저자: WarrenBuffett/찰리멍거 · 외국인
요약 보기
워런 버핏은 가치투자를 중심으로 한 투자 교육 방식을 설명한다. 그는 비즈니스 가치평가와 시장을 다루는 두 과목만 가르칠 것이며, 현대 포트폴리오 이론·베타·효율적 시장가설은 제외하겠다고 말한다. 핵심은 능력 범위(circle of competence) 안에서 이해 가능한 기업을 찾고, 가치보다 싸게 거래되는 주식을 고르는 것이다. 모든 종목을 알 필요 없이 소수 기업만 정확히 판단하면 된다고 강조한다. 회계는 기업의 언어로서 필요하지만 한계가 크므로, 어떤 회계 정보를 무시해야 하는지 판단할 줄 알아야 한다. 경쟁우위의 지속성을 구분하는 것도 중요하며, 유행성 기업과 코카콜라 같은 지속 기업을 구별해야 한다. 시장 변동은 투자자를 가르치기 위한 것이 아니라 투자자에게 봉사하기 위해 존재한다고 본다. 높은 IQ보다 정서적 안정이 더 중요하며, 과도한 지능은 오히려 해가 될 수 있다. 멍거는 학계와 현대 금융의 많은 이론이 잘못되었다고 비판한다. 효율적 시장 이론을 가르치는 것의 모순을 지적하고, 막스 플랑크의 '과학은 장례식을 치를 때마다 발전한다'는 말을 인용해 금융계에서도 잘못된 생각이 오래 지속된다고 설명한다.
다듬은 글
Hmm, I was wondering if you could explain your strategies, namely value investing, in terms of nurturing the next generation of investors . How will you teach this young group? This year, 49 people came to Omaha, mostly universities, a few colleges, uh. We conduct them in groups of six, and in the last class, another university joined us .
So, we had eight sessions, all-day sessions. And they asked me, sometimes, they asked, uh , what would I do if I ran a business school and taught investing. So I told them I would only have two courses. One would be about how to value a business. And the second would be about how to think about markets.
And , uh, there wouldn't be anything about modern portfolio theory, beta testing, efficient markets, or anything like that. We would have gotten rid of it in the first 10 minutes. They, uh... But if you know how to value a business, and you don't need to know how to value all the businesses on the New York Stock Exchange, I don't know, there's probably four or five thousand businesses, and a lot more on the Nasdaq.
You don't have to be right about 4,000 or 5,000. You don't have to be right about 400. You don't have to be right about 40. You just have to stay within your circle of competence, what you can understand, and look for what's selling for less than it's worth, from those that you can appreciate. And you can start with a fairly small set of competencies and learn more about the business as you go along, but you find out that there are a whole bunch of them that just don't lend themselves to being assessed, and you forget about them.
I think if accounting helps you with that , you need to understand accounting to know the language of business, but accounting also has huge limitations, and you need to learn enough to know what accounting makes sense and when you need to, uh, ignore certain, uh, aspects of accounting. You need to understand when competitive advantages are durable and when they are fleeting.
I mean, you have to learn to tell the difference between a hula hoop company , you know, and Coca-Cola. But it's not that difficult to do. And then, you have to know how to think about market fluctuations and really understand that the market exists to serve you, not to teach you. And to a large extent, it's not a question of IQ.
If you have...If you work in the investment business and have an IQ of 150, sell 30 points to someone else because you don't need it. I mean, you have to be...You have to be pretty smart. You don't need to be a genius at all. In fact, it can be harmful. But you need emotional stability. You have to have some inner peace about your decisions because this is a game where you are exposed to stimuli every minute , where people are constantly offering their opinions.
You must be able to think for yourself. And I don't know if it's how it happens, I don't know how much of it is innate and how much of it can be learned, but if you have that quality , you'll be very good at investing if you spend some time on it, learn something about business valuation. This is not a difficult game.
As I've said many times, it's simple, but not easy. This is not a difficult game. You don't need to understand advanced mathematics. You don't need to understand the law. There are all sorts of things you don't need to be good at. There are all kinds of jobs in this world that are much more difficult.
But you need to have a certain amount of emotional stability that will help you get through almost anything. And then you will make the right investment decisions over time . Charlie? Yes, you have a major problem: exactly half of the world's future investors will be in the bottom 50%. In other words, you will always have more skills at the top than at the bottom, and you will never be able to homogenize the investment expertise of the world.
There is so much that is wrong and crazy in modern investment practice, modern investment banking, and in modern academia , in business schools, even in economics departments . What if you just cut the nonsense, uh, that's all I think you can reasonably hope for. Beyond a certain basic level of skill, wouldn't you say that your emotional makeup is more important than some super-high degree of skill?
Uh, of course . And if you think you're talented, if you think your IQ is 160 and he's 150, you're a disaster. A 130 guy who works well within himself is much better. I-I see the students coming. I love a guy from the University of Chicago. Uh, one of the students in The first question I was asked was, what are we studying that's most wrong?
I mean, that's exactly what... It's a shame they didn't ask that in the panel here. How did you manage that in one session? Yes. But that was scripture 25 years ago. The efficient market theory, you know, I never understood how it could even be taught. I mean, if you came in in the first 5 minutes and told the students, "Everything is priced correctly." I mean, how do you kill the rest of the hour?
But they did it. And they got... And they got doctorates for doing it well, you know, and... And the more Greek symbols they could weave into their... you know, their writings, the more they were respected. It amazes me, and I could even imagine academia in general, how crazy ideas take hold and spread.
And then I read a quote the other day that may have partially explained it. Max Planck spoke, a famous physicist, that Max Planck spoke about the resistance of the human mind, even brilliant human minds, to new ideas, especially those that have been carefully developed over many years and have been blessed by other great people and so on.
And he said: " Science advances, funeral after funeral ." And I think there's a lot of truth in that . This is certainly true in the world of finance.
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