저자: HowardMarks · 외국인
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시장 효율성 가설과 패시브 투자 확산을 논하며, 투자 성과는 수익률뿐 아니라 감수한 위험으로 평가해야 하고 위험 통제가 핵심이라고 주장. 미래는 확률분포로만 이해 가능하며 예측은 신뢰하지 않는다는 입장. 본 발언 구간에는 특정 자산의 1~3개월 방향 예측이 없음.
다듬은 글
uh and and you know and I owe I owe it all to Warren Buffett and on the front it says this is that rarity a useful book Warren Buffett and that those few words sold a lot of copies. So Howard let's step back and talk for a moment about the most important thing in that book you listed a number of important things but market cycles is the only book you've written from that list.
Yes. Why market cycles? Well, I I think that so the book said the most important thing each there are 21 chapters and each one says starts off by saying the most important thing is and that it's a different thing because in investing there is no one important thing there is maybe you might argue there's no uh you know what was it uh Lombardi says uh winning is not the let's see how many people in the audience even know who Vince Lombardi is?
Vince Lombardi. Anybody? Okay. Well, we have at least a third. He said, "Winning is not everything. It's the only thing." And as I say in the book, I'm not exactly sure what that means, but I think that the two most important topics in investing are risk and cycles. And they're connected because where you are in the cycle determines your risk for the for the intermediate term.
Now the reason I think risk is so important is because uh I think that the distinguishing mark between a great investor and a not great investor is not merely how good the return was but how much risk they took to get it. if you you know you can take you can lever up an S&P now nowadays with derivatives or ETFs you can buy an an ETF that goes up or down four times as much as the S&P or maybe eight times and if you if you buy that and you go into a very positive period in the market you'll have an astronomical return but it doesn't mean you're a great investor because they'll say look at that guy he went up eight times as much as the S&P well guess what if it had been a down period he would have gone down eight times as much as the S&P He added no value.
He's not a good investor. I think that an exceptional investor is someone who has a good return disproportionate to the risk born. A good return with the risk under control. So I think that I actually do think that risk is the most important thing. And in the book there are 21 chapters and there are three on risk.
Understanding risk, recognizing risk and controlling risk. But I also think that where we are in the cycle is enormously influential in terms of how much risk you'll bear. And I'm not crazy about the title of this book. I was encouraged to do that by my publisher because they thought if we said mastering the market cycle will sell more books because everybody will figure out that they'll get rich.
But I like the subtitle and the subtitle is getting the odds on your side. We don't know what the future holds. I am not a believer in forecasts. In fact, Michael started off by by with a quote from Galbrath. My other favorite quote from Galbrath is that there are two kinds of forecasters. The ones who don't know and the ones who don't know they don't know.
And and I believe that very strongly and I am firmly in the first camp. I don't know what the future is going to bring and I don't think anybody does. The future can only be thought of intelligently as a probability distribution. What is the range of things that may happen? Which is the most likely which other ones are probable and which ones are unlikely.
And we describe great quote from Elroy Dempson at the London Business School. More risk means more things can happen than will happen. That's the source of risk is the future is uncertain and and and if the future could be predicted in theory there would be no risk. So let's step back Howard and try.
So we're really talking about risk adjusted returns, right? And what Howard has said is can you achieve returns with little to no risk, right? Uh and that's quite different from someone that's taking a lot of risk. And so as we think about the world we live in, there's been enormous movement today from um active management of assets to ETFs or passive management of assets.
But it's easy to understand what's occurred. What's occurred here is the market has gone up so significantly. And so if you're fully invested, i.e. In an ETF, by nature, you're 100% invested in whatever that asset category is versus a money manager who might be 50% invested, 60%. So, in an up market, it's very difficult to outperform person that's fully invested.
However, in a down market, which we really haven't seen in this growth of passive investment or ETFs, uh what is going to occur? Okay, obviously you're going to go down more because you're fully invested, not necessarily hedged, and you also run the risk of the issue of redemption. So, we really haven't.
So, Howard and I are firm believers in fundamental analysis. Would you like to touch base at all on passive or investment versus fundamental investment? And obviously your background at Wharton and Chicago, we both live during a period an academic life of this idea that the markets were perfect. Yeah.
That no one could outperform the market. Our academic uh training people won Nobel prizes for it. They even won Nobel prizes for telling you capital structure didn't matter, etc. So take us back to this debate. Uh Howard, well, I was a Wharton undergraduate and I learned the practical side of investing and then I went off to University of Chicago for my masters and I learned the theoretical side and the the finance theory the key theories had just been developed almost entirely at Chicago in 634 that period uh was when they ca emerged and uh we learned things like Michael described the one of the most important of which is called the efficient market hypothesis and what it says is that people the market consists of a whole bunch of people who are highly motivated to get rich.
They're all intelligent. They're all numerate. They're all hooked up by computer. They're all trying very hard. And their search for bargains has the effect of driving bargains out of existence that if they if there are any cheap stocks, they find them, they buy them. Their buying raises the price of the stock to full value.
If there are any overpricings, they sell them. They that brings the price down to the point where that's fair, too. So, all prices are fair. give for the risk involved QED you cannot outperform the market that's the official conclusion of the efficient market hypothesis and by the way they told us in Chicago u empirically that the average mutual fund had not beaten the market but charged high fees clearly everybody collectively can't beat the market so on average they had on average all investors do average but after high fees all average on average do below average and you shouldn't be in a mutual fund which is actively managed and has high fees you should and they said back when I was a kid why not just buy one of every stock in the Are you suggesting we're both still not kids we're both still not kids and we're still both not kids but but they said why not just I every stock in the S&P now we didn't have a term for it but about five six years later the term index fund emerged and there started to be index funds and the if if the average active investor does worse than the market then it's better to be in an index fund which merely emulates the market index index investing got off to a very slow start in mid70s Vanguard started the first serious index fund and Jack Bogle and it still grew very slowly because you had to overcome the traditional resistance to turning things over to automatic processes and you know there's there's I wrote a memo if you want to read on this subject I wrote a memo in June entitled investing without people and I talk about the uh historic development of index funds and it quotes Ned Johnson of uh of Fidelity and he said no American is going to settle for being below average.
Now that is really a a I have nothing against Ned but it's a great example of uh I think that that statement has no introspection or alternatively maybe it's the statement of a salesman because of course you would settle for average if everything else you could do would put you make you below average and and and for so many people so many people would have been better off if they had average.
Uh anyway, uh the point is that that the highly priced active management uh in broad swaths, clearly not everyone did so much worse than lowcost passive investing that in the last 10 or 15 years, the movement to index investing and other passive forms, Mike mentioned ETFs, has g gained a lot of traction. And now 37.
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