저자: 하워드막스 · 한국인
요약 보기
막스는 시장이 낙관에서 비관으로 기울고 있다고 진단하며, S&P500 PER이 22배로 역사적 평균(16~17배)보다 높지만 과거보다 싸졌다고 말한다. 바닥은 사후에만 알 수 있으므로 바닥을 기다리는 것은 어리석다고 주장한다. 성장주와 가치주의 이분법을 거부하고, 매도는 상승·하락 어느 쪽에 의해서도 감정적으로 이루어지기 쉬우며 소수의 훌륭한 아이디어에서 대부분의 수익이 나온다고 강조한다. 리스크 통제와 손실 회피를 투자 철학의 핵심으로 제시한다.
다듬은 글
gets ahead of steam based on optimism. It gallops ahead on further good news. Uh one or two negatives come in but the market finds it very easy to reject those and exclude them from their thinking. Uh part of it is because the general trend is still positive, but part of it is because of something called co uh cognitive dissonance and and uh you know cognitive dissonance is something that you should all familiarize yourself with and it is basically the human brain's ability to reject information which is at odds with its predisposition.
So you know the market is riding on optimism rising continuously. uh the good news is incorporated and causes price to go higher. Bad news is ignored. Uh and then at some point in time for some reason or no reason uh a kind of a critical mass of negativity uh arises and it overcomes this predisposition to be optimistic.
By the way, I believe that there is a predisposition to be optimistic, not pessimistic, optimistic. Why is that? Because you have to be optimistic to be an investor. What is investing? You take your money, you give it to somebody else in the hope you'll get back more later. So if you think about it, it has to be built on optimism.
But sometime enough uh kind of critical mass of bad news uh to knock this process off stride. You know, one thing you have to bear in mind, as I say, in real life, things fluctuate between pretty good and not so hot. But in the minds of investors, they go from flawless to hopeless. And and and the psychology swings to the extreme.
First, they like them too much, then they hate them too much. And you you you don't want to be caught on the wrong side of that or you don't want to be part of part of that movement. I really believe that the there's been a slight turn from optimism to pessimism. We're certainly not suicidal m you know uh depressed and you have it's it's hard to gauge where the market is but one thing we look at is the price earnings ratio on the S&P 500 uh you know it was probably 23 times now it's probably 22 times still very high is the historic average is between 16 and 17 so it's still it's still high priced but they are cheaper than they used to be and that should be encouraging.
Are we at the bottom? Well, that's that's that's like the stupid question in the world. I mean, you never know when you're at the bottom. What is the definition of the bottom? Think about it for a minute. What is the bottom? Pardon me? No. No, not zero. Nothing goes to zero. But, but the bottom is the day before it starts going up, right?
And if that's true, then by definition, you never know when you're at the bottom because you can only tell the next day. So, one of the I think one of the dumbest things you can do in the investment business is to say, "I'm going to wait for the bottom." Because logically and even logically and practically, you'll never know.
You can tell when things are cheap. uh you can't tell when the day has been reached that that it's it's never going to go down anymore. You know, prior to the 60s, people investing in the stock market were called investors. There were no different kinds of stock market investors. Then around the beginning of the 60s, uh, Wall Street, I remember seeing a brochure in my dad's apartment in around ' 62 talking about something called growth stocks.
And the concept of growth stocks was invented. And these were companies that looked expensive on the basis of their current assets or uh, earnings, but had brilliant futures. they were either in tech uh or biotech or you know technological advancements or they were great consumer companies. So you had Xerox, IBM, Kodak, Polaroid, Hulip Pack, Perkin Elmer, Texas Instruments, Mercilly or you had uh Coca-Cola for example, Sears Robok etc.
companies, a growth company, all companies grow, growth companies grow at above average rates of growth and and so the growth stocks started to attract attention. People started to specialize in the growth stocks. So, uh, as humans do, uh, when to categorize themselves, they want to put labels on. So, the people who did not invest in growth stocks called themselves value.
These are growth stocks. They grow faster than the average company. These are value stocks. They're cheaper than the average company. So that became the dichotomy. And so some people buy the growth stocks, some people buy the value stocks. But with this firm divide and Andrews, so Andrew and his family moved in with us during the pandemic and we got to exchange a lot of ideas.
uh uh a lot of them were on this subject and I crystallized them in a memo I wrote in January of 21 called something of value but the bottom line was it shouldn't be a bifurcation it shouldn't be either or you can make a intelligent investment in a company with a high rate of growth or in a low rate of growth
and you should pay a price which is appropriate for the rate of growth but just because a company is fast growing doesn't mean it can't be a good value investment and and you got to get away from these hard exclusionary uh definitions and I think I was right every trade's two trades so there's a question of buying and there's a question of selling
uh how do you map your logic to discipline and selling I I wrote a memo uh called selling out and I said in there why do people sell you know and you you you read a hundred articles and books and analyses on whether to buy something you there are very few on whether to sell it and half facitiously I said they sell it for two reasons because it went up and because it went down if it goes up they sell it because they're afraid that it's going to stop going up or maybe go down in which case their profits will evaporate And if it goes down, they sell it because they it scares them and makes them think it might go down more.
Now, if you think about it logically, it can't possibly be right to sell because it went up and to sell because it went down. And I I think in this memo on selling out, I told the story of Amazon. And as I recall, yes, I think Amazon was 90 in 99 on the tech bubble. And then when the bubble burst in 2000 or 2001, it was six.
So it went from 90 to six. It was down 93%. So what if you were smart enough to buy it at six? Would you held it at 12? Or would you say, well, I doubled my money. I'm going to take my take some off the table. And let's say you held it at 12. You're tough. What about when it got to 60 and you've made 10 times your money?
Would you sell it? Most people would. What about when it got to 600 and you made a hundred times your money? Would you sell half? Would you sell three quarters? Would you sell 90%. And you know, at the time I wrote it, as I recall, Amazon was 3,300. So if you sold it at 600 when it was up 100 times, you left basically uh 85% of the money on the table.
So you should it should not be your negative your natural inclination to sell because things are up. And you know Buffett says he made all his money on 12 ideas. Guy invested for 70 years says he made all his money in 12 ideas. Charlie Munger, who was a friend of mine, Warren's partner, used to say he made all his money in four ideas.
He didn't have as many good ideas as Warren. So if but if so if you if you tend to think that a great idea or what what uh nowadays they call a compounder if you if you if you realize how scarce they are and that you're not going to find a lot of them then a big mistake is getting off too soon. So are we in a world where we should be stretching or in a world where we should be thinking about making money by not losing it?
One of the influential things I read was 1974. There's a guy named Charlie Ellis and Charlie wrote an article called Winning the Losers Game. Uh there was a guy named Sai Ramo who was the R and TRW and he wrote a book. I'm a tennis player. He wrote a book extraordinary tennis for ordinary tennis players.
And he he made an interesting observation. He said that in in professional tennis in championship tennis the person who wins the match is the person who hits the most winners. If you hit a gent ball back gently, your opponent will hit a winner and put it away. You'll lose every point. So, you have to go for winners.
Uh, but of course, you have to have the skill to execute. But at the amateur or club level where I play, the winner of the match is often the person who hits the fewest losers because the the club tennis player doesn't have the ability to hit a lot of winners. And in fact, many don't have the ability to keep the ball in play.
So, I believe that if I can just hit it back over the net 20 times, my opponent can't and I'll win the point. I don't have to hit a winner. I just don't have to hit any losers. So, so Charlie Ellis took this idea to investing. Should you go for winners or should you try to avoid hitting losers? And that appealed to me.
And given my chicken nature, I said, "Well, I I can win by not hitting losers." So when we set up Oak Tree, we wrote down the investment philosophy. Number one is risk control. Number two is consistency. It's all about avoiding the losers. But it it's a choice that everybody should make based on their skill level.
If you have if you if you aspire to be to be a championship player, you should learn how to hit winners and then try to do it. If you don't learn how to hit winners and try to do it, you'll never become a champion. Of course, most people can't. So you have to pick your course, but it has to be the right course for you.
Not for me, not for you, not for your parents, but for you. Uh, and a lot of life is figuring out what you're about and then pursuing life accordingly. Yeah.
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