저자: BillAckman · 외국인
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집중 투자(10~12개 우량주)와 장기 복리 관점을 강조. 사업 예측 가능성과 혁신 위험 회피를 핵심 기준으로 제시. 2008년 General Growth 사례처럼 과도하게 하락한 우량 자산이 저가 매수 기회가 된다고 설명. 실패 경험과 장기 보유의 중요성을 강조하며, 시장 변동 시 저가 우량주를 매수한다고 언급.
다듬은 글
Look at every challenge as an opportunity. The good always comes from the bad. You just have to look for it. If you can't predict what the business looks like 5 years, 10 years from now, 15 years from now, you really can't figure out what it's worth. Most investors make the mistake of owning too many things.
And the reason for that is diversification protects you from ignorance. Right? If you don't know what you're doing, just do a lot of things. you know 10 12 stocks is more than adequate diversification if you're investing in really high quality companies and so the combination of concentration kind of doing our homework and being good at you know figuring out through the risk of disruption has enabled us to be successful.
So, one of the things I say to uh when I talk at business schools uh and colleges and I I go to a lot of great schools is I the speech I give or the the advice I give is that if you're here, you're unprepared uh for what's coming. And the reason for that is most of the places where I speak, you have students who did really well in high school, did well in their SATs, they got into a really good college, uh they did really well there.
um they got a job for a couple years, they did well in their job, now they're at Harvard Business School, uh they're about to graduate. And I said, "The problem is that if you're here, you've had no experience with the most important thing that you need to understand in order to be successful. You've had no experience with failure and you're going to fail.
It's going to happen. And life is like that. You're might get fired from your first job, your first startup. You may not be able to, you know, raise the second round. Uh you could fail personally. You could have challenges in your personal life. You could your partner, your girlfriend could, you know, uh, have some challenge that takes you off offline.
And every successful person I know has, uh, their key to success was how they dealt with failure. And I think what's interesting about this place is I think they try to teach that while you're here. And it's one of the few schools I've uh, spoken at. My biggest piece of advice is that be prepared for the unknown.
Be prepared for the uncertain. Be prepared because you're you're going to fail. You're going to go bankrupt. Something. But the great thing about this country is that there's always a second act. And actually people like betting on people uh that that have failed. If I look at my trajectory, it you know, it was not a straight line up.
uh it I've had you know significant moments of major setbacks in business and personal life and otherwise and I just uh you know I think the most meaningful part of my college education was I rode crew and maybe it's something like the equivalent of some of the challenges you deal here but you learn to deal with a lot of pain a lot of adversity and you make it through and if as long as you believe that um you know if you find yourself in a deep dark hole you just power through one day at a time.
And this thing they teach you in business school about compounding and the laws of, you know, the power of compounding, it applies to saving yourself from challenges. Meaning, just make a little bit of progress every day. You won't notice the progress for the first 30 days. 90 days in, you're starting to notice the curve is starting to move.
Six months in, you've made huge progress. Uh don't look at where you fell from. Don't look at the startup that had a $300 million valuation where you raised money [snorts] and now you're starting all over again because the original idea didn't work. Don't don't focus on the 300. Focus on where you are.
Focus on the next step. Make a little progress every day and it works every time. Uh and you know the never give up thing is entirely true. Um and I'm a good example of that. So I' I've made bigger mistakes in the investment business than almost anyone. I lost $4 billion on one investment. And yeah, it's a big number.
Um and uh and despite that, all of my investors who've stayed with me over time have done extremely well. You know, it's been a 16% compounded return for 20 years at Persing Square, but it wasn't a straight line up. There was a moment where we were down 35% uh in 2017 from the peak. Uh investors were redeeming capital.
I was going through a divorce. Um you know, there I had a litigation in connection with one of my investments. It was a really sort of brim moment. And um you know I took my own advice, made little progress every day, used good judgment and I'm way better off uh today having gone through that sort of moment.
Our firm is you know one of the important things about our uh the investment business. The problem with the investment business, if you're a long-term investor, is investors generally give you money over relatively short period of time and you're and you're trying to generate value over a long period of time and there's this mismatch and people talk about, you know, asset liability mismatch problems.
You have a bank where you're taking deposits, you're making longerterm loans that creates risk. The same thing is true in the investment business. So my ambition was always to get to a place where the capital was permanent, where it would never leave. and the path by which I got there. It was that failure that created the opportunity to create permanent capital and that's been a huge advantage for us.
So look at every challenge as an opportunity. The good always comes from the bad. You just have to look for it. The most important thing for us is what we call business quality. So we look for businesses that one, we can predict what they're going to look like with a high degree of confidence over a long period of time.
So the value of any financial asset is the present value of the cash the business will generate over its life. If you can't predict what the business looks like 5 years, 10 years from now, 15 years from now, you really can't figure out what it's worth. So we try to find businesses that are first predictable and then we and in order to for the business to be predictable, it's also has to be protected from the various forces in the world.
The hardest thing to do as an investor is to figure out or determine, you know, is this a disrupt business that's going to be disrupted by two Citadel students working in a garage or is it a business that's going to survive whatever technological changes occur, AI, etc. That's the hardest part about investing.
But once you've found a business that meets that criteria um you know we sort of have a library of these kind of companies and then we track them on a regular basis and even the best businesses in the world at various times of sometimes for reasons completely unrelated to the business become available at really cheap prices right every stock on the S&P went down you know something like 10 or more percent in the couple days after the tariff announcement uh some businesses are materially affected by tariffs others are not if you if you do suffic efficient work.
You know the business as well. Um because of the volatility in markets, every once in a while a really great company becomes available at a really cheap price and we just wait for those moments. And so it's not like we're figuring it out before other people. It's just that we know a meaningful number of companies.
Um when the stock prices move significantly, you know, become a lot cheaper, we update our work. If if it's still as interesting as we thought before, now available at an interesting price, we buy. There aren't that many companies that meet that description that are available at a cheap price. So the other thing we do is we just concentrate meaning we own 10 things.
Um most investors own you know a typical mutual fund might own a hundred securities. Typical investor most investors make the mistake of owning too many things. And the reason for that is diversification protects you from ignorance. Right? If you don't know what you're doing just do a lot of things.
Right? If you if you you know most business people know a ton about their own business and they're super concentrated in their own business. You know, if you look through the Forbes 400, the wealthiest people in the country made their money generally in one company. They had a portfolio of one. I mean, that's an incredible degree of concentration, right?
So, you know, 10 12 stocks is more than adequate diversification if you're investing in really high quality companies. And so, the combination of concentration kind of doing our homework and being good at, you know, figuring out the risk of disruption has enabled us to be successful. The best investments are generally ones where everyone else thinks you're wrong.
Right? So, we had this company where everyone believed it was the most creditworthy company in the world. It was as good as the federal government, AAA rated. And actually, the federal government today is not even AAA rated. It's like double A plus or something. Uh, and we were we bet that a company with a AAA rating was going to go bankrupt.
And we made, you know, 354 times our money. Um the inverse of that is in November of 2008 uh a shopping mall company called General Growth, second largest shopping mall company in the country, uh the stock went from $63 a share to 34 cents in like six months. And the reason why the stock went down 99.5% was they had a lot of debt.
Uh they borrowed money in the CNBS market, which is the securitized real estate market. And that market shut down during the financial crisis and um everyone said they're going to go bankrupt because they can't pay off their debts as they come due. They had 27 billion of debt, about 15 billion coming due in the next 18 months.
And the stock went from, you know, like a $6 billion market cap to a hundred million market cap. And uh my bet was, you know, the malls had gone from 93% occupancy in 2007 to 95% occupancy in 2008. So the occupancies were up, the rents were up, the net operating income was up, the fundamentals of the company were solid and these were basically class A sort of the fanciest you know best malls and so the assets were fine and if you now before this company everyone who had invested in a company that had gone bankrupt the shareholders had lost all their money but I didn't understand why that had to be the case you know I read you know book on bankruptcy I called our lawyers I'm like look I think the assets are worth more than liabilities why shouldn't the shareholders be able to make a meaningful recovery and they said, "Look, it can happen, but it never does." Because what happens when a company gets delisted and goes bankrupt is people sell the stock.
Uh distressed investors buy the debt at a discount, and then they work the process through the courts, uh and end up keeping 100% of the company. So, I said, "Well, we're going to do something different." We bought 25% of the company in the market for $60 million, starting at 34 cents a share. I joined the board and then I I helped the board run a process that benefited not just the creditors but also the shareholders and the stock went from 34 cents to ultimately $31 a share.
Um but it was so again the most contrarian investment you can make buying something is to buy stock in a company going bankrupt, right? Because everyone says it has to go to zero. And if you have do a little bit of work, a little lot of work and have an insight, those are the best. This is advice I give everyone here.
Um the problem being young uh is that uh you want to get rewards as quickly as possible. Uh and um you know time seems to pass really really slowly. Uh but value is very rarely created overnight. It takes a very long it takes a long time can take decades to be created. And it's going back to my, you know, compounding something you really should spend a little time studying understanding the curve of compounding.
Um, doesn't really show much progress. You know, it's a bit like COVID, right? People didn't notice COVID in the early days of COVID compounding, but it was compounding 100% a day or some number like that and then eventually it exploded. Um once you understand the power of compounding once you understand it takes a long time to create value uh and that many people are short-term focused uh if you one of the great competitive advantages you can have in life or as an investor is just having the long view uh because some of the best opportunities the the benefit of that opportunity doesn't show itself you know for a number of years you know so some people for example take the job that pays the highest salary coming out out of uh the Citadel because you know what?
U maybe they've got some student debt or you know they're planning to get married at some point and you know that that extra $20,000 or $30,000 or whatever the number is uh is the difference between them living a little nicer place versus otherwise. Um but the what matters when you're picking a job is what does it look like over the next you know five years 10 years uh etc or what will give you the best experience uh that you can leverage over time to create even more value and so I think you know once you figure that out um it's really it's not so hard to make that you know uh to make that kind of decision and it gets easier uh the more successful you are you know the the I my principal driver in life has been independence I wanted to be indep independent.
I wanted to be able to say whatever I wanted to say. I wanted to not be relying on anyone else uh for a job. I wanted to be financially independent. Um and once you get to financial independence, all that stuff becomes easier. Um but you know, I always kind of believed that I would be successful. I actually told my dad when I was 20, I said, "Dad, I'm going to be a millionaire by 30, going to be a 100 millionaire by 40, and I'm going to be a billionaire by 50." Dad laughed.
And I've always been like a head in my my of the plan. and my uh not that that's money is the measure of of of anything, but the um I always I thought I was a billionaire when I was 22. I just used a high discount rate to discount my future my future cash flows. And and by the way, that's what that's how you should think about it as a young person, right?
The biggest advantage you have is time. You know, you've got extra years of compounding. Here's an interesting stat. Warren Buffett when he was 50 years old. What percentage of Warren Buffett's net worth did he create after 50? And 50 sounds old everyone in the room. The answer is 99 and a half% of Buffett's net worth he created after 50 years old. And now he's 94. Um so anyway, think long term.
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