Howard Marks: The Thinking Skill That Separates Great Investors

요약 보기

하워드 마크스의 2차 사고(consensus와 다르게 생각하기), 위험은 변동성이 아니라 영구적 자본 손실, 투자 심리 추의 극단(과열·공포)을 읽기, 시장 사이클 인식, 미래 불확실성 인정 등 5가지 투자 사고 개념을 소개한다. 구체적 자산 가격 예측은 없다.

다듬은 글

※ 자동 자막 원문(다듬기 전)

01. here is a question most investors never ask not is this a good company not will earnings grow not what does the analyst say the question Howard Marks asks is this what does everyone else think about this company and are they wrong that single question is the foundation of second level thinking and it is the reason marks built Oak Tree Capital into a 170 billion dollar asset management firm generated some of the most consistent risk adjusted returns in investment history and wrote memos that Warren Buffett has called among the first things he reads when they arrive most investors think at the first level they ask whether a business is good or bad whether the economy is growing or shrinking whether a stock is cheap or expensive marks thinks at the second level he asks what everyone else already believes about those things and whether reality is about to diverge from consensus in the next 17 minutes I'm gonna walk you through his five core concepts the framework that separates investors who are merely right from investors who are profitably right concept 3 is the one that will permanently change how you read financial news and once you see it you cannot unsee it stay with me Howard Marks founded Oak Tree Capital Management in 1995 Today it manages approximately $170 billion specializing in alternative investments and credit markets areas of the market most investors never enter but Marx is not famous primarily for his fund he is famous for his memos since 1990 Marks has written investor memos long detailed essays on market psychology risk cycles and the nature of investment thinking they have become legendary in the investment world buffet has said he reads them immediately upon arrival they are studied at business schools quoted by fund managers and collected in his books the most important thing in mastering the market cycle what makes them unusual is that marks almost never tells you what to buy he tells you how to think his central insight the one that underpins everything else is this in investing being right is not enough you need to be right in a way that the market has not already priced in think about what that means if you correctly identify that a company is excellent but every other investor has also identified that the company is excellent the stock already reflects that view there is no edge your correct analysis produces average returns at best the only way to generate above average returns marks argues is to be right about something that the consensus is wrong about and to do that consistently you need to think differently from the consensus not occasionally but systematically that is second level thinking concept 1 explains what it means in practice concept 3 is where it gets genuinely uncomfortable because it requires you to act against your own instincts at exactly the wrong moment and Concept 5 is the one Mark says most investors resist the most because it requires admitting that the future is fundamentally unknowable first level thinking is simple and superficial it says this is a great company I should buy the stock or the economy is going to slow down I should sell second level thinking is more complex it asks this is a great company but does everyone else already know that is the greatness already in the price and what would have to happen for the stock to outperform from here Marx frames it this way the first level thinker looks at the world and forms an opinion the second level thinker looks at the world forms an opinion and then asks what does the consensus think and what is the probability that the consensus is wrong this distinction sounds simple its implications are profound it means that buying a genuinely great company at a consensus agreed great price will by definition produce consensus average returns above average returns require owning something before the consensus recognizes its value or selling something before the consensus recognizes its deterioration how Mark supplies it Mark's built oak trees edge in credit markets high yield bonds distressed debt companies in financial difficulty these are areas most institutional investors avoid because they are uncomfortable and require specialized expertise but precisely because they are avoided they are often mispriced the consensus ignores them which means the consensus cannot set an efficient price Marx found that by thinking carefully about these unloved assets asking not just is this cheap but is this cheaper than the consensus believes and why he could find opportunities that the market had systematically undervalued his returns were not from taking more risk they were from being right about things the consensus was wrong about what you do before any investment add one question to your process what does the consensus believe about this then ask whether you have a specific reason to think the consensus is wrong if you cannot articulate a clear reason why the market is mispricing something you are not investing with an edge you are investing with hope concept 2 is about risk and marks has a definition of risk that is completely different from what you'll find in any finance textbook the idea modern finance defines risk as volatility the degree to which a price fluctuates the more a stock moves up and down the riskier it is considered to be this is how risk is measured in most academic models most investment frameworks and most fund reporting Marx considers this definition dangerously wrong his definition risk is the probability of permanent loss of capital not the probability of temporary price decline not the standard deviation of returns the probability that you will lose money you cannot get back how Mark supplies it the distinction has enormous practical consequences a stock that drops 40% in a crash and recovers fully within two years has high volatility but if you held through the decline it produced zero permanent loss by the academic definition it was risky by Mark's definition it was not conversely a bond that trades at a stable price but defaults quietly producing total loss with almost no volatility look safe by the academic definition it was catastrophically risky by marks he argues that the obsession with volatility causes investors to avoid temporary discomfort at the cost of permanent opportunity they sell volatile assets that have not permanently deteriorated in order to hold stable looking assets that are silently accumulating real risk the most dangerous investments marks has written are often the ones that feel the safest because the risk is hidden rather than visible what you do when you feel the urge to sell a position because of price volatility stop and ask Mark's question has the underlying business permanently deteriorated or has only the price moved if the business is intact the volatility is noise if the business has genuinely changed for the worse that is real risk and selling is correct regardless of the current price concept 3 is the one I promised at the start the idea that will permanently change how you read financial news and it requires you to act against every instinct you have the idea the peak concept marks describes investor psychology as a pendulum that swings between two extremes euphoria and despair greed and fear risk tolerance and risk aversion the pendulum never rests at the center its natural resting point for long it swings from one extreme to the other driven not by economic fundamentals but by collective human emotion and crucially it almost always swings further than logic justifies in both directions in euphoria investors believe the future will be permanently better than the past valuations expand beyond what earnings can support risk is ignored every purchase feels safe because prices keep rising in despair investors believe the future will be permanently worse than the past assets are abandoned at prices well below intrinsic value risk feels everywhere even when assets are genuinely cheap every holding feels dangerous because prices keep falling how Marx applies it why it changes how you read the news here is the practical implication that transforms how you consume financial media when headlines are uniformly positive when every analyst is bullish when the news cycle celebrates a market that keeps going up when risk feels like a distant concept Mark says the pendulum has swung toward euphoria the consensus is comfortable and comfortable consensus is almost always where the next correction originates when headlines are uniformly negative when every analyst is predicting disaster when the news cycle features crises and collapses when risk feels everywhere and inescapable Mark says the pendulum has swung toward despair the consensus is panicking and panicking consensus is almost always where the next recovery originates he is not saying buy when markets are falling and sell when they are rising in a simple mechanical way he is saying pay attention to where collective psychology sits on the pendulum when euphoria is extreme protect capital when despair is extreme deploy capital the single most reliable investment signal marks has identified is not an earnings ratio or a technical pattern it is the degree to which the consensus has become either uniformly optimistic or uniformly pessimistic extreme consensus in either direction is a warning sign this is why marks reads news not to get information about the world but to get information about what investors are currently feeling about the world the headlines tell him where the pendulum is what you do start reading financial media as a sentiment indicator rather than an information source when every article is warning of crash note that despair may be extreme when every article is celebrating gains note that euphoria may be extreme neither is a precise timing signal both are calibration tools for where collective psychology sits on the pendulum and calibration is what second level thinking runs on concept 4 is about cycles and marks has spent more time studying market cycles than almost any investor alive what he found should change how you think about timing the idea marks does not believe in market timing he does not believe anyone can consistently predict when markets will rise or fall when recessions will begin or end or when specific assets will appreciate or depreciate what he believes in is cycle awareness understanding where we are in the economic and psychological cycle and adjusting your positioning accordingly the distinction is critical timing says the market will fall in the next six months sell now Cycle awareness says based on current valuations credit conditions and investor psychology we appear to be late in the cycle therefore I will hold more defensive assets and less aggressive ones until conditions shift one requires predicting the future the other requires only observing the present how Mark supplies it Marx watches three cycles simultaneously the economic cycle the credit cycle and the psychological cycle the economic cycle are corporate earnings growing or contracting is unemployment rising or falling is GDP expanding or shrinking the credit cycle is credit expanding or tightening are lending standards loose or strict are spreads between safe and risky bonds narrow or wide marks considers the credit cycle the most important because easy credit fuels euphoria and tight credit accelerates despair far beyond what economic fundamentals justify the psychological cycle where is collective sentiment are investors fearful or greedy cautious or reckless this maps directly to the pendulum concept when all three cycles are late stage simultaneously strong economy easy credit euphoric psychology marks becomes deeply defensive not because he knows a crash is coming because the conditions that precede crashes are present he is positioning for probability not prediction what you do build a simple cycle checklist once a quarter assess is the economy expanding or contracting is credit easy or tight are interest rates rising or falling are banks lending freely or cautiously is investor sentiment euphoric or fearful are ipos oversubscribed are speculative assets performing is leverage in the system rising the answers won't tell you what will happen next week they will tell you whether to be more aggressive or more defensive with your capital right now that is cycle awareness that is positioning that is marks and finally Concept 5 the one Mark says most investors resist because it requires accepting something about investing that our brains are wired to reject the idea marks divides investors into two schools those who believe the future can be known and those who believe it cannot the first school which includes most retail investors and a surprising number of professionals believes that with enough research enough data and enough analytical skill the future trajectory of markets economies and individual companies can be predicted with useful accuracy Marx belongs firmly to the second school he believes the future is fundamentally uncertain not just difficult to predict structurally unknowable in its specific outcomes because it depends on the interaction of millions of human decisions each of which is itself uncertain his conclusion any investment strategy built on the premise that you know what will happen is flawed at its foundation not because the analysis is wrong but because the premise is wrong how marks applies it this does not lead marks to paralysis it leads him to a specific approach to portfolio construction if you cannot know what will happen you build portfolios that are robust across a range of outcomes rather than optimized for a single predicted outcome you avoid leverage because leverage amplifies the consequences of being wrong and in a world of fundamental uncertainty being wrong is inevitable you maintain margin of safety because if you cannot know the future precisely you need a buffer between what you pay and what you believe something is worth you diversify not just across assets but across your own assumptions holding positions that will perform well under different scenarios rather than concentrating everything on a single view of the world and perhaps most importantly you remain humble in the face of apparent certainty when a consensus view feels overwhelmingly obvious and universally agreed upon marks become suspicious because in his experience the times when the future feels most knowable are often the times it surprises most violently what you do review your current portfolio and ask how many of my positions depend on a specific future outcome being correct if the answer is most of them you are predicting not investing now ask which of my positions would still be reasonable investments if my central Assumption turned out to be wrong those are the positions with genuine margin of safety those are the ones marks would recognize as second level thinking made real the goal is not to be right about the future the goal is to build a portfolio that performs acceptably even when you are wrong and exceptionally when you happen to be right five concepts one framework built by a man who has spent 50 years thinking about thinking and writing about it with more clarity than almost anyone in the investment world let's bring it together concept one second level thinking don't just ask if something is good or bad ask what the consensus believes and whether the consensus is wrong concept 2 risk is not volatility risk is permanent loss of capital temporary price declines that recover are not risk silent deterioration that does not is Concept 3 the pendulum markets swing further than logic justifies in both directions when consensus sentiment is extreme act against it read news as a sentiment indicator not an information source concept 4 cycle awareness you cannot predict where markets go next you can observe where we are in the economic credit and psychological cycle and position accordingly concept 5 know what you don't know the future is fundamentally uncertain build portfolios that are robust across outcomes not optimized for a single prediction here is what ties all five together every one of these concepts points to the same underlying truth investment edge does not come from knowing more facts than the consensus it comes from thinking more clearly about the same facts the financial information available to you and to every professional investor is largely the same the difference is not access it is the quality of the thinking applied to that information marks has spent 50 years developing and refining a way of thinking that is more disciplined more honest about uncertainty and more aware of collective psychology than what most investors ever develop you now have the framework if this series has changed how you think about markets money and the investors who have navigated them most successfully there is one more video I wanna show you it covers the one strategy all five investors we've examined share the single thread that connects Buffet Munger Dalio Lynch and marks despite their very different approaches that video is right here