저자: HowardMarks · 외국인
요약 보기
마크스는 투자의 핵심을 '싸게 사기'로 보고, 투자는 확률의 영역이라 좋은 결정도 실패하고 나쁜 결정도 성공할 수 있다고 설명한다. 탈레브의 '행운의 역할'을 인용해 should≠will, 결과로 의사결정 품질을 판단할 수 없음을 강조한다. 기대값만이 아니라 감내 못 할 손실(스카이다이버 비유)도 고려해야 하며, '고평가'가 '내일 하락'을 뜻하지 않으니 생존과 인내가 중요하다고 말한다. 특정 자산에 대한 가격 예측은 없다.
다듬은 글
How do you make money as an investor? The people who don't know think the way you do it is by buying good assets, a good building, stock in a good company, or something like that. That is not the secret for success. The secret for success in investing is buying things for less than they're worth. As you know, I wrote a book in 2011 called The Most Important Thing.
And the reason it has that title is because I would find myself in my client's office and I would say, "You know, the most important thing in investing is controlling risk." And then 5 minutes later, I would say, "The most important thing is to buy at a low price." And 5 minutes later, I would say, "The most important thing is to act as a contrarian." And so, back in 20 03, I believe, I wrote a memo called The Most Important Thing.
I listed 19 things, each of which was the most important thing. And then I used that I couldn't think of a better format for my book, so I used the same format in 2011. Interestingly, some of the things are different. And as you are supposed to show you that that one's thinking should still be alive and should still evolve.
And I know that Sir Rob and some of the other fellows went to see Charlie Munger speak in Los Angeles this week at age 91. And I'm sure he's still evolving and and getting younger. So, I'm going to try to do the same. Now, I should tell you, and I don't know if you know this, but uh I I write memos to the clients.
And I'll refer to a lot of memos in in this session, probably, and they're all available on oaktreecapital.com website, and the price is right, they're all free. And so, uh you know, I've been sending them out now 25 years. I started 1990. And I got a letter from uh a guy named Warren Buffett in 20 09 or 10, and he said, "If you'll write a book, I'll give you a quote for the jacket." And so, I had been planning on writing a book when I retired from work, but Buffett's promise caused me to accelerate my time frame.
And what the book is is who here has read it? Okay, about half. So, what what the book is it's a recitation of my investment philosophy. And as it says in the forward to the philosophy, which I took the forward you know, I never I don't know about you, I never read the forwards of books, but I took the forward to mine very seriously.
And what it says in there it's not designed to tell you how to make money. And it's not designed to tell you how easy investment is or to try to make it easy. And in fact, my highest goal is probably to make it clear how hard it is. Investing is very difficult because it's it it's kind of counterintuitive and it it kind of turns back on itself all the time.
And there are no formulas that work. So, what I tried to do in the book is teach people how to think. And now the thoughts they should hold change from time to time, but how to think I think is valid in the long term. So, and I it's my investment philosophy and I wasn't born with an investment philosophy.
I was you'll you'll hear from a lot of people if you're interested in investing who'll say, "Well, I started reading prospectuses at age eight." And I didn't. Or I you know, at 13 I invested my Bar Mitzvah money, which I didn't do. But and in fact, when I was getting out of graduate school age 23 in 1969, so I know you can all do the math.
I didn't know what I wanted to do. I had studied finance at Wharton and accounting at Chicago and I knew I wanted to do something in finance, but I had I wasn't very specific. So, I interviewed in five or six different fields. Large consulting firm, small consulting firm, accounting firm, corporate treasury, investment management, investment banking, six.
So, uh, you know, I ended up in the investment business. Why? Because I had had a summer job in '68 at City in the investment research part and I liked it. I had fun, right? That's a good reason. So, I went there. And by the way, interestingly, there was nothing magical about working in the investment business at that time.
It paid the same as all the rest. All six jobs that I was offered had the same pay. Between [clears throat] 12.5 and 14. A year, not a month. And and uh, you know, and there were no famous investors at the time. Investing was not a household word. There were no investment TV shows. Uh, and uh, so I just did it cuz I liked it.
I liked the people and I thought that the investing was intellectually interesting. Um, so I wasn't I didn't have a philosophy then when I started. And the I had some things I had learned in school, but I think that your philosophy your philosophy as opposed to somebody else, you know, if you if you study Descartes or Locke or somebody like that, you learn his philosophy.
If you might learn a philosophy by studying a religion, but that's not your philosophy. Your philosophy will come from combination of what you have been taught by your teachers and parents and your experiences. And what your experiences tell you about the things you were taught and how they have to be modified.
So, I developed my philosophy over, you know, I it might seem like I started writing the Memos a long time ago, 25 years, but I had been working already over two decades at that time. So, I think that the integration of real life into philosophy is essential. Now, my I prepared a few slides for today and basically the slides are here to illustrate where the philosophy came from.
Talk to you about some of the foundations and roots. So, I call it Origins and Inspirations and I hope you'll find it interesting. So, first of all, uh, not in order chronologically, but hopefully in order to try to make something intelligible. Uh Fooled by Randomness by Nassim Nicholas Taleb. Now, who here has read that?
All right, more people than have read my book. And uh I think it's very important. I think it's a excellent book. Uh with very, very important ideas. Now, don't tell Nassim I tell I said this, but I tell all the people I speak to that it is easy it is either the most important badly written book or the worst written very important book that you'll ever read.
I I think it's not very clear and I think it's uh not uh well, maybe there's no attempt to make it clear. Uh but I think a lot of the ideas are very important and uh even profound, in my opinion. So, among other thing and and the basic theme is that in investing there's a lot of randomness. And if you look at investing as a field without randomness where everything everything is determinative, you'll get confused because you will not draw the proper uh inferences from what you see.
For example, just a brief example, you see somebody and they report a great return for the year. The science the the scientist who thinks that the world investment world runs like the world of physics might think, well, great return, that means the guy's a great investor. But in truth, uh it it might be somebody who took a crazy shot and got lucky.
Why? Because there's a lot of randomness in the world. When I went to Wharton, 1963, the first book I remember learning was called Decision Making Under Uncertainty by C. Jackson Grayson, who became I as I recall America's first energy czar. And uh I learned a couple of important things from that book.
Number one, that you can't tell from an outcome whether a decision was good or bad. It's very important. Most people don't understand this. Totally totally counterintuitive. But the truth is in the real world where there's randomness at work. I mean, if you build a bridge and it falls down, then you must assume that the engineer made a mistake.
That it was a bad decision to build the bridge that way. But in the in the real world of where where where there's randomness, good decisions fail to work all the time. Bad decisions work all the time. The investment business is full of people who are quote right for the wrong reason. Made the bad decision.
It didn't work out the way they thought, but they got lucky. And they were bailed out by events. So this is very important. And this is the basic theme of uh of uh Fooled by Randomness, Taleb's first book. Since then he has written uh the uh Black Swan, which became more famous, but I don't think it's as good a book.
And he's written a book called Antifragile. And uh that one didn't get famous. Um but I think that this book is something everybody should read it if you have an interest in numbers, investing, and how the world works. So, it's as I say, the book is all about the role played by luck. And basically, uh even if you know what's most likely, many other things can happen instead.
This is a very very important. We talked uh earlier at lunch about what's the most important lesson you can draw. Well, of course, I can't I'll never say most important to anything, but one very important lesson for for you to learn is that you should not act as if the things that should happen are the things that will happen.
Again, in the world of the physical sciences, you can probably bet that that's true. And the electrical engineer knows that if he turns on a light switch over here, the light will go on there every time because it's subject to physics. Not in the world of investing. And so, for every possible phenomenon, there is there is a a range of things that can happen.
There may be one where it's possible to discern which one is the most likely. And if we draw a probability distribution, that may be the highest point on the distribution, the most likely single outcome. But that doesn't mean it's going to happen. And the reason we the the reason we don't have many probability distributions that look like this, but rather that look like this, is because a range of things can happen.
And it's very, very important to notice that number one, there are lots of things that can happen, so you have to allow for them. And number two, the thing that is most likely to happen is far from sure to happen. And we and so, uh that's that's very that's very key. Uh I I there's a professor at the London Business School who put it succinctly.
He said, "Risk means more things can happen than will happen." And uh this is again, this is profound, in my opinion. Um in the economic world, people generally make their decisions based on something called expected value. Which is to say that you multiply every possible outcome, first of all, of course, you don't think in terms of a single outcome, you think in terms of a range of outcomes.
So, you take every if you could, if you could iterate over so many, you take every possible outcome, you multiply it by the likelihood that it will happen, you sum the results, and then you get something called the expected value from that course of action. And you choose your course of action based on the highest expected value.
And that sounds like a total totally rational thing. But what if the course of action that you're considering has some outcomes that you absolutely can't withstand? Then you may not do it. You may not do the highest expected value course of action because it has some you can't live with. You know, who here is willing to be you know, the skydiver who was right 98% of the time.
You know, for example. So, you may elect to do bike riding on the Google campus rather than skydiving even though skydiving is more exhilarating 98% of the time. Anyway, so the point is as I lived my life from talking learning about Thaler and learning about Taleb from learning from my own experience, I realized that should is does not equal will.
Lots of things that should happen fail to happen. And even if they don't fail to happen, they fail to happen on schedule. So, the thing that the that the economist or the financier thinks should happen this year may happen in 3 years. You got to live 3 years to see it happen. One of my favorite sayings is never forget the 6-ft tall man who drowned crossing the stream that was 5-ft deep on average.
We can't live by the averages. We can't say, well, I'm I'm happy to survive on average. We got to survive on the bad days. You got to survive and and if you're a decision maker, you have to survive long enough for the correctness of your decision to be become evidence. And you can't count on it happening right away.
I always remind people overpriced is not the same as going down tomorrow. And if you bear that simple truth in mind, I think it helps. So, so Taleb and the role of luck very important. And there you have it. This was just the first part of an exceptional lecture by Howard Marks, a true legend of investing sharing decades of wisdom that few ever articulate so clearly.
In a world obsessed with predictions, models, and shortcuts, Marks challenges us to think differently. Not about how to make money fast, but how to survive, endure, and thrive in the long run. He reminds us that investing is not a science of certainty. It's a practice of probabilities. Of understanding that even the best decisions can fail, and the worst ones can sometimes succeed.
Because randomness is always part of the game. What matters isn't being right all the time. It's being thoughtful, humble, and above all, prepared. He shows us that the most important skill in investing isn't forecasting the future, but managing your behavior when the future doesn't go as planned. If you're serious about mastering this craft, this talk is not just insightful, it's essential.
And the best part? This is only the beginning. More is coming from this incredible session with Howard Marks, so stay tuned. Because the deeper we go, the clearer it becomes. Great investing isn't about knowing what will happen, it's about knowing how to think when it doesn't. I hope you enjoyed today's video.
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