"99% of Investors Fail at Long-Term Investing" - Howard Marks (Here's Why) | Stocks | Investment

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장기 투자의 최대 장애물은 인간 본성(상승장 흥분·하락장 공포), 기관의 인센티브 구조(손실 회피 우선), 변동성을 위험으로 보는 관행이라고 주장. 변동성은 본질적 위험이 아니며 매월 금리 인하 시점 같은 단기 예측은 무의미하다고 강조. 장기 가치 보유와 역발상 매수의 중요성을 역설.

다듬은 글

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01. What are the biggest obstacles that get in the way of behaving truly long-term? How much time do you have? I mean, that's that's that's the greater question. It's the probably the most fun for me to answer. But it it's a big question with with a long answer. Most of the elements of human nature are designed to prevent us from being good investors.

02. Uh when things are going well, the economy is performing well, companies are reporting record earnings, the stock prices are rising, people get more excited and they want to uh buy more of something until it reaches a an apogee at which they want to buy everything. When things go poorly and the the news is bleak and the prices are cascading downward, uh they lose heart, they want to sell, and and when we approach what might eventually turn out to be the bottom, they want to sell everything.

03. Well, that's the opposite of what you should do. You should buy low and sell high, not buy high and sell low. Uh but it's against human nature. And if you want to if you get depressed and and and your your enthusiasm for selling increases as prices fall, isn't that the opposite of what we do in every other walk of life?

04. In every other walk of life, we buy more when things go on sale. In the markets, we sell more when things go on sale. So, this just indicates the the the essentially wrong nature of of of investor sentiment. And then again, uh you know, we have we have the non-linear uh what we call the non-linear utility function.

05. Uh most people care a little about a dollar made and a a lost. Exposing yourself to the risk of loss is integral in trying to have a good investment return. Uh so, you know, even though our investment philosophy uh stresses uh risk control, we're not talking about risk avoidance. We're talking about intelligent bearing of risk, but people's psychies are warped to prevent them from viewing risk objectively.

06. You have to take some risk in order to make money. Uh so, that's another problem. Then So, investor psychology. Human nature. Then we have something called institutional constraints. So, if your job is if you have if you're an employee, what we call an agent, and your job is to manage somebody else's money, what is your payoff structure?

07. You make a good investment decision, you get a pat on the back, handshake, maybe a raise. Make a bad investment decision, you get fired. So, that means that your incentives are directed more at avoiding losses than at achieving gains. And maybe to an extent which has a negative impact. So, uh So, you have to overcome the institutional constraints.

08. David Swensen, who ran the endowment at Yale with great success from '85 to 2020, said that uh investment management requires non-institutional behavior from institutions, establishing a a conundrum that is not easily resolved. Um and how can you make how can institutional uh uh employees, agents, act as contrarians?

09. Act as knowing bearers of risk for profit. And how can they uh increase their uh ardor for buying as prices fall rather than as they rise? Then Then the third factor, in addition to investor psychology and institutional constraints, is volatility. And [clears throat] you know, when when prices fluctuate, uh especially uh well, especially uh agents, but even principals get uncomfortable.

10. And so, in the investment industry as a whole, there has grown up over the last 50 years, since I attended University of Chicago, a concept which was developed at University of Chicago, which is that volatility is risk and volatility is to be avoided. And uh I think that seeing prices fluctuate up and down is part of life.

11. It's not a negative in itself. It's not to be avoided in itself. Um and if you are well funded, you don't have to withdraw the money, uh uh you can't get a sell order from your clients, then volatility in itself is not to be avoided. And I think that the excessive nature of the concern with interim volatility is one of the wrongest things about the investment profession.

12. Buffett again. Buffett says, "I'd rather have a lumpy 15% return than a smooth 12." And I would say to people, "If you'd rather have a smooth 12 than a lumpy 15, you have to ask yourself what's going on." Look, it reminds me the one of the memo you wrote in I think late 2022 called What Truly Matters.

13. And yeah, there you gave the example is a kid uh how we are told, "Don't just sit there, do something." Yeah. And in investing actually probably you got to reverse that. Well, you know, uh I wrote that memo in October of '22 uh because uh you know, I participated in a conference where everybody's question was, "Well, what month will the Fed stop raising interest rates?" And and I said, "Why do you care?

14. This doesn't matter. What matters is whether we buy pieces of companies that grow in value and whether we lend money to companies that pay us back. And what month the Fed is going to stop cutting interest rates or whether security prices rose by 1% yesterday or fell doesn't matter. Uh and yet these latter two things are the things that command attention.

15. And that's largely because uh the things that really matter are determined in the long run, and once you make your commitment, you have to wait a long time to know if you were right. Uh you have to sit there and not do something.