저자: JoelGreenblatt · 외국인
요약 보기
그린블라트는 싼 주식(담배꽁초 투자)에서 품질 중심으로 옮겨간 과정을 설명하며, 좋은 밸류에이션 작업은 보통 2~3년 내 시장에 인정받는다고 주장한다. 개별 종목은 90%의 경우 2~3년이면 가치가 반영되고 종목군은 더 빠르다고 말한다. S&P500은 1996년 이후 등락을 반복했으나 전체적으로 크게 올랐고, 시장이 여전히 비합리적이라 기회가 있다고 본다. 액티브 투자 가능성을 강조하며 Damodaran, Parikh 도서를 추천한다.
다듬은 글
But, at first, Buffett wasn't so captivated by good business. He was famous for pioneering the "cigarette butt" approach. Where I wasn't looking for quality, I was just looking for them to be cheap. But then he too made a transition. Yes, I mean, my master's thesis at Wharton, or what it became, along with my friends Rich Pzena and Bruce Newberg, was an article we wrote and that was eventually published in the Journal of Portfolio Management about buying cigarette butts.
You know, they used to call them " net-nets," buying shares that are selling below their liquidation value. He showed that simply by buying, if you bought cheaply enough, you could make good money. And that's how Warren Buffett got his start. But, when you think about why we moved towards quality, suppose you find a stock that is worth 10 dollars and is selling for six.
It's quite cheap. But, if you don't control the business and it's not a good business, your margin of safety can erode over time, meaning that those $10 could become $8 if you don't really control those assets. And what you're really looking for, or the businesses, or what seems best to me, are companies where those 10 dollars could grow to 11 or 12, increasing your margin of safety.
So, I might accept a smaller safety margin if I thought that was growing. But there's more, buying cheap things works. I mean , cheap things work on their own. I have nothing against that. You just have to get out of it. So, Buffett, who manages one hundred billion dollars or a similar figure, it's not easy to spend five billion and then sell it to another guy who's going to pay you more than those five billion.
It's too big. So , when he was...and said recently, around the year 2000, he said, "Well, if you give me a million dollars, I can get 50% annually on that." There are many opportunities. Your opportunity set shrinks as companies get bigger. If you can invest in anything, if you don't have a lot of money, you can invest in thousands and thousands of companies.
Buffett now looks at the 300 largest companies, because the smaller ones won't move the needle. So, there's a lot you can do in special situations. Well, one thing that many of my students ask me, you know, and it happens every year now, probably for the last five or six years. And they ask me the question at some point during the semester, when you were younger, because you are very old, things were easier.
There was less competition. There were fewer hedge funds. There were fewer computers. There were fewer smart guys getting into this business. I mean, when I came in, I was telling Howard earlier , the market hadn't gone up in 13 years by the time I got to Wall Street . So it wasn't a place that really attracted a lot of people.
And so, my answer is this. People who are very good, especially in special situations, I have two answers. One is the people who are good at investing in special situations, looking out of the ordinary for liquidations or recapitalizations or spin-offs or any of those things . Many of them have liquidity constraints.
You know, Warren Buffett started making a lot of money doing those things, but he got too big for his britches. And then I ask them, I tell them to listen, do you know what happens to people who become very good at analyzing businesses in this area? The problem is that they earn a lot of money. And they become too large to remain in this area.
So there's always a new group of people who can come in and look at some of those smaller situations, because the guys who are really good at it get too big to really take advantage of some of the smaller or more obscure situations. And therefore, there is always room for new people to enter that area.
And then, on a larger scale, you know, because people still teach efficient markets and they'll say, "Hey, you know, active investment doesn't work ." And even Warren Buffett says, "Go buy some ETFs or, you know, indexes and all that." And what I will say is that for most people that is true, because they don't know how to value companies.
But I will give you a counterpoint, and this is what I tell my students. So most of my students are around 27 years old or something like that. So I said, I say to everyone, " Let's go back to when you were about 10 years old, where you might start to notice some of this." And let's look at the most followed market in the world, and that would be the United States.
And let's look at the most followed stocks in the most followed world, in the most followed market in the world, and that would largely be the S&P 500 stocks. Let's take a look at what's happened since you were 10 years old. Look at the S&P 500 from 1996 to 2000, it doubled. From 2000 to 2002, it was reduced by half.
From 2002 to 2007, it doubled. From 2007 to 2009, it was reduced by half. From 2009 to today, it has basically tripled. That's my way of saying that people are still crazy. And that's a very unfair thing to say, because this S&P 500 is an average of 500 stocks. There is a large dispersion within that average between the stocks that are in favor, that people love emotionally, and those that people hate .
So it's actually much worse than what I just described. There is a great dichotomy between the things people like and the things they don't, those they are in favor of and those they are not. Within that, there's all this noise happening within that average. That average softens things. So, if you believe what Ben Graham said, you know, here's the fair value and here are the market prices.
It's like a wave around fair value. And if he has a disciplined way of valuing companies, and buys more than his fair share when they are low, and sells a little perhaps if he is short, and is very disciplined. I mean, I make two guarantees to my students on the first day of class. The first guarantee is this.
If they do a good job of valuation, I guarantee the market will agree with them. I just don't tell them when. It could be a couple of weeks, it could be two or three years. But I assure you that the market will agree with them. And the corollary of that is this, and it is very powerful. I tell you that in 90% of cases for an individual stock, two or three years is enough time for the market to recognize the value they see if they have done a good job.
When you bring together a group of companies, on average, that happens much faster. So, um, you know, both are very powerful. It simply says that good work will be rewarded. Therefore, I don't believe that the reason people don't beat the market is because the market is efficient, or even close to being efficient, or because it isn't emotional.
It's very emotional, or it can't be done. There are all sorts of institutional and agency reasons, and many other reasons why they don't. But because prices are efficient, if you just pick up the newspaper, observe what's going on, or listen to what I've been telling my students since they were, you know , 10 years old, it's clear that people are still crazy and that there are opportunities out there.
Joel Greenblatt says that the market may take no more than two to three years to recognize the true value of a stock. But there is an important condition. First, you must perform the assessment correctly. There are dozens, even hundreds, of stocks that don't go anywhere for years, only to deliver extraordinary returns when the market finally recognizes their true value.
Sometimes, a few years of great performance can make up for all those years of waiting. However, identifying such opportunities requires preparation. The more thoroughly you understand a business, its finances, competitive advantages, and intrinsic value, the lower your chances of making a serious valuation error.
So, if you want to improve your valuation skills and become a better investor, here are two books I highly recommend. The first is The Little Book of Valuation by Aswath Damodaran. It introduces the fundamentals of business valuation, including discounted cash flow, valuation-related topics, and how to think about the relationship between a company's financial performance and its intrinsic value.
The second is Value Investing and Behavioral Finance by Parag Parikh. This book is one of my favorites. This book explores the principles of value investing and the psychological biases that can influence investment decisions . It helps you understand why investors often make irrational decisions and why discipline and patience are so important in the stock market.
But remember, your job as an investor is to understand how much a business is worth. Identify a significant margin of safety and have the patience to let the market recognize that value. The better prepared you are, the better your chances of making informed investment decisions.
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