저자: MohnishPabrai · 외국인
요약 보기
버핏·그레이엄 투자 원칙을 되짚으며 찰리 멍거의 중요성을 강조. 벤저민 그레이엄 원칙을 과도하게 적용하지 말고 멍거의 질적 투자 관점을 병행해야 한다고 주장. 투자 적중률은 낮아(버핏 약 3~4%, 미국 주식 상위 약 4%가 시장 수익 창출) 좋은 기업을 오래 보유하고 능력범위(circle of competence) 내에서 소수의 베팅을 해야 한다고 설명. 현재 미국 시장엔 과거와 같은 기회가 드물고 터키 시장 등에 유사한 저평가 기회가 있다고 언급.
다듬은 글
We can't overdose on Ben Graham and in fact one of the big problems I had in life was there was too much Ben Graham and too little Charlie Munger. Ben Graham talks about a lot of other things. My suggestion is to not focus on the rest of it because it might hurt you more than it helps you. You don't need to know everything about everything.
If you know a little bit we can do a lot. John Templeton used to say that the best analyst is going to be wrong 1/3 of the time. I think 1/3 is very low. We're going to be wrong more than half the time. Over the last 60 years Warren has made three or 400 different investments and key hires. Out of those three or 400 it has been 12 according to him that has led to the creation of Berkshire Hathaway.
So even for someone like Warren Buffett it has been a very low hit rate. It's been a 4% approximate hit rate, maybe a 3% hit rate. Obviously we with capital allocation we start with Ben Graham. But one needs to calibrate. So we can't overdose on Ben Graham. And in fact one of the big problems I had in life was there was too much Ben Graham and too little Charlie Munger.
So Ben Graham, you know, the three important tenants that he came up with, the three very important models which are very important and which is you're not buying a stock, you're buying a piece of a business. Mr. Market is there to serve you, not to advise you. So we're not take trying to learn something about a company with the stock price.
And the third is the margin of safety. You always want to be buying things well below what the underlying value is. And again, the thing is that Ben Graham talks about a lot of other things and I think my suggestion is to not focus on the rest of it because it might hurt you more than it helps you. One of the things to remember about Ben Graham is he was very smart, but his entire security analysis came from the experience of the 1930s.
And the 1930s were a very extreme time in US market history where we have severe dislocations. 25% unemployment and so on. We did not see that level of unemployment in the financial crisis, or during the pandemic, or anything else that's happened since then. So, it's possible it may happen in the future, but we really should not be investing with the framework of assuming it's happening next week.
Buffett talks about the 20-punch card. You know, he says that if you think about that in an investing lifetime, you only get to invest in 20 stocks. And each time you invest in a stock, you punch the card once, kind of like at Subway or something. And when you're done with 20, that's it. If that were the rule that you had to apply, then all of us would be very careful about what we invest in.
Because basically, in an investing lifetime of maybe 70 or 80 years of investing, on average, you'd maybe making one bet every 3 to 5 years. And so, fast is slow. And so, you're better off slowing things down, and you're better off looking at things from a perspective where we want to make very few bets, and we want to be very thoughtful about how we make those bets.
Then we get to the circle of competence, you know, and the importance of circle of competence is what Warren says, which is the size of the circle is not very relevant, but staying in its epicenter is very relevant. That picture you see has two gentlemen and a lady. The guy on the left is Marc Andreessen.
The lady in the center is his wife. And the guy on the right is her father, John Ariega. So, John Ariega is a He passed away, I think, 2 or 3 years back, and he was a billionaire. So, his daughter is a billionaire to the power of billionaire. So, you know, she's She starts a billionaire, and then she married a billionaire.
Anyway, the thing is John Ariega was a friend of Charlie Munger's, and his circle of competence was extremely tiny. He only invested in real estate within a mile of the Stanford campus. And his whole life that's all he did. He never ventured beyond that and starting with nothing he became a billionaire.
And if you walked with John Arrillaga around the Stanford campus every single building he could give you the history of when it was built, who owned it, what the rents were, what were the different transactions, when it was bought and sold. He knew everything about every piece of real estate around.
And basically he acted on these properties when there was distress. So usually whenever there were downturns and people were distressed and these properties came up he would he knew which were the ones he wanted and was every always under levered, loaded up when everyone else was feeling pain and then just kept these properties forever and did extremely well.
We should always remember that we don't need to know everything about everything. If we know a little bit we can do a lot. It's guaranteed that we're going to have a very high error rate in this business. And John Templeton used to say that the best analyst is going to be wrong 1/3 of the time. I think 1/3 is very low.
We're going to be wrong more than half the time. And when you look at this you know, 30% or 50% error rate, in reality if we look at US equity markets over the last 90 years, that basically about 4% of companies have delivered all the market returns. So it was very important to be invested in those 4% companies and if you miss those then things wouldn't work out and which is why the index does so well because the index owns the whole thing and so it gets the benefit of that.
So most equities that are publicly traded are not good investments. The overwhelming majority of them are not good investments which again goes back to the 20 punch card. The 4% is actually very similar to what Warren pointed out a few years ago where he said that 12 ideas that he had over time had led to the creation of Berkshire Hathaway.
And I took a stab at what I think those 12 ideas are, you know, with probably Ajit being number one and so on. But basically, if you think about Berkshire Hathaway over the last 60 years, Warren has made, I would guess, at least three or 400 different investments and key hires. And out of those three or 400, it has been 12, according to him, that has led to the creation of Berkshire Hathaway.
So even for someone like Warren Buffett, it has been a very low hit rate. It's been a 4% approximate hit rate, maybe a 3% hit rate. We have to remember that very few ideas that we come up with are actually going to end up moving the needle. What the second What this 4% implies is that when we own a great business, you know, we get into the wonderful situation of owning a great business, we should be very reluctant to sell the business.
We should be reluctant to sell the business when it's fully priced. We should also be very reluctant to sell it when it's overpriced. And we should be possibly the only time we should think about selling those businesses is when they are egregiously overpriced. And so this is where we depart from Ben Graham, and it's a very important departure to make.
The risk of owning a great business above what it's worth, in my opinion, is lower than being in a constant gin and rummy game of buying and selling all the time. If we look at Berkshire Hathaway, longest held public equity that they owned is Coke, Coca-Cola. They bought Coke in 1988. And so now it's 38 years.
And if you think about Warren, Warren is going to be 96 this year. So, the first buy and hold forever stock in Berkshire Hathaway came when he was about 57 or 58 years old. You know, it didn't come very early in life. I'm now he was He started doing buy and hold when he started buying the businesses like See's Candy and so on.
But on the public equities, that discipline came fairly late in life. And so, many of you in the room are well under 58. You don't need to wait till you're 58 to figure this out. We've got it figured out now. These are some examples of businesses that I used to own and that that I wish I still owned and I no longer own because [clears throat] there was overdosing on Graham and underdosing on Munger, which we're trying to balance off here.
So, the main reason I'm giving this talk is just educate myself. So, history doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme and what I found is that when I talk to Charlie and and he's mentioned this several times and you know, Ron's mentioned this several times publicly that the opportunity set that they had in 60s and 70s, even in the early 80s, just doesn't exist today.
And he said that what they were able to do In fact, they've said repeatedly that if they were starting today, they would not be able to build Berkshire Hathaway. It's just that that time they faced a much less competitive world with far fewer brain power applied to security analysis. But what I have found is that there are other parts of the world where similar situations still exist.
And so, for example, what I found is that like the Turkish stock market has a lot of parallels to what was going on in the US equity markets in the mid-70s and early 80s, etc. in terms of disparity between price and value. So, we may not be able to find things exactly the way they were before and things may not go back to the way they were, but you may be able to find it somewhere else.
If you can't explain your investment thesis to a 10-year-old in about four sentences, it is a useless investment. Please don't make it. If you cannot, like in four or five sentences, explain it so a 10-year-old understands it, we're done. And a 10-year-old is not going to understand an Excel spreadsheet.
The four sentences don't need too many numbers. You know, they just need something very simple.
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