저자: MohnishPabrai · 외국인
요약 보기
마커스 아우렐리우스의 스토아 철학과 찰리 멍거의 태도를 빌려, 역경을 성장의 씨앗으로 받아들이라는 메시지. 파브라이 본인도 닷컴 버블 투자 실패(450만 달러 손실)와 금융위기 손실(65~67%) 이후 오히려 성장했다고 회고. 1999년 이후 기술주 과열을 피하고 저평가된 전통 산업주에 집중해 8년간 손실 없는 성과를 냈다고 설명. 특정 종목·지수에 대한 향후 가격 전망은 없음.
다듬은 글
In the first Gladiator movie, there's a old king who makes an appearance right at the beginning of the movie very briefly and that's Marcus Aurelius and his name comes up a few times in Gladiator 2. But Marcus Aurelius had a very difficult life. He spent almost the entire life on the battlefield. Lots of injuries, lots of illnesses, lots of adversities and he came up with a philosophy known as the Stoic philosophy and which is now the book he wrote called Meditations which goes over that philosophy.
But you know, the essence of what I've gotten out of it is you know, like there's a quote by him that to encounter misfortune and overcome it is good fortune. So basically what Marcus Aurelius is saying is that anytime we run into adversity in life, we need to kind of you know, man up and you know, deal with it and the reward of basically dealing with it is that subsequently that particular adversity is going to be the kernel that leads to greater heights, greater growth, etc.
And what I have found in my life and I think you know, Charlie Munger talks about it as well that basically no matter who you are, you are going to have a lot of reverses in life, a lot of adversity, a lot of misfortune that shows up in unexpected ways. And so it's not like some people are immune to it.
I mean the case of Charlie, he lost his son to leukemia when the child was 11 years old. It was very traumatic for him. There was a botched cataract operation where he lost one eye when he was probably around 60 years old and then he actually subsequently had issues with the second eye as well where he was there was a good chance he would go blind in that as well and blind in both eyes.
And Charlie's perspective was you always just soldier on, you know, these things are just going to keep happening. Just keep moving. And when I look back on my own life and I look at the the big setbacks that came at different points, and I look back on what the impact of those setbacks setbacks was, I cannot point to a single one that did not lead to greater growth and better outcomes in the future.
So, it's we cannot see it at the time it's happening. We also don't know how exactly this misfortune is going to turn into a good fortune, but my viewpoint now is that basically just have blind faith in it. So, basically, if I hit some adversity, I actually now just I'm pretty laid-back about it in the sense that I say, "Well, I okay, I don't know how this is going to be helpful, but I know it's going to be helpful." And so, I just kind of go with that.
And so far, there has not been a single case where that has not been the case for me. And in an investing context, this happened at least two times. There were two major incidents that took place in my investing career, which were major reverses. The first was before just before I had started Pabrai Funds in kind of the 1998-1999 time frame, where, you know, the dot-com boom was up in a big way.
The bust of 2000 had not yet come, and there was just a big frenzy going on. And I got carried away in that frenzy as well, and I had invested about 4 and 1/2 million dollars in a dot-com startup that would eventually go to zero. Out of the 4 and 1/2 million, about 2 million was my own money, and about 2 and 1/2 million was from venture capitalists and other investors and so on.
And it was just terrible. I mean, to to go through that, lay off everyone. And I look back, we just made so many mistakes. But what happened with that experience was that when I later was switching to starting Pabrai Funds, I was going to invest in the public markets. Pabrai Funds started in July '99, so we were still about 9 months away from the crash.
But, because of my experience with the dot-com, I was maybe just about 6 to 9 months ahead of the public markets in terms of knowing that this was a bubble and it was a big bubble and it was not going to end well. And so, when Pabrai Funds started in mid-'99, I basically did not I mean my my background until then was all tech and I basically invested in almost no tech.
At the same time in the all these techs and dot-coms are becoming very valuable or very overpriced. Basic brick-and-mortar stocks in the economy were becoming very cheap. So, if you're willing to look in a more boring, benign part of the market, there were great opportunities there. And so, that's kind of what Pabrai Funds did and my view at that time was that the major indices the Nasdaq, the S&P and Dow, etc.
were not going to do well for a while and in fact they could go down a lot. And so, almost the entire portfolio was anomalies. You know, special situations and things. And basically, I would say Pabrai Funds in the first 8 years from '99 to 2007, we had no down years. We had around mid-30s annualized returns before fees and probably high-20s annualized returns after fees.
And the Nasdaq had crashed and burned and the S&P was down and the Dow was down. So, while we had climbed and done really well, all these indices, everything had, you know, gone down. So, I was by 2007, I was managing 600 odd million, and we had made hundreds of millions in in in that approach. So, if I looked at the 4 and 1/2 million loss and the hundreds of millions of gain, you know, it was very clear that that adversity at that time, which was very painful, actually had a silver lining and kind of helped out and went from there.
And then this happened again in the financial crisis from 2007 to 2009. Our funds went down like 2/3. I mean, the markets were down about 40% because we were concentrated, etc. We were in some just dumb mistakes. We were down 65, 67%, and again, basically, that adversity led to a lot of rethink and some very great investments, which I wouldn't have made if hadn't happened.
And again, helped me grow as an investor, and we did very well after 2009 as well. So, given the station in life and the position in life you're in right now where you have, you know, maybe eight decades or something ahead of you, I think it's a very good model, basically, to just have this hack in your mind that whatever bad things show up or bad things happen are going to lead to good things.
And just like what Charlie says, just soldier on, and those good outcomes will eventually reveal themselves. When I look at our private funds, you know, we made a lot of mistakes during the financial crisis 2007. Going into the financial crisis, I had significant exposure to leveraged financial institutions.
I mean, kind of the worst place to be at that time. And we had a couple of zeros, you know, we took a straight 100% loss on a couple of investments at that time. And there's been plenty of losers along the way, but you know, like Charlie used to say to me that you want to learn from your mistakes, but you don't want to learn too much.
So, you have to look at your mistakes, you have to study what happened. And then you have to move on. So, it's not like we're going to get to a situation where I mean, when I look at my portfolio today, I could not point to a particular stock that I think will not work. But, I know that as a basket, some of them will not work.
And in due course, I'll figure out it'll become obvious which ones, but it's not obvious today. And so, that's the nature of it, and that's why we we need a basket. And we kind of take it from there.
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