저자: HowardMarks · 외국인
요약 보기
투자는 미래를 예측하기보다 대비하는 것이며, 여러 시나리오를 대비하고 안전마진을 확보해야 한다는 주장. 리스크 관리 중심의 일관된 성과가 장기적으로 중요하며, 비효율적 시장(하이일드, 부실채권, 사모신용, 신흥시장)에서 저평가 자산을 찾는 보텀업 가치투자를 강조. 시장 타이밍과 거시예측에 의존하지 않음.
다듬은 글
Investing consists of positioning your capital to be prepared for future events. So, how can you prepare for future events if you if you can't if you can't predict them? Um and uh you know uh I think the answer lies in a memo that I wrote to clients about 25 years ago. And uh it was Oh, no, 20. And it said the title was you can't predict, you can prepare.
Now, that sounds like a contradiction, but it's really not because you don't know what's going to happen. And I believe that we never know what's going to happen. Sometimes we have a sense, but especially we never know when. And the linkages and the the lags and the leads time-wise can be very frustrating.
Um but you have a sense for what's most likely to happen, for the other things that probably could happen, and uh then the other and then finally the things that are unlikely. And I think the answer is that you you have to prepare for a variety of scenarios that you think are likely. Uh and uh the the key concept is is something called margin of safety or margin for error, which is to say that even if the things you hope will happen don't happen, you should be okay.
That's that's really the the key criterion. Uh you know, some people they say, "I think this is going to happen." And they put all their money like in a casino. They pick one number. They put all their money on that one number. And they say, "If it hits, I'm going to get rich." But rarely does it hit.
And that they're surprised that they end up frustrated. If you cover a variety of possibilities, spread your bets, uh allow for error, I think you have a much higher probability of having success in the long run. And you you about the other five uh principles. If if you may quickly go through those.
So, number one, risk control. Our motto is if we avoid the losers, the winners take care of themselves. So, you know, we don't go out hunting for elephants. We just go out we we want to have uh a large number of good investments. In fact, the Financial Times has a column on Saturdays called Lunch with the FT.
And they took me to lunch in December at my favorite Italian restaurant in New York. And I said to the reporter, I said, "Eating in this restaurant is like investing at Oaktree. Always good. Sometimes great. Never terrible." And this is really uh one way for me to describe my goals. It would be great to say we're always going to be terrific, but it's not true.
Nobody can produce that. But if you can just do uh you don't even have to be good all the time. Be good almost all the time. Great some of the time, but never terrible. And if you do that for a few decades, you'll have one of the greatest records in in history. So, risk control. Consistency. Um not top decile, bottom decile, top decile, bottom de- but around the middle all the time.
And then in in our experience, we pop up to the top in the bad times. When things go wrong because of our emphasis on risk control, we're better prepared than most. Um so, I think that's that's extremely important. Number three, uh we're only active in what are called less efficient markets. An efficient market is is a market where everybody has all the information.
Everybody knows how to deal with the information. And as a result of the efforts of thousands or millions of investors to value something, the price converges with the intrinsic value. So that this one is better, the price is higher. This one is worse, the price is lower, but the price is about right for the value.
Well, clearly if if price is always equal to value, then there are no bargains. So even even a great stock picker can't add much if there are no bargains to be found. That's an efficient market. And uh There's something called the efficient market hypothesis, which I was fortunate to learn at University of Chicago in graduate school in the in the middle '60s.
Uh but there are less efficient markets, and we're sitting in one of them. The emerging markets are less efficient. The information is not quite as uh uh broadly distributed or or uh as as well understood. And there aren't as many people looking and trying. So in in a market like this, high yield bonds, distressed debt, private credit, we can have divergences of price from value.
And it's possible to find bargains to buy, find overpriced assets to avoid. So there is scope for uh contribution from active management. Number four, high degree of specialization. We don't try to do everything. We do We do a few things. We try to do them well. Our people are not generalists, they're specialists.
So that each of our strategies has its own research capability, and it's not pulled in multiple directions. Number five, I already mentioned it. Our investment decisions are not driven by macro forecasts. We are what's called bottom-up value investors. We don't say what's going to happen in the economy, what industries will do best, what's going to going to happen to currencies, which are the companies we should get into.
Rather we go from the bottom. We We just look for companies that have merit where where the securities are not fully reflective of that merit. Bottom up. Number six, we're not market timers. We don't get in, get out, get in, get out. Very hard to do that on a regular basis with success. And I'll tell you one thing that we never do, since we're not market timers, we never say it's cheap today, but it'll be cheaper in 6 months, so I'm going to wait.
Cuz you could be wrong. And you often are. So, if it's cheap today, we buy it. If it gets cheaper, we buy more. And then of course our we only need for our thesis to be correct.
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