저자: HowardMarks · 외국인
요약 보기
하락장은 매도 신호가 아니라 가격 할인 신호이며, 분석이 맞다면 가격이 떨어질수록 더 매수해야 한다고 주장. 2008년 리먼 사태 당시 저가 선순위 채권 매수 사례를 들어 근거로 제시. 후반부는 인도 시장 관점에서 변동성은 주식투자의 일부이고 조정기는 기회가 될 수 있다는 일반론. 구체적 자산 가격 전망은 없음.
다듬은 글
Falling prices are the equivalent of investments being put on sale. How can they be a sell signal? If anything, they're a buy signal. I think that one of the important things that I have realized and incorporated into my thinking is that you're never going to get it exactly right. Sometimes, if we're lucky, we know what's going to happen.
We never know when. And it So, if you accept that, then it kind of gets you off the hook. That means you buy today at nine, it goes to eight. You buy more. It go eight, you buy at eight, it goes to seven. You buy more. You don't say, "Oh my god, I bought at nine and went to eight. I must be a and and I must be wrong." You understand that the nature of this and you know, Warren Buffett says, "I like hamburgers and when hamburgers go on sale, I eat more hamburgers." So, you know, if you if you did an analysis at nine and if the analysis was sound and it goes to eight, you should buy more.
Now, of course, in our business, there's always the question of when does uh resolve turn into hubris. And there's no easy answer. Uh but it always goes back to it always go back to rechecking your analysis and ultimately to your analysis being correct. You have to have be very vigilant and and you have to believe that it's correct for good reason.
Uh but, you know, I wrote a memo. You probably, since you know them all, I think it was February of '16 called What Does the Market Know? And see what I what happened is in '16, the the market got off to its worst start in history and it was really collapsing. All all markets. And uh so, I wrote a memo called On the Couch because I I said that every once in a while the market needs a trip to the shrink.
And that it was really uh the victim of uh irrational fear. So, I went on Bloomberg the next day. Usually, when I put out a memo, I go on Bloomberg the next morning. And uh the hosts kept peppering me and saying, "Well, stocks are collapsing. Isn't that a sell signal?" Went back to my office and I wrote a memo that day called "What does the market know?" That This is really a very important concept.
The market is supposed to be efficient, know everything. We know it doesn't know everything. And I believe there are times when it doesn't know anything. You know, I said you can't let falling prices be a sell signal. Because falling prices are the equivalent of investments being put on sale. How can they be a sell signal?
If anything, they're a buy signal. And then uh I said, "And you know what? However, when we bought high-yield bonds in 1990 when they were collapsing, and when we uh sold into the tech bubble in '99, and when we bought uh in the period you're describing, etc. Uh I I never want to give anybody the impression that we don't do it with trepidation.
You know, you can have if you're if you have great advantages, you can have a strong intellect, and you can act on the basis of your uh intellectual analysis, and you can control your emotion. But that doesn't make you right. And there's always the possibility that you're wrong. And we must bear that in mind.
And since we're only human, when we do these things, when we buy in October '08, it terrifies us. But it if you think about it, buying at the low point has to terrify you. Uh Lehman went bankrupt on the 15th, and as I recall, I put out a memo on something like the 18th and or 19th entitled "What Now?" Or maybe it was "Now What?" Believe me, if you weren't there, it was impossible to figure out what was going to happen.
It was impossible to prove that the financial system of the world either would or would not collapse. In in general, we can't prove anything about the system in the future, and that's particularly true when we're going through an an event that's never occurred before. So, there was nothing intelligent to say about the future of the financial system at that time.
So, how What made us buy? Well, number one, the objectively speaking, the things we were buying were extremely low prices. We were buying the senior debt of companies that had been the subject of LBOs 1 or 2 years earlier. And we were buying the senior most debt at prices where if the companies turned out to be worth a third or a quarter or a fifth of what these great buyout firms had paid a year earlier, we would have broken even.
And we figured out, well, and you know who I'm talking about, but we said, well, sometimes, like when you go to buy a car, you negotiate with the car salesman, you know, you say, well, I I I probably could have gotten another 5% off, right? Do you negotiate car prices in this country? Okay, good. So, so so you sometimes you come away and you say, I I probably got a good could have gotten another 5% off.
But did you ever say, well, I probably paid too high by a factor of four? You know, I bought that car for 60,000. If I'd only negotiated a little, I probably could have paid 15. You know, so similarly, we concluded that the great private equity firms who had done all that due diligence probably did not overpay by a factor of three, four, or five.
Uh but then the other thing is, we reached the conclusion that what I said, what I wrote is, if we buy today and the financial system falls apart, doesn't matter what we did. But if we don't buy and the financial system doesn't fall apart, then we didn't do our job. So, we should buy. And that was It's That's about as profound as it got.
Now, look at this table. This is how much some of the world's prominent investors deployed during the 2008 financial crisis. Howard Marks deployed $10 billion while Warren Buffett committed $25 billion to Berkshire Hathaway, and Seth Klarman deployed roughly $4 billion. These investors weren't waiting for the crisis to feel comfortable.
They were deploying capital when the fear was at its peak. If investors like Howard Marks were willing to buy when the global financial system itself was under tremendous pressure, what should stop us from investing during a normal market correction? Of course, there's an important difference. I know the Indian market has been frustrating recently.
Many investors have seen very little progress in their portfolios over the last couple of years. But, isn't this exactly how equity investing works? Equity returns don't come in a straight line. It isn't always 1 + 1 + 1 + and 1 + is equal to 5. Sometimes, it's 1 - 2 + 1 - 1 + 5 and + 1 is equal to 5.
You can have some years of mediocre or even negative returns, followed by a relatively short period that can create a huge portion of your long-term wealth. And that's a trade-off with equities. You accept volatility in exchange of the possibility of substantial long-term wealth creation. If equity markets deliver the same predictable return every single year, there would have been much less reason for investors to demand a premium over fixed-income investments.
So, if you have fresh cash, corrections can give you an opportunity to gradually deploy into businesses that continue to grow their earnings, and whose valuations have become more attractive. And if you are already fully invested and own good businesses with growing earnings, a falling stock price does not automatically mean you should sell.
Sometimes, the absence of cash is simply the price you pay for being fully invested when opportunities appear. Remember what happened during the global financial crisis. The market experienced a historical collapse, yet the businesses and the markets eventually recovered. Historical market data also shows that how severe the 2008 drawdown was for Indian equities.
The Nifty 50 fell roughly 54% from its previous peak before eventually recovering. And finally, the lesson isn't that every correction will quickly recover. The lesson is that volatility is a part of equity investing. And periods of fear can create opportunities for investors who have the cash, patience, and conviction to act.
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