장을 심리 지표로 본다. AI 관련 자산은 버블 여부를 판단할 지식이 부족하다고 밝히고, 중국 시장은 저평가일 수 있다고 추측만 했다.
다듬은 글
Now you're very um dismissive of economic forecasting as we as we talked about but you are a strong believer in cycles and knowing where we are in the cycle. Why why is the understanding of market cycles so important? Well, the world is cyclical. Uh and uh you know, everybody knows that the market and the economy um and and uh politics um move cyclally and uh you know, nothing moves in a straight line uh where human behavior is involved.
And if you were to count on it doing so, you would uh get into big trouble. I've been thinking about writing a memo uh lately. People have been asking me what is the biggest mistake that you've seen or what is the mistake that people make most often? And I think it is that once the market is moving in one direction that it will always continue to do so.
In truth, uh, regression toward the mean or the correction, uh, of, uh, excesses is much more dependable than continued movement in a straight line. Why do things revert back? Because the I wrote a book uh in 2018 called the mastering the market cycle. And I I'm a great believer in cycles. I'm a student of cycles.
I I I've lived with cycles for a long time. And yet when I got about twothirds of the way through writing the book, I said to myself, why do we have cycles? The economy grows at 2% a year. Why doesn't it just grow 2% every year? Why sometimes one and sometimes three and sometimes minus one, sometimes so what's the answer?
The answer is that people go to excess. And for example, if the economy is growing well for a few years, business uh heads say, "Oh, well, we have to build a new factory to get our increased share of the growth in our industry." And so they do, but so does everybody else. Now there are too many factories and now uh the uh factory utilization falls and the companies go into decline.
So then they pull back and they and they stop building factories. So straightforward greed and fear. Greed and fear is is a good way to put it. And you know uh you mentioned the memos. The second memo I wrote uh 1991 was called the pendulum. Greed and fear optimism and pessimism credulousness and skepticism.
Now you dismiss forecasting yet you are a great believer in know or trying to figure out where we are in a cycle. Isn't that kind of counterintuitive? It sounds it on the face. But I think there is a time when when forecasting becomes more useful and that is when we're at an extreme. Uh uh now think about what I said a minute ago that the biggest mistake people make is to believe that a process once in operation will continue non-stop forever.
That's what takes markets to extreme highs, which we call bubbles, and lows, which we call crashes. But when we're extremely high and people get excited and say, "Hey, this is going to go on forever, usually it will collapse eventually of its own weight. So when the market is crazy high or crazy low, I think we can uh make a profitable uh forecast.
The only thing is uh Nikolai that we don't get too many opportunities. Uh I was speaking with my son when I was writing that book on cycles and I said you know I think my market forecasts have been about right. He says yes dad that's cuz you did it five times in 50 years. Five times the market has been at such an extreme that regression toward the mean has been dependable.
Not in terms of when it will happen or what will cause it or how fast it'll happen, but the fact that it will. Where are we now? I think we're in the middle ground. I think we're a little bit above uh fair value, but not so high that a decline is uh predictable or dependable, you know. Are you are you talking about credit cycle now or talking about
No, I'm talking right now about about the stock market, right? Pretty much. And I'm not I'm not involved in the stock market directly. Uh you know most of Oak's activities are in the credit markets. Yeah. But it's a I think the stock market is a good barometer because it's very it's very obvious. Uh we get a reading in the stock market every day.
We don't get frequent readings in the credit market and in private credit. We never get readings. It all takes place behind closed doors. M so I take the stock market and particularly the S&P 500 stock index in the US as a very good indicator of what's going on in psychology. How many more good years do you think we have?
Well, see now now you've crossed the line into are we going into prediction now into well but not only that but you've crossed the line into asking me to make a prediction as to time. Right. One of my Oak Tree colleagues in his quarterly letter to his clients stated his rule. If you name a price, don't name a date.
If you name a date, don't name a price. Yeah. And then you can never be wrong. Yeah. Uh, you know, the mar here's the important thing to think about, which I don't think many people do. Let's just say that you and I can agree that the S&P is 20% overvalued today, which I think is probably a good estimate.
The PE ratio is 21. The post-war norm is 16. So 20 25% overvalued. And let's say let's say we agree on that. And let's say we're right. The next question is what is the probability that it's going to decline in the next year? It's modest. It's probably a little better than 50/50, but it's not 100 or 90.
Uh if you've lived as long as you and I have, we've seen markets that were overpriced become more overpriced. Yeah. And then more overpriced and then get into a genuine bubble. Uh if it was true that every time the market's overvalued it corrects, then you wouldn't get bubbles. But do you see any bubbles within the market?
Now on the positive side, there are people who believe that um that the AI stocks for example uh are are in a bubble and most bubbles do surround something that's new and this one does and something that uh everybody's very impressed by. Um, I don't know enough about AI to know if this is excessive or or justified,
but but you know, you would look at the things that are most exciting uh to most people and and largely at the things that are new. Now, in in terms of excesses on the downside, you would have to wonder about China. I mean, China has been marked down by everybody. Many people describe it as uninvestable.
Um, it has declined a lot, that Chinese market. Is it too cheap? Is it? Well, I I again, I don't know. I I suspect that it may be, but I I don't know enough about it uh to uh, you know, to uh make a statement. And and one of the rules, as you know, is that it's okay to have an opinion on these subjects.
It's just not okay to bet the client's money. Yeah, that's an important principle in your firm. Right. Right.
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