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When you were younger, because you're so old, they skip that part, but you're so old, and when you were younger, everything was easier. This remains unspeakable. What? Uh, I just said. But anyway, uh , everything was easier. There was less competition. There were fewer hedge funds. There were fewer computers.
There were fewer, uh, smart guys going into this business. I mean, when I was doing this, I told Howard earlier that the market hadn't gone up in 13 years when I got on Wall Street. So it wasn't a place that really attracted a lot of people. Uh, they said, “It used to be easier for you, but you know, it’s probably harder for you.
You know, you stupidly wrote a book about it, and now a lot of people are doing it, not just because of that, obviously. "Uh, you know, it's harder for us, you know, things are easy for you." And so my answer is this. Regarding people who are very good at investing in special situations, I have two answers.
Firstly, these are people who are good at investing in special situations, they look for non-standard options for liquidation, recapitalization, spin-off, or something similar. Many of them have limited liquidity. You know, Warren Buffett started making a lot of money doing this, but he got too big.
So I ask them, I tell them: listen, you know what happens to people who are very good at analyzing businesses in this industry? What happens to them is that they make a lot of money. And they are getting too big to stay in this industry. So there's always a new group of people who can come in and look at some of these smaller situations, because the ones who are really good at it get too big to take advantage of some of the smaller or less obvious situations.
So there is always room for new people in this field. And then, on a larger scale, uh , you know, because people are still teaching efficient markets, they're saying, "Hey, you know, active investing doesn't work, and even Warren Buffett says, buy ETFs or, you know, indexes and stuff." And I will say that for most people this is true, because they don't know how to value a business.
But I'll give you a counter, and this is what I tell my students. Most of my students are around 27 years old. So I said to all of them , let's go back to when you were about 10 years old, when you might have started to notice some of this, and let's look at the most popular market in the world, and that would be the United States.
And let's look at the most popular stocks in the world, in the most popular market in the world, and that would be largely the S&P 500 stocks. Let's look at what's happened since you were 10 years old. Look at the S& P 500 index: it doubled from 1996 to 2000 . From 2000 to 2002, it halved. From 2002 to 2007, it doubled.
From 2007 to 2009, it halved. From 2009 to today, it has actually tripled. This is my way of saying that people are still crazy. And that's really unfair, because the S&P 500 is the average of 500 stocks. In this average, there is a huge variance between stocks that are popular and that people love emotionally, and stocks that people hate.
So this is much worse than what I just described. There's a huge dichotomy between what people like and what they do n't like, and what's popular and what's not popular—it's all this noise that happens in that middle ground that evens things out. So, to believe the words of Ben Graham: " Here's the fair value, and here's the market prices," it's like a wave around fair value.
And if you have a disciplined way of valuing companies and you buy more than you should when they're here and sell a little bit, maybe if you're selling short, then when, and you're very disciplined. I mean, I give my students two guarantees on the first day of class. The first guarantee is that if they do a good 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. Uh, but I tell them the market will agree with them. And, uh , the consequence of this is this, and it's very powerful. I tell them that 90% of the time for an individual stock, two to three years is enough for the market to realize the value they are looking for if they have done a good job.
When you merge a group of companies, it actually happens much faster on average. So , you know, both of these arguments are very powerful. It simply says that good work will be rewarded. So I do n't think the reason people don't beat the market is because the market is efficient or at least close to efficient, or not emotional.
He is very emotional. Or that it's impossible to do. There are all sorts of institutional and departmental reasons and a host of other reasons why they don't . But because prices are effective, if you just pick up a newspaper or watch what's going on, or listen to what I've been telling my students since they were 10 years old, it's pretty clear that people are still crazy, and there are opportunities.
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