저자: HowardMarks · 외국인
요약 보기
투자에는 확실한 것이 없으며 시장은 사이클을 따른다. 1970년대 니프티50은 80~90배 PER에서 8~9배로 폭락해 최고 기업에 투자해도 90% 손실이 가능했다. 닷컴 버블도 기술 기업들이 세상을 바꿨지만 투자자는 큰 손실을 입었다. 가격이 핵심이며 자산의 질과 안전성은 같지 않다는 교훈을 제시한다.
다듬은 글
My dad used to tell the story about the inveterate gambler who you know always lost the rent money at the track and finally heard about a race with one horse. So he went out and he bet all his money and [clears throat] halfway around the track the horse jumped over the fence and ran away. There's certainly no sure thing in investing and when you hear about a sure thing the best thing to do is run the other way.
Most things are especially things involving people are governed by cycles. You know the economy cycles constantly. The life cycle of businesses. The markets are cyclical and yet repeatedly people commit the mistake of thinking that trends will go on forever in one direction. That trees will grow to the sky.
That something can be worth a little and and and that means it's going to go to zero. And these are when the biggest errors are committed by investors. As as things get better and as prices rise in recognition of that people extrapolate that and they people get more excited as things rise and want to buy them more.
And things people get more depressed as as things fall and want to sell them more which is just the opposite of what you should do. Black Monday 1987 Howard. That's the day that the stock market lost I think 26%. Now you think the market being down 3% and how panicked people get. Try losing 26% of your money in one day.
And it was there was not even a obvious candidate for what caused it. You had stocks that were too high based on too much optimism. You had people who had swallowed this canard of uh uh immunization that you could protect yourself because you would establish a policy of automatically selling portfolio insurance buying portfolio insurance if prices started to fall and all you had to do was fell sell when they started to fall except that the brokers wouldn't answer the phone.
And it built on itself. So you know the lesson from that is that there's no such thing as a sure thing. My dad used to tell the story about the inveterate gambler who you know always lost the rent money at the track and finally heard about a race with one horse. So he went out and he bet all his money and halfway [clears throat] around the track the horse jumped over the fence and ran away.
Not a very sophisticated joke but the point is that there is no sure thing and there's certainly no sure thing in investing and when you hear about a sure thing the best thing to do is run the other way. Well you have to go back I guess it was about 40 years ago that the Nifty 50 had their demise but when you and I got out of graduate school in 1969 the leading banks and the bank trust companies were the leading investors at the time.
There were no boutiques and so forth. The bank trust departments most of them emphasized something called Nifty 50 investing which meant you took the 50 best companies in America the fastest growing. Xerox IBM Kodak Polaroid Merck Lilly Texas Instruments Hewlett Packard Perkin Elmer Avon Coca-Cola etc.
Walmart McDonald's etc. And you bought their stocks regardless of price. Because they were the best and they were the fastest growing. And so they were a little expensive it didn't matter you wait long enough to grow into it. And the official dictum whether spoken or unspoken at most of these institutions was that it didn't matter what price you pay as long as you bought the best.
And the the the little hitch was that when I joined Citibank in '69 they were trading at 80 to 90 times earnings. And by '73 they were trading at 8 to 9 times earnings which meant that you lost 90% of your money in the best companies in America. So that was a very painful lesson probably my greatest learning experience.
You know experience is what you got when you didn't get what you wanted. But I learned a lot from it and and what it taught me is that risk and safety have nothing or little to do with asset quality. Howard what about the tech bubble? Well the tech bubble was you know Mark Twain said that history does not repeat itself but it does rhyme.
The themes rhyme even though the details are different. The tech bubble was just like the Nifty 50. People believed that these were great companies that they were going to change the world and as a consequence it didn't matter what you paid for them. And guess what? Collectively they changed the world.
The world has no resemblance to what it was 20 years ago technologically and yet if you invested in most of those companies you lost all your money. In the late 1960s Merrill Lynch put out a report listing the 30 companies in the technology industry and they were recommending the computer industry would increase 100 fold by the end of the century.
Out of those 30 companies within 15 years only one was in the computer business. So they were 100% right in the enormous growth of technology in the computer industry. However 29 of the 30 companies they picked were no longer either in business or in the computer business. I think from that standpoint and I remember Howard at that period of time when someone would want you to invest in a technology I company I say well it sounds interesting could we read it and they would say well if you have to read it you won't get a chance to invest because it'll be fully subscribed.
It's it seems a little bit like the high yield bond market today doesn't it? You know before the Arab oil embargo oil was selling for almost nothing. And the Arab oil embargo came along and it convinced people that to the contrary oil was of infinite value. And it ran way up to a price in excess of what it should be and the people who bought oil related assets at the peak despite the fact that oil is important and it's available in limited supply lost a lot of money for a long time. Because they they got involved at too high a price.
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