저자: HowardMarks · 외국인
요약 보기
장기 낙관과 분산투자를 강조. 변동성은 위험이 아니며 위험은 사전·사후 정량화 불가능한 주관적 판단이라고 주장. 남들과 다르게 행동하려면 불편함을 감수해야 하며 역발상이 필요하다고 함. 금·나스닥100·인도 Nifty500은 25년간 여러 차례 큰 조정을 겪었음에도 연 11~14% 수익을 냈다는 사례 제시. 조정 시 손실보다 기회를 보라는 메시지.
다듬은 글
Remember, we concentrate our investments to take advantage of what we think we know and we diversify to protect against what we don't know. Investing is a is an optimistic activity. It must be optimistic. You take your money, you give it to somebody else in the expectation you'll get back more later.
You have to be optimistic [clears throat] to be an investor. I think my worst failing as an investor is that I wasn't optimistic enough. My parents were uh lived through the depression. [clears throat] And if your parents lived through the depression, they filled you with ideas like don't put all your eggs in a in one basket and uh and save for a rainy day.
And I grew up very conservative. Now I went into interesting parts of the market. I mind them pretty well, but uh not with high optimism. I think everybody in this room should be optimistic about the long run. I think that over time, economies grow, companies increase in profitability, ownership of investments uh is rewarding in the long run.
Certainly there are fluctuations meaning there are some bad times as well as good. So the real bottom line is to invest and stay invested and don't try to be too clever and get out and get in and get out and get in. It's hard to do. You know Warren Buffett his greatest advice is and his strongest advice to everybody is in our case he says don't ever bet against the United States.
and he's been right and and it's been extremely rewarding. I would encourage you all of you to invest and stay invested but also to diversify. Remember, we concentrate our investments to take advantage of what we think we know and we diversify to protect against what we don't know. In ' 06, I wrote a memo about risk.
The first one dedicated completely to risk. The title was risk. And I said what I usually say is that you can't quantify risk in advance. There's no number that you can provide which fully captures the risk. Now uh they taught us at Chicago to talk about volatility and volatility can be quantified historically and and applied to the future.
But the only problem is that's not risk. The real risk that matters is the risk of losing money for good. Yeah. And there's no way you can read that. There's no place you can find that number. And you know, you you you find a stock or a building or a company that you're thinking about buying. The probability that you'll have a permanent loss of capital and that the investment will be successful is is is in the future.
doesn't exist yet can only be estimated and and you can put a number on it but that's not quantification. You can't measure it in any way. And so I wrote that out. Risk cannot be quantified in advance. And then I hit the return button. I went on to the next section and I wrote something which I found very provocative but I had never thought about before.
Risk cannot be quantified after the fact. You buy something for $100. A year later you sell it for $200. Was it risky? You don't know. It might have been a brilliant investment that was sure to double or a crazy investment where you got lucky. And the fact that it doubled doesn't tell you which of those two it was.
So risk is an intangible and it's it's not volatility and it can't be measured and it can't be reduced to a number. And in fact in 201 15 I I I wrote a memo entitled risk revisited again because I found a a note from a brilliant philosopher named Peter Bernstein. The title was can we reduce risk to a number and the answer is no.
It's it's a subjective judgment about the future and I think that the best investors are best because their subjective view of the future is superior. What are the most difficult things while being a contrarian? I I was me reading with the meeting with a university class uh last week in New York and I said who in this room has the goal of being average and no hands went up.
I said who wants to be above average? every hand went up and I said to them, "Think about this. If you if you think about things the same as everybody else and you have the same data as everybody else, which the SEC is determined to make sure that everybody has the same information and you think about it the same and you process it the same, you re you'll probably reach similar conclusions.
You'll probably take similar actions." That's not a very good formula for being superior. Sure. In order to be superior, you have to do something different. You have to diverge from the crowd. So that may be your contrarian behavior. Um, of course, you can't be a contrarian just for the sake of having contrary opinions.
You you have to your opinion has to be non consensus and correct. Well, that's not easy because all the other people who constitute the consensus, there are they're not dummies. And when people think that I'm the only smart one and everybody else an idiot, that's when you get into trouble. That's hubris.
And so, you know, often times the consensus is as close to being right as you can get. And it's hard to consistently deviate from the crowd and be more correct. But that's what you must do in order to be a superior investor. Idiosyncratic and uncomfortable. If you're taking positions that are different from the positions of everybody else, why do they take those positions?
They take those positions because they receive the same information you do. They're bombarded every day with the same newspaper news and and broadcasts and and emotional factors and they reach a certain conclusion and they're not dummies and you reach a different conclusion and you say I'm I'm going to distinguish myself by through through taking a non-conensus action.
If you do something different from what everybody else is doing and you're not a little bit uncomfortable, there's something wrong with you. Everybody else thinks Nvidia is great and it's up six times in the last two years. And you say it's overpriced. I'm not going to own it. I'm going to short it.
And if you do that and you're not a little uncomfortable, there's something wrong. So I think the you ask what's what's the challenge? You have to engage in uncomfortably idiosyncratic behavior and you have to be right. You have to have a strong stomach. And and the reason you need a strong stomach is because we sometimes know what's going to happen.
We never know when when. And you know the fact that you conclude that something is underpriced and it's a bargain and you buy it today, it doesn't mean it's going to start going up tomorrow and you may have a long time to wait. The first of the great addages that I ever learned in the early 70s was that being too far ahead of your time is indistinguishable from being wrong.
And so if you're a contrarian, you deviate from the herd, you do something different, it's uncomfortable, and you may have to wait a long time. And in that interim, you may look pretty bad. You have to have the intestinal fortitude to to retain your position. You have to have an understanding with your bosses or your clients that permits you to to to do so and to to get through to the other side when if your decisions are correct uh they're validated.
Uh but obviously this business of departing from the crowd is not easy. And you know and roughly a hundred years ago Lord Kanes said it is better for reputation to fail conventionally than to succeed unconventionally because unconventional behavior can cause you a lot of problem in the interim. Now look at this table carefully.
Over the last 25 years gold has experienced at least eight distinct corrections of more than 10%. The NASDAQ 100 has witnessed six major draw downs of more than 15%. While India's broader Nifty 500 index has corrected by more than 15% on eight separate occasions. Now here's the interesting part. Despite all these corrections, gold delivered an annualized return of around 11.5% in US dollar terms.
The NASDAQ 100 delivered 13.1% and the Nifty 500 delivered nearly 14% CAGGR over the same period. Now think about that for a moment. Every one of these investments went through painful corrections, periods of uncertainty, and moments where investors probably questioned their decisions. Yet over the long run, they delivered remarkable returns enough to create generational wealth for investors who stayed invested.
There was a very important lesson in this video. As Mark said, to make real money in the stock market, you need to maintain a degree of optimism about the future. Economies grow, businesses become more profitable, and patient investors are rewarded for owning productive assets over the long run. As Hodmark said, the core idea of investing is volatility is not risk, and volatility is not the same as permanent loss.
Market corrections can create opportunities to buy great businesses at attractive prices. And we all know this, but we still feel that hesitation to buy. So the next time the market falls sharply instead of asking yourself how much I can lose ask yourself what opportunities is the market giving
Comments 0