저자: JeremyGrantham · 외국인
요약 보기
그랜섬의 투자철학과 역사를 다룬 영상. 평균회귀(mean reversion)와 투자는 수수료 차감 전 제로섬이라는 두 원칙을 강조하며, 1999년 GMO의 S&P500 10년 마이너스 수익 예측과 가치주 선호를 소개한다. 과거 경험과 이론 설명 위주이며 현재 시장에 대한 구체적 가격 전망은 제시되지 않는다.
다듬은 글
All right, let's get into it. Today, we're going to try and get inside the mind of one of the most legendary investors out there, Jeremy Grantham. Now, you've probably heard him called a perma bear, right? Always warning about the next big crash. But is that really the whole picture? Nah, we're going to peel back the layers and really understand the philosophy that makes him tick.
So, picture this. The year is 1974. A much younger Jeremy Grantham is standing in Rockefeller's center and he's in front of his biggest, most important client, the Rockefeller family. And his firm's performance, it's been awful. He's just finished this big, passionate speech trying to explain why his strategy is the right one.
And then Lawrence Rockefeller just leans over and drops this line on him. Talk about a crushing blow. I mean, can you imagine that pressure? Your number one client in the middle of a really nasty bare market is basically telling you that you're just full of hot air. That single moment right there captures the massive career risk that comes with being a true long-term contrarian investor.
To get how Grantham not only survived this, but actually thrived, we've got to go all the way back to the beginning. So, what makes a person willing to stand completely against the market even when it's costing them clients, costing them credibility, at least in the short run? Well, for Grantham, the answer is kind of baked right into his DNA.
This is how Grandantham explains it himself. See, people from Yorkshire and England, they're known for being, well, bloody minded, you know, stubborn, independent. And then you have the Quakers who see being thrifty as a fundamental virtue. So, what do you get when you mix that kind of stubbornness with a deep, deep belief in being frugal?
You basically get the perfect recipe for a value investor. And what's really cool is how he lived these ideas. They weren't just talk. His grandfather, a true Quaker, ran a restaurant during the war. He could have made a fortune because he had extra food rations, but instead he kept his prices low. The lines were huge, but he just refused to profit from the situation.
And Grantham's own childhood was all about postwar Britain. You know, rationing, darning socks until they were basically just patches. It wasn't just about saving a buck. It hammered home this core belief that cheap is just better than expensive and that waste waste is the ultimate sin. But here's the thing.
Grantham wasn't born this super disciplined value investor. Nope. He had to learn it the hard way. And it took one catastrophic failure to completely change his entire approach to the markets forever. Back in the roaring bull market of the late60s, Granthm was just like everybody else. He got swept up in all the excitement.
He was chasing the hot stocks of the day, these things called go- go stocks. And it was all based on speculation and momentum, not some deep analysis. He was playing the game, trying to be fast and smart. And then the music stopped and he didn't just get burned, he got completely financially wiped out.
He said it was this profound shock, especially when he realized the lesson he just learned in the most painful way possible was available for free in history books. The key here is that this wasn't just a phase for him. It was a permanent conversion. Literally overnight, the gambler disappeared. And in his place was this patient, dataobsessed value investor.
And this lays out the change perfectly, right? He went from chasing all that short-term market noise to obsessively digging into long-term data. From gambling on popular go- go stocks to systematically hunting down cheap, ignored assets. That incredibly painful lesson became the foundation for his entire career.
Okay, so now that he's got this totally new worldview, Grantham needs a framework, right? a set of tools to actually make sense of the markets. And that led him to what he thinks is the single most powerful concept in all of investing. Mean reversion. It's such a simple but powerful idea. Basically, nothing stays crazy forever.
When profit margins get super high, competition comes in and pushes them back down. When valuations get ridiculously low, smart money eventually flows in and pushes them back up. For Granthm, it's like a law of financial gravity. What goes way way up must eventually fall back to the long-term trend line and what goes way way down must eventually climb back.
Just take a look at this chart of the market's price toearnings ratio. You can see these insane swings, right? Times of total euphoria where valuations go to the moon like the late60s or the dot bubble and then times of complete despair where they just crash. But do you see that line running through the middle?
That's the average, the mean. The market always always finds its way back to it. That's the predictable force Grantham is betting on. His other huge idea is just as powerful and it's all based on simple arithmetic, not some complex academic theory. Forget all that stuff about efficient markets. Granthm says that before you factor in any fees, investing is a zero sum game.
Period. For every person that beats the market, another person has to lose to the market by that exact same amount. So once you add in fees and trading costs, the average active money manager is mathematically guaranteed to underperform. And he uses this poker analogy that just makes it so clear. Think about it.
The total amount of money in the pot at the poker table doesn't change. Everybody's just fighting over a bigger piece of the pie. So if I'm going to win by 2%, someone else at the table has to lose by 2%. And on top of that, they have to cover the costs for both of us. It's this brutal simple math that most of Wall Street just kind of pretends doesn't exist.
So Grantham is armed with these two killer ideas, mean reversion and the zero sum game. And now he's about to be put to the ultimate test during one of the craziest market mania of the 20th century, which you guessed it brings us right back to that showdown with the Rockefellers. This was the time of the Nifty50.
This group of huge blue chip stocks that Wall Street believed you could buy at literally any price and just hold forever. Meanwhile, Grantham's firm was digging around, buying these obscure, cheap, small cap stocks nobody wanted. The Albertson's versus Safeway example is just perfect. They were almost identical businesses, grocery stores, but Albertson's was run better, had less debt, and was trading for half the price.
But the market didn't care. Safeway was big and famous. Albertson's wasn't. And this is exactly why that meeting with the Rockefellers was so painful. sticking to his guns, buying the Albertsons of the world while everyone else got rich on the Safeways led to absolutely sickening underperformance. I mean, this is the ultimate test for a contrarian, isn't it?
To be right in the long run, you have to be willing to be painfully wrong and look like a total idiot in the short run. But what happens when the bubble finally bursts? Well, this is the proof. This is the vindication. Just look at this forecast that Grantham's firm GMO put out at the absolute peak of the 1999 tech bubble.
They basically said the S&P 500 would deliver negative returns for a decade. While boring, unloved stuff like emerging markets would do great. The rest of the world thought they were completely insane. And 10 years on, the correlation between what they predicted and what actually happened was an astounding 93.6%.
The odds of getting a result like that just by random chance, something like 1 in 550,000. It's just unbelievable proof of the whole concept. The pain of being a contrarian was huge for sure, but the datadriven payoff was undeniable. So, why doesn't everyone invest this way? Well, Grantham's own hero, the economist John Maynard Kanes, just nailed the reason why.
For most professional investors, the biggest risk isn't actually losing money for your clients. It's career risk. It's losing your job. See, nobody ever gets fired for buying IBM along with everyone else. Even if it's way overpriced, but you will absolutely get fired for buying some weird cheap stock all by yourself.
Even if you end up being right, it is just safer to be wrong with the crowd. Which really just leaves us with this one last question. The entire story of Jeremy Grantham is this epic battle against the pressure to just go along with the crowd. It's a powerful testament to a philosophy that was built on frugality, on painful experience, and this unshakable faith in data.
And it kind of forces us all to ask ourselves in our own decisions, do we have the guts to actually follow the data, or is the comfort of the crowd just too tempting to resist?
Comments 0