저자: JoelGreenblatt · 외국인
요약 보기
가치투자는 기업의 가치를 평가해 할인된 가격에 사는 것이며, 지금은 저평가 종목 바스켓의 기대수익이 높아 가치투자의 기회가 크다는 주장. 가치투자의 정의와 운용 방식: 가치 평가는 미래 현금흐름과 성장, 위험(할인율)을 모두 포함하며, 주식은 사업의 지분이므로 가격이 가치보다 낮을 때 산다는 원칙이다. 과거에는 소수 종목에 집중했으나 운용자금이 커져 현재는 대형 리서치팀으로 수백 개 종목을 분산 보유한다. 모멘텀 투자 비판: 모멘텀은 지난 10년간 가치보다 나았지만, 향후 몇 년간 통하지 않을 수 있고 많은 사람이 아는 혼잡한 매매라고 본다. 가치 기준으로 평가해 할인에 사는 원칙은 바꾸지 않겠다고 밝힘. 시장 인내와 기간: 좋은 가치 평가는 결국 시장이 인정하지만 그 시점은 몇 주가 아니라 2~3년, 때로는 3~5년이 걸릴 수 있다고 봄. 인내 자체가 희소한 자원이라는 점을 강조. 현재 기회 근거(Gotham 리서치 포트폴리오 데이터): 가치 바스켓(상위 1400개 대형주 중 최저평가 20%)은 최근 30년 기준 92분위(매우 저평가)이며, 이때 2년 선행 평균수익률 약 61%. 반면 S&P500은 28분위(고평가)로 과거 2년 평균 약 17%. 다만 이는 예측이 아니라 과거 통계라고 명시. 리스크 및 조건: 92분위에서도 추가 하락 가능성이 있으며, 2009년 3월에는 100분위(14→24 수익률)까지 떨어졌다가 이후 2년간 178% 상승. 따라서 최대 20~30% 추가 하락을 감내할 준비가 필요하다고 경고. 거시 환경: 금리 인상과 경기침체 우려 속에서도 거시가 나쁘게 보이는 시기에 저평가 종목이 많았다는 과거 패턴을 근거로 매수 기회라고 봄. 출연자 및 기타: 영상은 JJ(진행자)가 Greenblatt의 2023년 ETF Think Tank 인터뷰를 소개하는 형식이며, 저서(『주식시장을 이기는 작은 책』 등) 추천 링크가 포함됨.
다듬은 글
hi JJ here with the outer value, well, Joel Greenblatt, one of the greatest investors of our time, of all time. He got over 50% compounding for well over a decade, and he's not done yet. He gave an interview recently where he talked about investing, what value investing means to him, and the opportunity he sees for value investing, the way he does it, in the coming period. He thinks it's going to way outperform the market, so he explains what he's doing. The interview was with ETF Think Tank, and I'm going to leave a link to the full interview in the description. But right now we're going to look at a clip of what Joel Greenblatt says about how investing is fun to him, and also how important investing is.
Investing is really a fun career. It's like solving puzzles all the time, which is a lot of fun. But we're not saving lives. And everyone, I think, to some degree needs to understand some investing, because everyone tries to earn a living, and it would be nice to know what to do with that money. You have to save for the future, so I think it's important to everyone, and it's important to know what you do know and don't know and keep learning.
I wanted to start with that because I think it's a really good description of investing being like a puzzle. It's fun, but it is important, because everybody wants financial security, and we save money, but we also need to invest it. So I think that's a really apt description of investing. Let's see what else he has to say. This time he gets asked about what a value stock, or what value investing, is to him.
Our definition: value is figure out what it's worth, pay less. I'm going to cut in here for a quick second, because I think that's a really great definition as well: work out what it's worth and pay less. That is what value investing is in one short sentence.
Okay, let's go on. "Stock is based on valuing a business. It incorporates growth. It incorporates all the elements of what goes into it: what are the cash flows you're going to get for the next 30, 40 years, which has to incorporate growth. It incorporates the risk of whether those earnings are going to show up or not. That's your discount rate, to figure out whether it's going to show. So all those things are incorporated in valuing a business."
So think of our definition of value investing as merely valuing a business. That's what stocks are. Try to pay less than it's worth. And we try to do it in a bucket. We try to be right on average. We used to be very selective and have very concentrated portfolios and do deep dives on everything. Now we're sort of in the insurance business, on average, trying to do a great job and buy a bucket of stocks that are going to work out over time. Both ways of making money are great, and they're both full-time jobs. So we've shifted more to running a big research team with a big tech team that balances risks and just takes advantage of our evaluations.
Okay, there's Joel's longer definition. He also explains how he invests. When he talked about owning a very focused, small group of stocks in the past, that's similar to what Buffett did in the beginning years. He used to be very concentrated, very focused, maybe five stocks sometimes, or less, but definitely under 10. He did a lot of analysis, looking at what it's worth and paying less, and that's how they got that 50% compounding.
But now he works with a lot more money. Buffett has said the more money you have, the harder it is to earn a good return. So the way he does it now, he has a big research team, which we can't do as individual or retail investors. He's got a huge team, and they analyze basically the whole S&P 500 and every stock, and have a big bucket. It's not concentrated, far from it. It has changed with the amount of money he's investing. Obviously, when you make 50% compounding, a lot of people want to give you money to invest. So he does it a little bit differently now.
Next he talks a bit more about how they go about valuing companies. It involves being like a private investor buying the whole company. Ownership shares of companies, valuing the company as a whole. He starts talking about value investing in relation to momentum investing, how it's so different, and that he thinks value is the better way to go.
"Russell or Morningstar, I have a particular definition, and it may involve low price-to-book, low price-to-sales, and those are merely metrics and don't really mean anything to me, to be honest. Stocks are ownership shares of businesses that we value and try to buy at a discount. We're like private equity investors, and no private equity investor will go buy a whole business because it's selling at a low price-to-book ratio or low price-to-sales ratio, or because momentum was really good this year. Just imagine if I came to you with a real estate investment strategy that says, yeah, I'm just going to buy all the houses that went up the most last year. Hopefully you throw me out of your office."
So again he reiterates that stocks are ownership shares of businesses, not bits of paper. And we don't just buy them because they're going up. Some people do, momentum investors, but he thinks value is the better way to go. He starts to explain that you could have been right for a decade playing that strategy, but ultimately proven wrong.
"Yeah, I agree. I look at it this way. Stocks are not pieces of paper that bounce around that you put Sharpe ratios and Sortinos on. They're ownership shares of businesses that you buy. You value and try to buy at a reasonable or good price. And companies are valued based on their cash flows over time: what are the cash flows, and what are they expected to be on a normalized basis, what are they expected to grow to? That's all value is. So if you value something and try to buy at a discount, that's what I call value investing. Growth is a component of value. The way Wall Street divides all these categories up doesn't mean that much to me."
He also talks about growth as a component of value, which Buffett has talked about before: growth and value are joined at the hip. There's really no such thing as value stocks or growth stocks. Growth is part of value. When you're valuing a business, you value that growth as part of it. That's important to him. A lot of people kind of miss that, and just talk about this bucket of value stocks, where they're not really talking about value investing. They're talking about something different.
I think this next bit is important. He talks about momentum specifically. Momentum has done better than value over the last decade. We could say not maybe so much over the last year or so, but over the last decade people have just ridden the momentum in the bull market. But he says: what if it doesn't work for the next few years? What if it doesn't work for five years? What then? You're just left with valuing the company. What are the fundamentals of the company? What's the company worth? That is value investing to him.
"Okay, well, it's worth, pay less. But to answer your question about momentum, let's say, and I agree momentum has worked for 30 or 40 years, so we have decent data about it, not just in this country but across the globe, maybe one or two exceptions where it hasn't worked, but it works over time. I'm not arguing that point. The point I would argue is, what if it didn't work over the next couple of years? It could be that it works over the long term, you just have to be patient and hang in there. If it didn't work in the next two years, it could be that a lot of people know about momentum, it's a crowded and degraded trade, and that's why it doesn't work over the next two years. Two years from now I would know the answer to that question. However, if I am actually valuing companies, like someone who's buying the whole company based on cash flows, and that didn't work for the next two years, I'm not going to stop doing it. That's what stocks are: ownership shares of businesses that we value and try to buy at a discount. So I'm going to stick with my guns, because that's what stocks are."
"And I made a promise to my students, first-year class, every year for 23 years. I said, if you do good valuation work, I guarantee the market will agree with you. I just never tell them when. A few weeks could be a few years, whatever it might be, but the market eventually gets it right. Anything that's uncertain eventually becomes more certain. The right answer comes out over time. It's crisscrossing with value. It's not necessarily going to stay there at exact value, and obviously the future is uncertain. But the market will recognize, if you do a good job of valuing businesses, that value within a reasonable amount of time. Hopefully a big chunk of the time, in the next two or three years. Sometimes you have to wait three to five. But that's generally correct."
I've heard him say some of this before, about teaching students at Columbia Business School, the intellectual home of value investing since Ben Graham and Warren Buffett. He's worked there, and he tells students that if you do good valuation work, you'll be rewarded by the market, but he doesn't tell you when. So he talks about the importance of being patient. Momentum has been working better over the last decade or more, but he's being patient. He says the market will recognize your valuation, and that's correct: in two to three years, sometimes three to five.
When you think about it, how many people in the last decade or last five years have been willing to wait to get paid for being right, three to five years? People are often impatient. They're not willing to wait that long. They say two or three years, it's not happening, after three years, if the stock you've chosen isn't doing well. How many people are willing to wait up to five years for it to take off or to be paid for that valuation work?
Now he starts talking about the value opportunity he sees right now in value investing over the next few years, and how it's such a great opportunity. Listen to what he says. "How do you see the opportunity in value investing right now?" "Yeah, it's really just starting. If you're looking at your screen, this is the website gotham.com. We just put this up a few days ago, and it's giving away over 50 million dollars' worth of research and construction. It's actually telling us where we think the market is now based on past history. This is a chart of a research portfolio constructed the same way for 30 years. What we're trying to do effectively is look at the 1,400 largest stocks and buy a portfolio, so that our position-weighted averages have about the least expensive 20% of names. That's really what this portfolio is designed to do. It has seven or eight hundred names, but they're not equally weighted. They're weighted towards the cheapest ones, so it's effectively trying to capture the cheapest 20%. It's updated daily. The value of a business hasn't changed daily, but prices do, so the relationship between price and value changes daily, and it's always skewing towards the cheapest 20%."
So that graph shows the average two-year forward return is 61%. He's saying it's a very good opportunity, and this is in comparison to history. They've got data going back to 1990. He thinks it's a very good opportunity. It's gone down a little since he made this video, which was about a week or two ago. It's like in the 50s now, because the market has gone up quite a lot, and for some stocks, but still, this is the opportunity in the cheapest 20% of stocks. He's talking about good-quality stocks, not junk. As his research teams analyze them, the cheapest 20% have a very good opportunity over the coming years.
"Right today, what it says is: over the last 30 years, we're in the 92nd percentile toward cheap for the cheapest 20% of stocks. If you created the same portfolio out of the 1,400 largest, in the same way, and valued stocks in the same way, given our research team and everything else, for the last 30 years, right now we're in the 92nd percentile toward cheap over those 30 years. We call it the Gotham yield, but it's the free cash flow yield, the way we constructed it. We did it the same way over the last 30 years. It's only 14% today, meaning we get a 14% free cash flow yield relative to the all-in cost, the enterprise value of the business. Meaning the only cost of buying the stock plus the debt you assume when you're buying the stock. Pretty similar to the way a private equity firm would invest. So we can construct this very diversified portfolio of hundreds of names, with a position-weighted earnings or cash flow yield of 14%. We've only been able to do this 8% of the time over the last 30 years, and when we've been here, the two-year forward return has averaged possibly 61%."
That's the forward return for this portfolio of hundreds of names. They look at hundreds, not just a focused few like some value investors, or like he used to do. He says it's in the 92nd percentile toward cheap, which historically is a very good forward opportunity, 61%, as this graph shows. At that time, it was a very good opportunity for value investors, for his particular portfolio.
*(여기서 발표자는 영상 시청자에게 좋아요와 구독을 요청합니다.)*
"To give you an idea how that compares to the S&P: the S&P constructed the same way, according to our metrics, is in the 28th percentile toward expensive. When it's been here in the past, two-year forward returns have averaged 17%, sub-normal but not negative. So 61% for the value opportunity, the way we constructed it, versus 17% for the S&P. And that's not a prediction. It's saying when we've been able to construct these portfolios before, this is what's happened over the next two years."
So importantly, he compares it to the S&P 500 index, doing it the same way. He says it's in the 28th percentile toward expensive, in comparison to that value opportunity. That means forward returns are about 17%, rather than 61%, or now, in the late 50s. So there's quite a big disparity between value and the S&P 500 index as a whole. The opportunity looks good to him, and he's one of the greatest investors of all time, so he's worth listening to on this. That's just my opinion.
"And my answer to those who say things don't look so good right now: the Fed is raising rates, we're about to hit a recession. Of course you're able to construct a portfolio that's fairly cheap. And I would say every time over the last 30 years we've been in the 92nd percentile, it's looked at least this bad. So it always looks bad when you're able to buy them this cheap."
He answers the macro question, saying things look bad. Of course you can buy stocks cheap. Whenever it's been in the 92nd percentile like this in the past, the economy or the macro situation has always looked bad. That's part of value investing: buying when the house is burning down and everybody else is running away. He's saying the macro economy looks bad, and it always looks bad, like in 2009, when the market bottomed and the economy looked terrible. He's saying the opportunity is good, and that's not a reason to hold back from buying cheap, good-quality stocks, the cheapest 20%.
"Anyway, I'm very excited about the value opportunities. My bottom line: there's a huge dichotomy. I'm not saying it's like what happened to us in '98-'99, where we were losing money while everybody else was making money, and then in 2000 it completely reversed. But I am saying there's a huge dichotomy between the way we perceive value and what the market is paying for."
Next he gives a caveat about it getting cheaper. Just because it's in the 92nd percentile toward cheap doesn't mean it can't get a lot cheaper. He gives the example of March 2009, the cheapest part of the market in the last big bear market, the global financial crisis, which got to the hundredth percentile. So just because it's at the 92nd, there could be another big washout, and it could get really, really cheap. You have to be prepared for that, and he is.
"If I were investing in the stock market, value was an amazing opportunity right now, 92nd percentile. But let me give you a caveat. On March 2nd, 2009, our Gotham yield, which is now 14%, got to 24%. That's the difference between the 92nd percentile and the 100th percentile, which is the cheapest it's ever gotten. The two-year forward return from there was 178%. So you probably shouldn't be expecting 90% a year. The pendulum of the market got very cheap. All I'm saying is the distance between the 92nd and the 99th or 100th percentile is huge, and you could lose another 30 to 40%. The pendulum, when it got there, of course, made 178% over the next two years. So for me, telling you that we're in the 92nd percentile, with an average return over the next two years from our research of 61%, if you can close your eyes for two years, on average that's what's going to happen. That doesn't mean it's not going to fall 30% from here. And that is the rub, and that's the great news for people like us. The last man standing will be time arbitrage, meaning patience. And patience isn't in short supply, because everyone is looking to make money in the next year or two, and I'm just being patient."
"Our strategy at Gotham is to be patient, just value the companies, where they're going to be trading two, three, four, five years out. Take a little longer horizon than other people. I'm not saying it won't fall 20 or 30% from here, if the market wants to go even crazier on the downside. I'm saying historically, over the next couple of years, if you constructed a diversified portfolio of our definition of value, at least based on past history, we have a great opportunity set, and we're excited about it. That's all, you guys. I'm as excited about the coming value opportunity as I have been in a long time."
In this interview he also talked about a couple of the books he's written. They're really good books. I've read them and they're excellent. I'm going to leave a referral link in the description. Thanks very much. If you use those, I get a little bit of commission from Amazon. His first book was *You Can Be a Stock Market Genius*, not "You Too Can Be a Stock Market Genius," which would be conceded, but everyone calls it "Stock Market Genius." That was in 1997, and it was about value special-situation investing. He wrote a book called *The Little Book That Beats the Market* in 2005. *The Little Book That Still Beats the Market* came out in 2010.
제가 예전에 《The Big Secret for the Small Investor》라는 책도 썼는데, 아쉽게도 별로 팔리지 않았습니다. 그리고 2020년에 또 다른 책을 냈습니다. 《Still Making the Market》이라는 책인데, 조금 전에 나왔고 첫 번째 책의 데이터를 최신화했습니다. 그 책에서는 우리가 추가로 진행한 연구 가운데 일부를 다루고 있습니다.
《You Can Be a Stock Market Genius》는 석사 과정 학생 정도의 독자를 겨냥해 쓴 책입니다. 두 책 모두 점차 초보 투자자에게 맞춰졌는데, 가치투자의 개념과 시장에서 수익을 내는 방법을 쉽게 설명하려고 했습니다. 정말 읽어볼 만한 책이니 링크를 남겨두겠습니다.
여기까지 영상을 보셨다면 유튜브에서 보고 계시거나 좋아하는 팝캐스트 앱에서 듣고 계신다면 구독도 한번 고려해 주세요. 다음에 또 뵙겠습니다. 들어주시고 봐주셔서 감사합니다.
Comments 0