저자: JoelGreenblatt · 외국인
요약 보기
Greenblatt는 장기 가치투자 관점에서 주식을 기업의 지분으로 보라고 강조한다. 과거 집중투자(6~8종목, 포트폴리오의 80% 이상)를 운용했을 때 수년마다 순자산의 20~30%가 하루 이틀 사이에 빠지는 손실을 경험했다고 설명한다. 현재는 롱·숏 합쳐 수백 종목으로 분산해 변동성을 낮추고, 분산이 기대수익을 크게 해치지 않는다고 주장한다. 특정 자산의 단기 가격 방향에 대한 예측은 없다.
다듬은 글
Uh well when I first started out I was doing very concentrated portfolios and I did that for quite a long time several decades. We had concentr by concentrated I mean 6 to8 stocks were 80% plus of our portfolio. Okay when you know the businesses really well you know the best way to think about these are actually businesses.
is, you know, Warren Buffett has a, you know, I'm going to uh, you know, paraphrase here, but he said, imagine that you had a business uh, that you sold for a million dollars and now you want to reinvest the money intelligently uh, in, you know, the city where you live and let's say there's hundreds of businesses and you analyze them and you find, you know, six or eight that, uh, you know, are run by good people, have good prospects, uh, you know, nice returns on capital, you know, all good things and a nice future.
And you did that research and you divided that million dollars amongst those six to eight businesses in your city that you know, you liked all those elements too. Most people would kind of call you a prudent person. You know, you're dividing, you did your research, but when it comes to the stock market, you can get daily quotes on those businesses.
Uh academics would tell you you're insane. You know, you're taking way too much risk. It's volatile. And so you really have to think in those terms, you know. I mean, read as much Buffett as you can, but bottom line is if you want to stay unemotional, actually think what you're doing. Think of businesses uh stocks as ownership shares of businesses.
It's very, very helpful. If something happens in Greece and you own a chain store in the Midwest, okay, are you going to sell it at half price the next day because something happens in Greece? You're probably not even going to think about it. But in the stock market, you know, you're going to get a much lower quote and bad things will happen.
and you'll think it's relevant in some way and and you know no one who actually own the business would do anything about that. So it's better to think of businesses I mean stocks as ownership shares of businesses is one way to keep yourself sane. Uh the way we have very diversified portfolios now because when you go long short and put on leverage you need diversified portfolios and so when we used to own how do I stay sane?
We used to own six or eight names and every couple years we would wake up, Rob and I, and we lose 20 or 30% of our net worth in a day or two. It would happen like clockwork all the time. That was just the way it works. When you own six or eight things, some things uh not going right for your business or you were wrong on a pick.
And that just has to happen. Even if you're right, most of the time you're going to be wrong and you're g and that's going to happen every couple years. Most people can't handle that, but that's just part of the game. It has to happen. It's mathematically impossible almost not to happen that way uh that the market or you'll just be wrong on some uh when you're that concentrated and and you have to sort of know what you own and be very cold and analytical.
Uh and it's helpful when you actually think I just own a small group of businesses. Uh now when we have hundreds of stocks on the long side and short hundreds of stocks, we're trying to be the insurance company. We're trying to be right on average. And when we actually have more diversity, uh this is a flaw in in a lot of hedge funds.
It turns out, you know, rather than buy let's say three 400 of this the cheapest over here, we usually weight them based on how cheap they are and short three or 400, why wouldn't we just do the top 50 or 100 and short the bottom 50 or 100? I mean, the alpha generation is pretty linear, so why wouldn't we do that?
Uh well, number one, these stocks all the way down here, these are extremely in favor stocks. They're quite volatile. You know, a lot of money losers in there up there. These stocks are extremely out of favor. Much more volatile. You have less of them. More volatile when you go long, short, and put on leverage.
Uh I would say, and you have less stocks. Uh getting aberrationally bad returns is another euphemism for losses, you know. uh when when you go long short and put on leverage, you could get what you didn't expect more often when you just have a few volatile names and you could have some negative compounding.
Turns out negative compounding is bad as you all know the math. And so when you go long short and have more names up here and more names here, uh you have less extreme names on average. You have more names, you know. So less extreme names, less volatile, more names, less volatile. Another way of saying you get what you expect more often.
That's why insurance companies don't insure five guys. No matter how good their underwriting is, someone, you know, steps off a curb and messes up your numbers. You can tell I don't sell insurance. Um, so you when you go long-term put on leverage, you uh get what you expect more often. You spend less time negative compounding.
You actually end up with higher returns. Even though the alpha generation is linear, when you go more diversified, you end up with slightly higher returns and a lot less volatility. So there's no trade-off. So that's not really the math that most investors look at. It's not what typical hedge funds look at.
They're actually very under mo most of them are very underdiversified. Uh even though this is factual. This is what happened. So these guys did beat these guys, but by adding some of these guys, uh you can actually make more money by keeping less volatile. And so it's one way to so now our bad days to be honest in our diversified portfolios is we underperform by 20 or 30 basis points.
So that's how we stay same. That's our bad day as opposed to losing 20 or 30% of our net worth. So we trained ourselves over many years uh to be u you know by being concentrated investors for so long. So it's it's complicated. I would say that the best idea is to think of stocks as ownership shares of businesses and really believe that really don't you know when I I got on a very big investment board and my uh first memo I wrote with the chairman of the committee said oh this is a great memo you should hand it out and then I almost got shot and my suggestion uh and you know I hadn't been there hadn't been it was like a really big board and I hadn't been on one yet it's about 15 years ago and uh my suggestion was stop reporting your returns to everybody else so that you just do what you think's smart long term and you don't worry about how you compare to all the other guys on the lead table of who did the best and who did the worst. So, no one really liked that idea.
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