저자: BillMiller · 외국인
요약 보기
출연자는 역발상 투자자라는 평가에 반박하며, 군중 심리와 손실회피 성향을 근거로 시장을 판단한다고 설명한다. 52주 신저가 종목이 많을 때 오히려 기회가 될 수 있다고 본다. 워런 버핏·찰리 멍거 등 유명 투자자들이 특정 자산을 부정할 때는 강한 근거를 요구한다고 말한다. 비트코인에 대해서는 생산적 자산이 아니라는 이유로 멍거 등이 부정적이라고 전하며, 비트코인 옹호·비판 양측 모두 확증편향에 빠지기 쉽다고 지적한다. 비트코인의 전력 사용량이 전 세계 전력의 약 0.5%대로 에어컨·건조기 등보다 적다는 점을 근거로 과장된 기후 비판을 반박한다. 종목별 1~3개월 방향 예측 발언은 없다.
다듬은 글
is the is the premium widens. I I wanted to ask you a a couple of uh non-crypto currency questions but investing questions before we change the subject totally. One of which is h how do you guard against your own prejudice and bias and also against this character quirk that I think you have which is that you're so contrarian by nature that I think when when really smart people like Warren and Charlie oppose something you actually get almost more excited about it like what what do you what do you do to kind of yeah guard against your own your own um your own prejudice and your own personality quirks?
Oh, I don't have any, William. No, just I I I so I would I would actually dispute the the first thing, which is to say that I'm a a contrarian by nature. So, you know, I would I would say that, you know, in philosophic terms, I'm not a naive contrarian. I'm not if something if there's a lot of uh enthusiasm for something, I don't immediately say, well, then because everybody likes it, I don't I don't like it or everybody hates it, I like it.
What I do is I I I try and understand what people what the prevailing views are and where you know either there's a lot of exuberance or a lot of fear and pessimism and just see what the see what the evidence is on both sides and we know you know we know from the psychological literature and from conan and traverski that the coefficient of loss versus gain is 2 to1 you know so that a dollar losing a dollar is twice as painful as making a or lose or winning a dollar.
And so therefore that so in order to get people to bet you've got to give them two to one odds just to basically risk a dollar on each side where the where the odds are 50/50. They won't they won't take that because they're afraid of losing. So, when you have a market that's got 2,52- week lows and six new highs like we have today, then there's basically owners of 2,000 of those companies really are unhappy because they lost money last year, the last 12 weeks.
So, as I've said before, the only thing better than a than a stock at a 52- week low is a stock at a at a three-year low or a 5year low or a 10-year low or an all-time low, you know, because then everybody hates it because, you know, they they lose the money. So at least there's a there's a primaascia case.
Take the other side and let's take a look at really what's you know what's the case here. So but again again if if you see Warren and Charlie and Jamie Diamond and all these people dumping on some financial thing as I wrote in a shorter letter in 2017 um you have to have pretty good pretty good evidence on the take the other side of that one because they're rarely wrong about stuff like that especially when they're all lined up some of the best financial minds in the country.
Then it's like, yeah, I I got have a big pretty big threshold to to go against them and understand try to understand what they're saying about stuff. But mostly with Bitcoin, it's been the case that that people basically make up their mind first and then look for the evidence, the confirming evidence.
You know, again, with Warren and Charlie, it's it's easy. There is no it's not a productive asset game. That's all that's all they need to know. And therefore, they don't like it. Charlie thinks it's evil because it's it's anti-government and the government monetary system has all these laws in it and stuff that that you know have been built for a long time and and protect people.
So it's even worse than that because it encourages people's greed and it encourages people to behave outside the bounds of the regulatory system and he thinks that in itself is not good for for me the whole argument over Bitcoin I think that's that's been really interesting to me it just it just seems such a perfect example of of people filtering things through a bias and it and it and it It just reminds me very much of something that you got me to read maybe 20 years ago, which was an essay by William James.
I think it was on a on a on a certain blindness in human beings. Maybe it was a talk he'd given in the 1890s where he talked he talked this really had a kind of life-changing effect on me because he talked about going to a a forest in North Carolina that had been just absolutely ravaged. And he said it was like an ulcer.
He said it was just absolutely hideous with no redeeming characteristics. And then this mountaineer comes to him and says, "No, no, this is like a triumph of human spirit. This guy has has built his little cabin for his wife and bathes and and and and then William James takes this and and says, "Yeah, and if this if this guy came to my study in Cambridge at Harvard, where he was teaching psychology at the time, he would have he would have thought, God, how strange the way this guy is living." And I I just thought that was a really beautiful insight into how just just how blinded we are by our own prejudice and bias.
I think I I'm not sure it's in that essay or in another one. I think it's might be in that one. Um does he refer to to Robert Lewis Stevenson's story in that one or not? I don't think so, but I may. Okay. Then it's in a different it's in a different one. Uh there's a he refers to a story in a different essay by Robert Lewis Stevenson called the lantern bearers and um where it's it's a similar type of thing where Stevenson's writing about that they had these what were called bullseye lanterns that were these small little lanterns and they they hide them in their coats and um they go go places, you know, and then they were dark and they could take the lantern out and see.
And he's like, you know, when other people think it's really stupid to be doing this because, you know, you could burn yourself and set yourself on fire. And he's like, we're never happier than we're all together with our lanterns, you know, and going and doing stuff together. And then he pivots and says um again, it's the same basic thought.
and and he says that um so in his study at you know at uh on on Beacon Street in uh in in Boston he said you know his dog is completely insensitive to the idea but why would you sit there in a chair and stare at something all day long like a newspaper or a book when you could be out sniffing the ground and chasing squirrels and you know running around and doing stuff like that.
It's just not not not not and he says you know of course I'm I'm I'm completely unmoved by the fact of sniffing sniffing the ground and and and chasing other dogs around. So that you know that's not what I want to do. The same kind of thing is you have a certain set of attitudes. You one thing that that you that I use in terms to protect yourself against stuff is like when I see a statement that can be quantified but there's no quantification.
there's just there's just you know emotional description or I should say a normative description then I'm like well okay there's no where's the evidence for this and so it's it's like they say Bitcoin's a climate catastrophe it uses more electricity than Argentina how much is that exactly we know how much it is right it's basically according to the Cambridge Energy Institute at Cambridge and you know in the UK it's it's uh 0.62% 62% of the uh electricity usage uh in the world.
So it's less than it's it's it's basically all the bitcoin in the world is less than 1% but about but little more than less than a little bit more than one half of 1%. I mean laundry is used like 7%. You know air conditioning uses a lot more than that. And so do we say, "Oh, that's stupid. Why don't we just turn the air conditioning off and so we don't use all this electricity?
You're contributing to climate change." Like it's just I mean I think I think actually there's more natural gas natural gas flared many times that than Bitcoin usage. But we don't stop using natural gas because it's worse than Bitcoin.
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