저자: HowardMarks · 외국인
요약 보기
강세장은 낙관이 없을 때 매수, 과도한 낙관 때 매도하는 역발상이 핵심. 강세장 3단계(소수의 통찰→다수의 개선 수용→모두의 영원한 상승 믿음)로 설명하며 3단계에서 손실 위험이 크다고 본다. 정량 지표(PER, 채권 스프레드 등)는 변화기에 오해를 낳을 수 있다. 좋은 결정이 실패할 수도, 나쁜 결정이 성공할 수도 있어 결과가 아닌 과정으로 판단해야 한다고 강조한다. 개별 종목·자산에 대한 가격 방향 예측은 없다.
다듬은 글
When you buy, when there's no optimism, by definition, the price is low relative to the intrinsic value. And And that's when you get the bargains. If you When you do things the real easy and big money in investing comes when you are willing to do something that nobody else will. And when that's buy, nobody else is willing to buy, you buy, you get a bargain.
As I said, I spend most of my time thinking about the market in this regard rather than selecting individual companies or securities. Um so um I think that uh the pattern is is to say to to find when things are overpriced, which is usually a function of there being too much optimism and excesses in the environ- in the physical environment and then too much optimism about what's going on or too much pessimism.
When there are uh uh craters in the environment and too much pessimism about that. You know, in I I I use a lot of uh uh adages. Uh some of my own creation, but mostly other people because they said it so well. And in the early '70s, uh I was a member of something called the Third Thursday Group, which met on Wall Street for lunch on the third Thursday of every month.
And it was for directors of research and senior investors and that kind of thing. Uh and I, you know, I met a lot of very able people much older than me and and and they shared the wisdom. And somebody said to me the first one of the first smart things I heard I learned remember hear- hearing is there are three stages to a bull market.
The first stage, when very few people only a uh gifted few understand that there could be improvement. The second, when most people accept that improvement is actually taking place. And the third, when everybody believes that things can only get better forever. And it is which stage we're in and which uh feelings people are guided by that really determines the status of the market.
So, is are people being too pessimistic in the first stage? That's when you get bargains. Or too optimistic in the third stage, which is when uh you know, the uh excesses on the upside are taking place uh and when you can really get killed if you participate. So, it's really comes down, Shawn, to a question of how much optimism is there.
And uh you know, if if I could only know one thing about every every moment and every security, it's how much optimism is in there. When you buy when there's no optimism, by definition, the price is low relative to the intrinsic value. And And that's when you get the bargains. If you when you do things the real easy and dig money and investing comes when you are willing to do something that nobody else will do.
And when that's buy, nobody else is willing to buy, you buy, you get a bargain. The real easy way to lose money is when you do that everybody else is doing to excess because clearly there now there's too much optimism to be realistic and you pay prices that vastly exceed the intrinsic value and that's an easy time to lose money.
So, uh you know, I I work on that. Now, that's qualitative and there are quantitative things as well. Uh valuations, uh PE ratios, um bond yields, yield spreads, uh capitalization rates on real estate, uh in uh enterprise values on private equity purchase. These are quantitative. Um But but they can mislead.
Uh and and especially now in this change period of great change. Uh the historic valuation ratios may not be that meaningful. And that was another important theme of the recent memo. [clears throat] Yeah, you need to be non-consensus and right. You mentioned at the third Thursday lunches. I I love this.
Uh you just mentioned a little bit of wisdom you happen to pick up there. Any other really meaningful lessons that you picked up from someone much senior to yourself early in your career that just stuck with you all this time? The first of the great adages that I remember learning was that being too hard far ahead of your time is undistinguishable from being wrong.
Or indistinguishable from being wrong. But uh you know um people turn uh negative because they see things in the environment that that are going on that's book them. But and you may be uh in principle right. But if you do it too soon and it doesn't work for a few years everybody says, "Look at that guy.
He used to understand this process, but look how wrong he is." You know, now you're not wrong. You're right, but early. But we're uh right being right early looks like being wrong. And the question is, can you survive in that interim between when you make the decision and when it's proved out? And and these can be very difficult times and you can show terrible performance and lose most of your money under management if even with a decision which is right in principle.
So, actually, you know, I always I always tell um that the first thing I remember learning at Wharton in 1963 um I read a book called Decision Making Under Uncertainty by oil and gas operators, a guy named C. Jackson Grayson, who later went on to be the first energy czar in the '70s after the Arab oil embargo.
And and what he pointed out was that the sign of a good decision is not that it turns out to be right. You And this is counterintuitive. I believe that most of the things that are important in the investing world are counterintuitive. Uh but the point is you can make a good decision and it doesn't work.
Because number one, nobody knows everything when they make the decision. Nobody has all the facts. And number two, the world is is uh uh dominated by uncertainty and by randomness. So, you know, you can make a perfectly good decision with a with good data and a good decision process, but it turns out not to work because of some random event.
And if you if you read Fooled by Randomness by Nassim Taleb, who was That was his first book. Um And a great book in my opinion. Uh you know, he said to understand the quality of a decision, you have to understand not only the events that occurred, but the other events that could have occurred but didn't, what he calls alternative histories.
And only when you consider all the possible outcomes from a decision, do you really understand the quality of that decision? Uh not not by understanding the one event that did occur. So, um it's really important to understand this and to understand that there are lots of good decisions that don't work, and there are lots of bad decisions that work.
We all know We all know about people who are right for the wrong reason. So, only when we look at the world that way, do we understand who really made good decisions or not? And that's a very important distinction, also. So, this is this is the kind of thing which is so uh vague and provocative and uh un- uncertain that that this is why investing is interesting.
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