저자: Investing with Leaders · 외국인
다듬은 글
i don't know there are very few people uh you look at the most successful people in the world i know very few of them that haven't had a major failure you know if you read through the uh they're not the financially most successful people if you'll read through the forbes billionaire list and you read their stories you know they've had failed businesses and they've lost everything and they've hung on the you know they've almost died holding on to the ledge you know what's his name uh the k the uh the guy on cbs and uh yeah sumner fire summer redstone redstone so there are lots of examples of people who had huge adversity and i think it's how you deal with adversity that determines your ultimate success as opposed to how you deal with success that determines your ultimate success the investing business you can learn by reading you know read everything warren buffett's ever written watch every youtube video he's ever appeared in that's a great way to learn about investing but investing is more than just the way to really understand investing is to understand a business and one of the most important skills you need as an investor is just distinguishing between a great business a good business a fair business and a bad business and one way to get a sense of the quality of business is going to work for one so the recommendation i give to people graduating from business schools these days is this is the greatest time in history to work for a startup lots of incredibly interesting businesses being formed if you can be one of the early employees you're going to learn a lot about how business works how to make payroll how to market your product how to design something and those skills i think are invaluable first of all you might even find it really interesting you might have joined the next facebook so that's one thing even if the business fails you'll learn a ton from that i think that's the best experience you can get ultimately to be a good fundamental investor how do you be a successful investor now i'm assuming that you're not going to go into the business of investing i'm assuming that you're going to be a doctor or a lawyer you're going to pursue your passion but you're going to have some money they're going to save over time and i'm going to give you my advice on the topic it's not necessarily definitive advice but it's what the advice i would give my sister my grandmother on what she should do if she were in the same position i'd avoid investing in startup businesses where the prospects are not very well known because again you don't need to make 100 a year to have a fortune you just need to invest at an attractive return 10 15 over a long period of time your money grows very significantly so how do you avoid the riskiest investments i would my advice would be to invest in public security invest in listed companies companies that trade on the stock market why because those businesses are tend to be more established they have to meet certain hurdles before they go public the stocks are liquid so you can change your mind if you want to sell investing is about the best investments are the ones where we are the confident we're right and everyone else is wrong okay and you have to in order to be you know been accused recently of being arrogant among other things no no i'm going to actually ask you that it was called it was pompous but that's okay pompous i don't think i'm pompous but i've certainly been accused of being arrogant and there's a difference between arrogance and confidence yeah if you're arrogant and investing you're gonna get killed right if you're not confident you'll never make an investment right so you have to do a sufficient amount of work to be confident enough to have the conviction to do something that's contrarian right we bought the stock of a uh very soon to be bankrupt retailer i'm sorry a shopping mall company during the financial crisis uh at pennies per share you have to be willing to look silly when you do something like that uh general growth stocks up 90 fold since our original investment um you know on that's we had confidence maybe people thought it was arrogant to believe that we could be successful in turning around an investor what would you be um that's a good question i mean i would do what i do now even if i weren't compensated uh for doing it um because i think it's a way for me to make the biggest contribution that i can make i mean i look i think about uh government if i could if i could effectuate change the same way i can effectuate change in the in the private sector but i think i can have more influence as a private participant that a than a public participant and this guy that i met uh money manager named bob chapman who uh i met on a panel seven years ago we were on a panel together show cans never spoken to him since i've never had an email correspondence i've never seen him since but in the last 90 days he's been running the talk show circuit on how i'm you know uh either wrong or stupid or arrogant uh you know giving quotes to vanity fair um it's unfortunate uh you know i i don't mind criticism um but i don't i don't like reading things that are i don't you know it's hard to read for someone who doesn't know me well to be commenting on what i'm like as a person i find i find that difficult um but you know whatever i got you have to have a thick skin to be in this business uh and you know if you end up in a very public situation you should expect to have uh fans and critics and you know i just try to focus on you know what my job is and we focus on making money for our investors and i live my life i went to business school to learn how to be a good investor and i learned the first rule of investing which is you do your due diligence before you wire in your money and uh when i got to hbs i actually opened the course catalog for the first time and there wasn't a class on investing now there were classes on accounting or classes on finance so i decided i had to develop my own little self-study program and i wanted to so i opened a fidelity brokerage account i said this i had some money i'd made in the real estate brokerage business this was my tuition uh in the investment business and it was about a year of tuition and if i lost it it was as if i had gone to business school for you know two years but paid for three so i figured it wasn't like the the inverse of the oxford uh one plus one program but um and uh you know i the first stock i bought went up and i said okay i found what i want to do a little more involved than that but i i uh actually my father who's here he he came with us that's dad over there in the corner you can ask him whatever questions you want afterwards he told me it's a really dumb idea to start an investment fund right out of business school and he recommended that i go work for michael steinhardt or george soros or one of the other famous investors at the time but i figured that i knew enough this is the the perils of youth um but uh the answer is i was an entrepreneur and uh i felt that i wanted to approach investing my own way as opposed to learn from someone else and it's one of the few things you can really learn on your own you can learn investing by reading books by reading annual reports by having a you can have a portfolio and invest 100 and you can and you can learn the business unlike many other businesses which require a lot more so let's talk about for a moment some of the campaigns you've done as activists some of them have worked out some have not uh chipotle has seemed to have worked out but you did a couple that were difficult ones or herbalife or valiant uh they didn't work out what would you say is the mistake you made in hindsight and that you would try to avoid in the future sure so there's sort of eight principles that have driven our investment success and when we have veered from those eight principles uh we've lost money and uh after the uh two thousand we went through a very difficult period circa 2015 2016 the two investments you mentioned were big drivers of that it was a you know if you will experiences making mistakes and learning from them and it was a moment of reflection for the firm and i went back to the core principles that have driven our success for the first 12 years and i had a member of the investment team literally engraved them in a stone tablet not dissimilar from moses's ten commandments and i had that stone tablet put in what you might call a deal toy sits onto everyone's desk in the office and uh we've adhered to those principles you know ever since and you know we've been fortunate uh to return to the success we had for the first dozen years so i think it's about keeping to your our principles are basically one invest in simple predictable free cash flow generative dominant companies with large barriers to entry that are in high returns on capital that have limited exposure to extrinsic risk we can't control strong balance sheets don't need access to capital to survive have excellent management good governance sounds logical um but you know occasionally we've diverged and there's uh those times you know there's a certain discipline that comes with investments and there always seems to be a countervailing quality that caused us to diverge but in really each case we've compromised on business quality or complexity we've been harmed from an investment you
Comments 0