저자: WarrenBuffett · 외국인
요약 보기
버핏은 타인의 돈을 운용하려면 기대치를 맞춘 투자자들과 감사받는 기록이 먼저 필요하다고 강조한다. 소규모로 시작하고 기관보다 개인을 모으며, 대규모 자금에서는 고수익 전략이 통하지 않는다고 말한다. 또 고수익을 위한 과도한 레버리지와 파생상품 활용은 소수의 큰 실패를 부른다고 경고한다(LTCM 사례 인용). 이미 부자인 사람이 추가 수익 위해 큰 위험을 지는 것은 무의미하다는 입장이다.
다듬은 글
What I was worried about was not how I would behave, but how they would behave. A father-in-law that gave me everything he had in the world, you know. And I I didn't mind taking everything he had in the world. Why do people, very bright people, risk losing something that's very important to them to gain something that's totally unimportant?
I don't think you want to manage other people's money until you have a vehicle and can reach the kind of people that will be in sync with you. I think you ought to have your own ground rules as to what your expectations are, when they should send you roses and when they should throw bricks at you. It'd be almost impossible to go broke uh without borrowed money being in the equation.
I am considering starting my own investment fund, but I also recognize that I am young and have a lot to learn. How did you know you were ready to manage other people's money and what general advice would you give to someone in my shoes? Well, it's a very interesting question because I I've faced that and and uh I sold securities for a while, but in in May of 1956, I had a number of members of my family.
I'd come back from New York and they wanted me to help them out with stocks as I had earlier before I taken a job in New York. And I said I did not want to get in the stock sales business, but I I I wanted to I I enjoyed investing. I was glad to figure out a way to do it and which I did through a partnership form.
But I would not have done that if I thought there was any chance really that I would lose them money. And what I was worried about was not how I would behave but how they would behave because I want I needed people who were in sync with me. So when we sat down for dinner in May of 1956 with seven people who either were related to me or one was a roommate college and his mother and uh uh I I showed him the partnership agreement.
I said you don't need to read this. You know there's no way that I'm doing anything in agreement that that there's any way that you know you don't need a lawyer to read or anything of the sort. But I said, "Here are the ground rules as to what I think I can do and how I want to be judged and if you're in sync with me, I want to manage your money because then I I won't worry about the fact that you will panic if the market goes down or somebody tells you something different." So, we have to be on the same page.
And if we're on the same page, then I'm not worried about managing your money. And if we aren't on the same page, I don't want to manage your money because you may be disappointed when I think that things are even better to be investing and so on. So I don't think you want to manage other people's money until you have a vehicle and can reach the kind of people that will be in sync with you.
I think you ought to have your own ground rules as to what your expectations are when they should send you roses and when they should throw bricks at you and you want you want to be on the same and and uh that's one reason I never we didn't have a single institution in the partnership because institutions meant committees and committees meant that
you had some aunts that trusted you. What's that? You had some aunts who trusted you. Yeah. Well, and a father-in-law that gave me everything he had in the world, you know, but and I I didn't mind taking everything he had in the world as long as he would stick with me uh and wouldn't get panicked by headlines and and that sort of thing.
And and so it's very it's enormously important that you don't take people that have expectations of you that you can't meet. And that means you turn down a lot of people. It means you'd probably start very small and you get an audited record. And when you've got the confidence where if your own parents came to you and they were going to give you all their money and you were going to invest for them, you've got the kind of confidence that you'll say, "I may not get the best record, but I'll be sure that you get a decent record over time." Uh, that's when you're ready to go on it.
Let me tell you a story that I tell young lawyers who frequently come to me and say, "How can I quit practicing law and become a billionaire instead?" And so I say, "Well, that reminds me of a story they told about Mozart." Young man came to him and he said, "I want to compose symphonies and I want to talk to you about that." And Mozart said, "How old are you?" And the man said, "22." And Mozart said, "You're too young to do symphonies." And the guy says, "But you were writing symphonies when you were 10 years old." He says, "Yes, but I wasn't running around asking other people how to do it."
We wish you well. And but Mr. Buffett, you've said that you could return 50% peranom if you were managing a $1 million portfolio. What type of strategy would you use? Would you invest in cigar butts, i.e. average businesses at very cheap prices or would it be some type of arbitrage strategy? It might well be the arbitrage strategy but in a very different [snorts] perhaps way than than customary arbitrage thought of it.
One way or another, I can assure you if Charlie was working with a millionaire, I was working with a million, we would find a way to make that with essentially uh no risk, not using a lot of leverage or anything of the sort. But you change the 1 million to 100 million and [clears throat] that 50 goes down like a like a rock.
That uh uh there are little fringe inefficiencies that people don't don't spot. and you do get opportunities occasionally to do but but they don't really have any applicability to bure. Well, I agree totally. It's just what you used to say that large amounts of money they develop their own anchors. Yeah.
You're just it's it gets harder and harder. I've just seen genius after genius with a great record and pretty soon they got 30 billion and the two floors of young men and away goes the good record. It's just the way it works. charge as the money goes up. When Charlie was a lawyer initially, I mean, you were developing a couple real estate projects or I mean, you find if you really want to make a million dollars or 50% on a million and you're willing to work at it and [clears throat] uh you'll that's doable, but it just has no applicability to managing huge sums.
Um wish it did, but it doesn't. Yeah, Lee Lou using nothing but the float on his student loans had a million dollars practically shortly after he graduated as a total scholarship student. He found just a few things to do. Yeah. And did them. It's fascinating in that you had 16 extremely bright I mean extremely bright people at the top of that.
the average IQ would would probably be as higher higher than any organization you could find among their top 16 people. They individually had decades of experience and collectively had c centuries of experience in operating in the sort of securities um in which the LTCM was invested and they had a huge amount of money of their own up and probably a very high percentage of their net worth in almost every case up.
So here you had super bright, extremely experienced people operating with their own money. And in effect on that day in September, they were broke. And that that to me that is absolutely fascinating. There was a book written, you only have to get rich once. It's a great title. It's not a very good book.
Walter Gutman wrote it, but it many years ago, but the title is right. You only have to get rich once. And why do people very bright people risk losing something that's very important to them to gain something that's totally unimportant? The added money has no utility whatsoever. And the money that was lost had enormous utility and on top of that reputation is tarnished and all of that sort of thing.
So that the the gain loss ratio in any real sense is just incredible. I mean it's like playing Russian roulette. I mean, if you hand me a revolver with six bullets and you know, or six chambers and one bullet and you say, "Pull it once for a million dollars and I say no." And then you say, "What is your price?" The answer is there is no price.
And there shouldn't be any price on taking the risk when you're already rich, particularly of of investment and all of that sort of thing. But people repeatedly do it and they do it. Uh whenever a bright person, really bright person goes broke that has a lot of money, it's because of leverage. that you simply you you you basically can't it's be almost impossible to go broke uh without borrowed money being in the equation and uh as you know at Bergkshire we've we've never used any real amount of borrowed money.
Now if we if we'd used somewhat more you know we'd be really rich but if we'd used a whole lot more we might have gotten in trouble sometimes. And there's no there's just no there's no upside to it. you know what's two percentage points more you know in a given year or that year uh and run the risk of of of real failure.
But very bright people do it and they do it consistently and they will continue to do it and as long as uh explosive type instruments are out there uh they will gravitate toward them and particularly people will gravitate toward them who have very little to lose but are operating with with other people's money.
One of the things, for example, in the LTCM case, and Charlie mentioned it in terms of derivatives, in effect, there were ways found to get around the uh and they were legal, obviously, to get around the margin requirements because uh risk arbitrage is a business that Charlie and I have been in for 40 years in one form or another.
And normally that means putting up the money to buy the stock on the long side and then shorting something against it that where you expect a merger or something to happen. But through derivatives uh people have found out how to do that essentially putting up no money just by writing a derivative contract on both sides.
And there are margin requirements as you know that the Fed promulgates that I believe still call for 50% uh equity on on on stock purchases but those requirements do not apply if you arrange the transaction in derivative form. So that these billions of dollars of positions in equities essentially were being uh financed 100% by the people who wrote the derivative contracts and that leads to trouble.
It does. N, you know, 99% of the time it works. But, you know, 83 and a third percent of the time it works to play Russian roulette with with one bullet in there and six chambers. But neither 83 and a3% or 99% is good enough when there is no gain to offset the risk of of loss.
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