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At the heart of this is obviously the idea of bargain shopping, that you want to get what you pay for. Obviously, that's what everyone wanted, and if everyone wanted the same thing , you'd think that, um, all professional investors would be value investors, and that's even further from the truth. In fact, value investing, as it is properly practiced, constitutes a tiny minority among all investment professionals.
Most people hold different views, and let me simply articulate alternative views on investing for them. First, yes, shares legally represent partial claims, partial ownership, but it is, first and foremost, a piece of paper that you can work with constantly. And so it follows that successful investing is about successfully guessing stock movements based on whatever sound theories or practices you can find.
And third, the market should be respected, and even feared, because value can indeed be found in the market, and it is possible to buy and sell in the market. So, this is a different perspective, and it sounds even more compelling than the initial views I put forward as a value investor. In fact, I would say that most people actually take the stairs rather than the formal path.
So, as a young student trying to get into business, which path do you choose? I would advise you to do some basic research on the results of different approaches and philosophies before doing this. And fortunately, there's been a lot of research , because we have a pretty good track record, uh, over the last 100 years, at least since then , uh, and all of the research that, uh, has come to the unmistakable conclusion that true value investors, when practiced properly, consistently, uh, outperform the market, while all, almost all other strategies, uh, either follow the market or significantly lag the market over long periods of time.
Uh, now you can dispute this result, but I think the evidence is pretty compelling, so the question is , is it true? Uh, of course, the study also concluded that the two value investors that are good practice actually make up a tiny percentage of professional investors, and that's also a very interesting study, but it really aligns with our daily observations, having been in this profession for almost 20 years.
Hmm, so why is that ? Why is that? If empirical research overwhelmingly concludes that value investing is the right way to go, and, uh , the philosophy and practice have been well articulated for seven decades, well practiced, and even popularized by wildly successful examples like Mr. Buffett, whom we just mentioned, why don't more people follow what they're doing?
It turns out that this has a lot to do with human psychology . In value investing, you should have the mindset that if you've done your job correctly and the market is against you, you should feel comfortable standing alone. Hmm, and that's the concept behind Mr. Market. But this is actually very difficult to do.
This is a very unnatural thing to do when the entire market is against you. When everyone else really thinks you're stupid, uh, neurotic, and wrong, and you're now inclined to think that everyone else is Mr. Market, irrational, neurotic. Uh, these are very, very unnatural things that are on the verge of self-illusion.
Indeed, that was probably most people's opinion of you at the time. Uh, you look pretty funny and very uncomfortable. In fact, our very evolution requires a certain degree of conformity. Think about millennia, millions of years of evolutionary history. Uh, our ancestors, our animal predecessors, uh, you know, basically persecuted groups, and if someone was left out and they very easily disagreed with everyone else in the group, then they're not the ones who'll survive.
So all the genes that survived in the past are those that tend towards extreme degrees of conformity, and conformity also works very well for human society because we are, after all, fundamentally social animals. We need this sense of conformity and compassion to bring peace to society and live together.
So you need certain mutated genes to feel completely comfortable when everyone else disagrees with you . This is at least one of the reasons why the financial market itself is not that efficient. The free market has worked remarkably well since its emergence in modern times, about 230 years ago. But he worked most, I think, primarily in the area of goods and services, physical goods, and defined surfaces .
We have several hundred years of compelling evidence to support this. Every country where we practice this has proven to be extremely prosperous. Now we also have several hundred years of history. The free market is a practice in the financial market, full of ups and downs and tree movements. It doesn't really work that well when it comes to financial assets.
Why? Well, a financial asset is essentially a discounted mechanism for predicting the future. These are discounted estimated cash flows to infinity. And of course, we all know: a) we cannot predict infinity; b) we can't even directly predict what we can see, which is usually very brief. Therefore, an element of speculation and guesswork is necessary in the valuation of financial assets .
If you overdo it, there is a certain element to the stock market and the financial market in general : an element of gambling, an element of guesswork, an element of speculation. And as we all know, in clean casinos and clean gambling there is a huge advantage in favor of the players, and in fact in favor of the casino owners who set the rules.
This is why gambling is such a profitable business. And yet, this has never really deterred people from gambling. There is a certain element that really fits human nature. They love gambling , even though everyone knows the odds are against them, which is never safe, which prevents gambling from becoming a very big business, especially when it is allowed and sanctioned by the government , as is practiced in Nevada or Macau in some different geographical regions of the world.
And so there is a certain aspect of this widespread distribution in the financial market as well. And that's the reason why it doesn't work, uh, perfectly, as the financial crisis of 2008-2009 recently demonstrated, which is just part of a long history of financial crises. Uh, but that doesn't mean we have a better way to deal with it.
So, as Churchill said, democracy is probably the worst of all , just like the market. The free market also works with financial assets . It doesn't work very well. It certainly does n't work as well as goods and services, but it's still one of the best ways we've come up with in terms of facilitating the flow of finance, which is key to a modern economy.
So he's not working, but he's working. So this really challenges us as a value investor, a true value investor . You just need to rethink yourself and stop betting too often, knowing that the financial market doesn't actually work very well, but most of the time it works quite well. Therefore, you need to wait for a mature situation before you can place a bet so that you have enough margin of safety and can realistically withstand the entire market when it happens.
This requires extreme discipline in demanding a large margin of safety. Virtually all successful value investing practices have all of these elements in common. They don't bet often, and whenever they do bet, they need a large margin of safety to feel comfortable in case the market moves against them, and so that they can take advantage of opportunities that are almost obvious, and these are truly the most difficult challenges.
Most people don't really have the necessary discipline, the mental discipline, to do that. And so we can say that in a bull market everyone practices this, at least everyone would call themselves a value investor . They buy something that they think has a 20% discount on what they consider to be intrinsic value .
And when that discount increases, they really present themselves as a successful, smart, value investor, but then when the market really goes against them, which is very easy, 20% discount is almost within the margin of error, in the sense that if the market starts, you would say, they will be the first to respect the market move, which usually happens.
And so when you see a situation like that, it's usually a sign that it's not true value investing, practiced correctly. So, as a young student, young analyst, or someone interested in finance , I would strongly advise you to study successful practices from real life or history. But I studied all the examples of high-value investing decisions very well.
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