저자: CharlieMunger · 외국인
요약 보기
장기 보유 원칙 강조: 좋은 기업을 자주 사고파는 것은 대부분 투자자에게 좋지 않으며, 세금과 두 번의 결정 부담이 있다. 코카콜라·질레트도 단기 실망은 있으나 장기 추세는 유지되며, 기업 경쟁 환경상 어떤 기업도 영원히 1위에 머물지 않는다. 시장은 자산군 간·개별 기업 평가에서 대체로 효율적이지만 이것이 효율적 시장 가설(EMH)을 뒷받침하지는 않는다. EMH는 20여 년 전 정점을 찍었고 학계에서 신뢰가 크게 떨어졌다. 투자의 본질은 기업 가치 평가이며 저평가 시 매수하는 것이다.
다듬은 글
Generally speaking, trying to dance in and out of the companies you really love on a long-term basis has not been a good idea for most investors and uh we're quite content to send with to sit with our best holdings. People have tried to do that with Bergkshire over the years and I I've had some friends that thought it was getting a little ahead of itself from time to time and they thought they'd sell and buy it back cheaper and everything.
It's pretty tough to do. You have to make two decisions, right? You know, you have to buy you have to sell it right first and then you have to buy it right later on and usually have to pay some tax in between. And it to get into a wonderful business, best thing to do is usually is to stick with it. Koke and Gillette both experienced disappointments to their management below what they anticipated a year, a year and a half ago or whenever it was uh and below what we anticipated, but that will happen over time.
It happens with some of our wholly owned businesses from time to time. Sometimes they do better than we anticipate too. Uh but it's not the nature that everything things that everything goes in a nice straight smooth line upward. Uh you mentioned cap cities uh uh parts of cap cities have done extraordinarily well for example but in the network business if you go back 30 years and look at what network has been on top you find that no one stays on top or on the bottom um in indefinitely there it's a competitive world as I mentioned earlier and and sometimes your competitor's correct moves your own incorrect moves the world environment.
All of those things can interrupt trend lines. Uh I see nothing that's happened in the last year in terms of the long-term trend line of the blade and razor business, which is the one I've referred to as inevitable Gillette. I mean, there are other businesses that are not in the same category as the blade and razor business.
Coke, fortunately, has virtually its entire business in in soft drinks. And so, uh, it it it comprises almost 100% of the whole there, but I see nothing that, uh, would change long-term future of either the blade or ra blade and razor business or KO's position in the in the soft drink business. Mr. Buffett, many in the academic community call you lucky or um, a statistical outlier.
Uh, Mr. Munger, I'm not sure what they call you. Well, you're free to speculate on what they call them. I know uh you don't like to forecast the equity markets, but uh maybe you would dare to forecast the evolution of the debate between proponents of the efficient market theory and value investors. Um do you think there will ever be a reconciliation?
And I'm talking especially about what's taught at the business schools and as an addendum um are your designated su successors are they outliers as well? Well, we like to think they are and then and they may be more outliers than we are. the uh the market is generally and you know I to me it it's almost self-evident if you've been around markets for any length of time that the market in is generally fairly efficient.
It's fairly efficient as pricing between asset classes. It's fairly efficient in terms of evaluating specific businesses. What being fairly efficient does not makes uh does not suffice uh to support an efficient market theory approach to investing or to uh all of shoots that have come off of that in the academic world.
So if you'd believed in efficient market theory uh and uh and been taught that and adapted adopted it for your own 20 or 30 years ago or 10 years ago, I think it probably hit its peak about 20 years ago. Uh you know it would have been a terrible terrible mistake. It would have been like learning the earth is flat.
It uh it just you would have had you would have you'd have had the wrong start in life. Now it became terribly popular in the academic world. It almost became uh a required belief in order to hold a position. It was what was taught in all the advanced courses and and a mathematical theory that in involved other other investment questions was built around it.
So that if you went to the center of it and destroy that part of it, it it really meant that people who'd spent years and years and years getting PhDs found their whole world crashing around them. I would say that it's uh I would I would say that it's been discredited in a fairly significant way over the last decade or two.
I mean, you don't hear people talking the same way about it as you did uh 15 or 20 years ago. Uh but the market generally is fairly efficient in most ways. I mean it is hard to find it's hard to find securities that are inefficiently priced. There are times when it's relatively easy but right now for example it's difficult.
Um there I don't know exactly how much it's wholly rich still in business schools. I I certainly get the impression as I go around talking to business schools that it is far less regard regarded as uh as um [clears throat] you know sort of unquestioned dogma that uh like it was 15 or 20 years ago. The University of Florida now has some courses in valuing businesses.
University of Missouri is putting in one. Uh and uh uh I think the high priests of efficient market theory uh uh are probably not in the same demand for speaking engagements and seminars and all of that as they were a decade or two ago. Uh it's hard though to it's very interesting. It's hard to dislodge uh a belief that becomes sort of uh becomes the dogma of a finance department.
It's it's so challenging to them and you know they have to at age 30 or 40 to go back and say what I've learned up to this point and what I've been teaching students and all of that is is silly. That doesn't come easy to people. Charlie. Well, you know, Max Plank, the great physicist, said that even in physics, uh, the old guard really didn't accept the new ideas.
The new ideas prevail in due course because the old guard fades away clinging to the asenities of the past. And that's what's happened to the hard form efficient market theorists. They're an embarrassment to the scene and they will soon be gone. On the the people who think the market is reasonably efficient or roughly efficient of course are absolutely correct and that will stay with us for the long poll.
Thinking it's roughly efficient though does nothing for you in academia. You can't build anything around it. I mean that what what people want are what they call elegant theories and it just it doesn't work. Uh you know what investment is about is valuing businesses. I mean that is all there is to investment.
You sit around and you try to figure out what a business is worth and if it's selling below that figure you buy it. That to my you you you can't find a course virtually in the country on how to value businesses. You can find all kinds of courses on how to, you know, how to compute beta or whatever it may be because that's something the instructor knows how to do, but he doesn't know how to value a business.
So, the important subject doesn't get taught and it it's tough to teach. Uh, I think Ben Graham did a good job of teaching at Colombia, and I was very fortunate to run into him many decades ago. But if you take the average PhD in finance and uh ask him to to value a business, uh he's got a problem. And if he can't value it, I don't know how he can invest in it.
So therefore, he it's much easier to take up efficient market theory and say it doesn't make any difference because everybody knows everything about it anyway. And uh uh there's no sense in trying to think about valuing businesses that the market's efficient. It's valued them all perfectly.
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