저자: 워런버핏 · 외국인
요약 보기
버크셔 해서웨이의 기회비용 및 요구수익률 기준에 대한 2003년 주주총회 질의응답 영상이다. 한 줄 결론: 버핏과 멍거는 주식 투자의 요구수익률을 세전 자기자본이익률 10%로 두고, 이를 금리 수준과 무관하게 고정 기준으로 쓴다고 밝힌다. [요구수익률 기준] 질문자는 연차보고서의 세전 10% 기준이 금리 변화에 따라 어떻게 조정되는지 물었다. 버핏은 단기금리가 6%든 1%든 10% 미만 기대수익의 주식은 사지 않는다고 답했다. 이 기준은 과학적 근거가 없는 임의의 선이라고 인정했다. [투자 기준 설명] 버핏은 향후 10% 이상 수익이 가능한 주식 그룹을 찾으면, 대규모 자금 문제를 제외하고 그중 가장 매력적인 종목을 산다고 말했다. 그 가운데서도 예측 가능성이 높은 사업을 선호한다고 밝혔다. [현금흐름 시점 위험 (질문자 제기)] 질문자는 현금흐름의 시점과 시장 전체와의 공분산이 실제 경제적 비용이라고 지적했다. 불황기에 소득이 나는 직업과 호황기에 소득이 나는 직업의 비유를 들며, 이는 측정은 어렵지만 현실적 비용이라고 주장했다. [멍거·버핏의 기회비용 관점] 멍거는 결국 모든 판단은 기회비용으로 귀결되며, 그 미래 기회비용은 추정에 의존한다고 말했다. 버핏은 당시 160억 달러 자금이 세전 약 1.25%를 받고 있었는데, 국채로 약 5%를 얻을 수 있었다는 점을 언급했다. 그럼에도 10% 이상의 더 나은 기회를 기다리는 편을 택한다고 설명했다. [과거 운용 경험] 버핏은 과거 파트너십 운용 시 이벤트 차익거래 등 변동성이 큰 투자를 섞어, 시장이 나쁠 때 수익을 내는 자산을 보유했다고 말했다. 이는 질문자가 말한 학계 이론을 현실에서 이미 실천한 셈이라고 평가했다. [보험 및 현금흐름 선호] 버크셔는 매주 안정적으로 현금이 들어오는 것보다 현재가치가 높다면 들쑥날쑥한 현금흐름도 감수한다고 답했다. 펩시콜라의 10억 달러 경품 사례를 들며, 적절한 보상이 있으면 이런 위험도 인수할 수 있다고 설명했다. [결론] 멍거는 기회비용은 개인의 상황과 능력에 따라 달라지므로 남의 기준을 그대로 따르는 것은 어리석다고 강조했다. 두 사람 모두 시장 예측보다 자신의 상황에 맞는 판단을 강조했다.
다듬은 글
i actually have a two-part question i'd like to ask you to elaborate a bit how you think about opportunity cost and i'm i think i'm going to be elaborating very much on the very last question that was asked first of all in the annual report you say explicitly that you look for a 10 percent pre-tax return on equity in looking at common stocks and i think you talked earlier about how you built up from that for five to six percent um after tax return and then you layer on inflation and then layer on taxes my first question would be how do you adjust that required rate of return across periods of time so for example when interest rates are higher and do you look for a different equity premium return over different periods of time my second i just said that you actually would apply the same discount rate across the stocks and i'm sure you know that modern finance actually suggests that you should not do that that you should be thinking about the timing of cash flows and in particular the covariance with the general market now you've made a point of emphasizing that when you think of risk you think of risk primarily in terms of will you get the cash flows that you predict you will get over time sort of numerator risk if you think in terms of discounted cash flow which i think everyone here will have to acknowledge your results speak for themselves has probably been a very effective way of thinking about risk but there is a true economic cost to think about the timing of cash flows as well and it may be a much smaller cost but it is still a real cost i might for example suggest you think about somebody deciding between two jobs the jobs are completely identical and the person expects to make the same amount of money from each job but there's one difference and the difference is one job will pay him more when the economy is in the tank and the other job will pay him more when the economy is going gangbusters now if he asked you which job was actually worth more my guess is you would tell him that the one that would pay him more when the economy's in the tank and the reason is if he wanted to make more money by moonlighting or doing something else it'd be much easier when the economy's doing better that's the essential logic behind the idea that you look at the covariance of when um cash flows come in with the overall market it's a real cost even though it is difficult to measure and even if it is a smaller risk the numerator risk the risk of getting the actual cash flows since it's a real cost i imagine you must think about it and so my second question to you would be how do you think about it and if you decide not to why the question on on opportunity costs and the 10 we mentioned you know basically that's that's the figure we quit on and we quit on buying we don't want to buy equities where our real expectancy is below 10 now that's true whether short rates are six percent or whether short rates are one percent we just feel that that it would get very sloppy to start dipping below that and we would add we feel also obviously that we will get opportunities that are at least at that level and perhaps substantially above so there's just a point at which we drop out of the game and it's arbitrary there's no no scientific studies or anything but i will bet you that a lot of years in the future we we or you will be able to find equities that uh that you understand or we understand and that have a probability uh the probability of returns at 10 or greater now once you find a group of equities in that range now and leaving aside the problem of huge sums of money which we have then we just buy the most attractive that usually means the ones we feel the surest about i mean is a practical matter there's just some businesses that possess economic characteristics that make their future prospects far out for far more predictable than others there's all kinds of businesses that you just can't you can't remotely predict uh what they'll learn and you just have to forget about them but when we get so we we have over time gotten very partial to the businesses uh where we think the predictability is high but we still want a threshold return of 10 which is not that great after tax anyway charlie do you want to comment on that portion of the that question first yeah the i think in the last analysis everything we do comes back to opportunity cost but it to some extent in fact to some considerable extent we are guessing at our future opportunity cost warren is basically saying that he's guessing that he's in due course to to uh put out money at pretty attractive rates of return and therefore he's not going to waste a lot of firepower now at lower returns but that's an opportunity cost calculation and if interest rates were to more or less permanently settle at one percent or something like that and warren were to reappraise his notions of future opportunity cost he would change the numbers like kane said what do you do when you change your view of the facts or you change your conduct but so far at least we have hurdles in our mind which are basically well they they involve implicitly future opportunity cost right now with our 16 billion that's getting one and a quarter percent pre-tax that's 200 million dollars a year we could very easily buy governments uh doing in 20 years and get roughly 5 percent so we could change that 200 million a year to 800 million a year of income and we're making a decision as charlie says that it's better to take 200 million for a while on the theory that we'll find something that gives us 10 percent or better than to commit to the 800 million a year uh and then find that in a year thereabouts when the better opportunities came along that what we had committed to had a big principle loss in it but that's you know that that's not uh it's not it's not terribly scientific uh but it all i can tell you is in practice it seems to work pretty well years ago when warren ran a partnership and to some extent the partnership that i ran was the operated in the same way we implicitly did what you're suggesting and that part of the partnership funds were in so-called event arbitrage investments and those tended to generate returns occasionally when the market generally was in the tank and alternative investments would more mimic the general market so we were doing what this academic theory prescribes you know 40 years ago and uh but we didn't use the modern lingo yeah we've got some preferences for having a lot of money coming in all the time but we do go into into insurance transactions with huge volatility uh which could mean that a a big chunk of money could go out at one time or in a very short period of time and we won't give up a lot in expectable return for smoothness but if you give us a choice of having money come in every week and the pre and the same present value of money coming in in very lumpy ways that we wouldn't know about we would choose the smooth but if you give us a choice of a higher present value for the lumpiness we will take the lumpiness and that's usually the choice that's i mean that's usually we get offered that choice and other people value smoothness so highly that we do get a spread in our view for lumpy returns we are writing and then we're going to close this up but you will read a lot or you may hear a lot maybe you've heard it already pepsi cola is having a contest they're going to have a drawing in september the contest goes through a lot of little phases but in the end there's going to be one person who's going to have one chance and a thousand of winning a billion dollars that billion dollars will have a present value of maybe 250 million if whoever gets to that position hits the number we will pay it and we don't mind paying out 250 million dollars as long as we got paid appropriately for us and that would create bad cash flow that particular week we're willing to maybe even for two weeks we're willing we're willing to assume that for a a payment and very very few people in the world are even those that can afford it we would even assume it for two and a half billion present value we'd want more proportionally to assume it for that but charlie and i i think would agree that we would take that on if we got paid well enough for it we wouldn't do it for 25 billion but we would we will we will do things and therefore you know we get the calls on that sort of thing and that is more profitable business over time than uh bread and butter business it also can you know it can lead to having an intense interest in watching the television show when the drawing takes place making sure who draws the number two charlie you have anything to add then we'll yeah once you're talking about opportunity cost that's personal to yourself and your own situation you've departed from modern finance totally and that's what we've done we're intelligently making these guesses as best we can based on our own circumstances and our own abilities i think it's crazy to do it based on somebody else's circumstances and somebody else's abilities thanks for coming and we i hope we see you all next year
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