저자: 찰리멍거 · 외국인
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한 줄 결론: 멍거는 분산투자 남발과 고비용 자문을 비판하며, 소수의 확실한 기회에 집중하는 것이 성공 비결이라고 주장한다. 투자 자문사 실패 사례: 명문대 출신 인재들에게 '최고의 아이디어 하나씩'을 모아 포뮬러를 만들면 시장을 크게 이길 것이라 믿었으나 세 번 모두 실패했다고 설명한다. 원리를 묻고 이에 대한 생각을 던진다. 합리성과 교육에 대한 비판: 진짜 교육받은 사람은 교수의 말을 따라 하는 게 아니라 교수가 틀린 때를 알아보는 사람이라고 정의한다. 특히 인문·사회과학 교수진이 지나치게 좌편향되어 있다고 비판한다. 버크셔·데일리저널의 성공 요인: 많은 것을 알려 하지 않고 소수의 사업만 깊이 이해했다는 것이다. 그는 자신이 버크셔, 데일리저널, 코스트코, 리利러 아시아펀드 등 소수 종목을 보유하며 시장을 이기고 있으며 거래는 거의 하지 않는다고 말한다. 분산투자 비판: 모르는 상태에서 평균 수익을 원할 때만 의미가 있고, 우수한 소수 기회에 집중하는 것이 낫다고 주장한다. 포트폴리오 분산이 불가능한 과제를 반복하게 만든다고 비판한다. 할머니 사례: 한 고객 할머니가 30만 달러를 5개 종목(GE, 듀폰 등)에 나눠 사고 수십 년간 그대로 두어 약 150만 달러가 되었다는 일화를 소개한다. 수수료가 없었던 것이 핵심이다. 비용의 복리 효과: 연 5% 수익에서 2%를 수수료로 내면 미래 수익의 40%가 아니라 약 90%를 잃는 셈이라고 강조한다. 장기 보유자에게 연간 수수료는 큰 손실이다. 인덱스 투자 경향 및 가치투자자 은퇴: 대형 자문사들이 인덱스 투자를 많이 쓰며 성장 중이고, 과거 가치투자자들은 업계를 떠나는 것이 더 고상하다고 평가한다. 대상 자산 예측: 발언 중 대상 자산에 대한 1~3개월 가격 방향 예측은 없음. 장기 관점 일반론만 있음.
다듬은 글
what the hell are you thinking about it's weird and what's happened of course is that is that we're standing a bit for some combination of basic morality and sturdy common sense and it's amazing how well berkshire hathaway and the daily journal for that matter have succeeded with nothing more than basic morality and sturdy common sense but of course when people talk about common sense they mean uncommon sense every time you hear that somebody has a lot of common sense it means he's got uncommon sense and it is much harder to have common sense than is generally thought let me give you an interesting example in the investment world people involves an enormous amount of high iq people trying to be more skillful and normal and hardly imagine another activity that gets so much attention and weird things have happened and years ago one of our local investment counseling shops a very big one because they were looking for a way to get an advantage over other investment counseling shops and they reasoned as follows we've got all these brilliant young people from horton harvard and so forth and they work so hard trying to understand business and market trends and everything else and if we just ask each one of our most brilliant men for their single best idea then created a formula with this collection of best ideas we would outperform averages by a big amount and that seemed plausible to them because they were ill-educated that's what happens when you go to harvard and and and so they tried it out and of course it failed utterly so they tried it again and it failed early and they tried the third time and also failed and of course what they were looking for is some centuries ago right on the turn led into gold they thought if you could just buy a lot of lead and weight or magic wand over and turn into gold that would be a good way to make money oh this counseling shop was looking for the equivalent of turning lead into gold and of course it didn't work i could have told them but they didn't ask me the interesting thing about this situation is this is a very intelligent group of people that's come from all over the world you've got a lot of bright people from china where people tend to average out a little smarter and and the the issue is very simple there's a simple question why did that plausible idea fail just think about it for a minute you've all been to fancy educational institutions i bet you there's hardly a one in the audience who knows why that thing failed that's a pretty ridiculous demonstration i'm making how can you not know that it's one of the main activity of america an obvious and important failure surely we can explain it you have to have stayed awake in your freshman college courses to answer that question but if you ask that question at the department of finance at a leading place the professors wouldn't answer it right now i'm going to leave you that question because i want you perplexed and i will go on to another issue but that's when you should be able to answer and it shows how hard it is to be rational on something very simple how hard it is how many kind of crazy ideas people have and they don't work you don't even know why they don't work even though it's perfectly obvious if you've been properly educated by the way my definition of being properly educated is being right when the professor is wrong anybody can spit back what the professor tells you the trick is to know when he's right and when he's wrong that's the properly educated person and of course they're frequently wrong particularly in the soft sciences in fact if you look at a modern elite institution it's fair to say a lot of the faculty are a little crazy it's so left laying now in the humanities and it's very peculiar that's another thing why should 90 the college professors in the humanities be very left-wing i leave that question for you too but it happens at a place like berkshire hathaway or even the daily journal you've done better than average now there's a question why has that happened why has that happened and the answer is pretty simple we tried to do less we never had the illusion we could just hire a bunch of bright young people and they would know more than anybody about canned soup and aerospace and utilities and so on and so on we never had that dream we never thought we could get really useful information on all subjects like jen kramer predense tends to have and and we always realized that we worked very hard we could find a few things where we were right and the few things were enough and that that was a reasonable expectation that is a very different way to approach the process and if you would ask warren buffett the same thing that this investment counseling did give me your best idea this year and you just followed warren's best idea you would find it work beautifully but he was trying to know he would give you one or two stocks he had more limited ambitions i had a grandfather who was very useful to me my mother's grandfather and he was a pioneer and he came out to iowa with no money but youth and help and took it away from the indians he fought him a black boy he was a captain of black hawk wars and he he stayed there and he bought cheap land and he he was aggressive and intelligent and so forth and eventually he was the richest man in the town around the bank and uh and highly regarded in a huge family and a very happy life and and he had the attitude having come out to iowa when the land was not much more than a dollar an acre and having stayed there until that blacktops well the modern rich civilization and some of the best land in the world his attitude was that in a favored life like his when you were located in the right place you just got a few opportunities if you live to be above 90.
and the trick in coming out well was seizing a few opportunities that were your fair share that came along when they did and he told that story over and over again to the grandchildren around him all summer and my mother who had no interest in money remembered the story and told it to me but i'm not my mother's natural imitator and i knew grandpa was right and so i always knew from the very first little boy that the opportunities that were important that were going to come to me were few and that the trick was to prepare myself for seizing the few that came this is not the attitude they have in a big investment counseling thing if they study a million things they can know a million things and that of course the result is almost nobody operate our own end whereas i sit here with my daily journal stock my berkshire hathaway stock my holdings in lilu's asian fund my costco stock and of course i'm out performing everybody i'm 95 years old and i probably never have a transaction and the answer is i'm right and they're wrong and that's why it works for me and not for them and now the question is do you want to be more like me or more like them maybe the idea of diversification makes sense to a point if you don't know what you're doing and you want the standard result and not be embarrassed well of course you've been widely diversified nobody's entitled a lot of money for recognizing that because it's a truism it's like knowing that two and two equals four and but the investment professionals think they're helping you by arranging a derivative diversification and maybe it could diversify a portfolio and or a computer for that matter and and but the whole trick of the game is to have a few times when you know that something is better than average and invest only where you have that extra knowledge and then if you get just a few opportunities that's enough what tells you you own three securities and jp morgan chase owns a hundred you know what's wrong with owning a few securities jordan always says he lived in a growing town and you owned stock and three of the best enterprises in the town isn't that diversified enough the answer of course it is and that fortunes formula which got so famous which was a formula to tell people how much to bet on each transaction if you had an edge and of course the bigger your edge the more close the transaction was to a certain winner the more you should bet and of course there's mathematics behind it but of course it's true it's perfectly possible to buy by only one thing because the opportunity is so great and such a stench for only two or three so the whole idea of diversity occasionally looking for excellence is totally ridiculous it doesn't work it gives you an impossible task what fun is it to do an impossible task over and over again i find it agony and just who would want to do it and and i don't see why my father had a client he was a lawyer in omaha he had a client whose husband had a little soap cover and the guy died and my father sold the soap company this woman was one of the richest people in town had a little depression and what she had was a little soap company in a base mansion in omaha's best neighborhood they sold the soap company she had a mansion in the best neighborhood and 300 000 but 300 000 in 1930 something was an incredible amount of money a little hamburger was a nickel a big hamburger was a dime and the all-you-can-eat cafe in omaha would feed you all you needed to stay alive for two bits a day i mean 300 000 well she didn't hire an investment counselor she didn't do anything she's a wonderful old woman and she just took that and she divided into five chunks and she bought five stocks i remember three of them because i probated her estate and it was almost general electric one was dow one was dupont i forgot the other two and she never changed those stocks she never paid me advisor she never did anything and she bought some medical bonds she never spent her income and she bought some missile bombs from time to time will be and the time she died in the 50s she had a million and a half dollars no costs no expenses how did you decide to do that she said well she said i thought electricity and chemistry were the coming things he just chunked it all in and sat on her head i always like that little lawn my kind of a girl and but it's rare you know but if you stop to think about it think of all the expense and calabre that she didn't have to listen to and all the trouble she avoided zero costs and of course what people don't realize because they're so mathematically illiterate is if you make five percent and pay two of it to your advisors you're not losing 40 of your future you're losing 90 because over a long period of time that little difference because the 90 disadvantage to you so it's hugely important for somebody who's a long-term holder not to be paying a big annual toll out of the performance and of course there are a few big time advisors now are using indexation very heavily and of course they're prospering mightily and of course every time they get somebody it's just agony for the rest of the investment counseling good and it's a very serious problem and i think these people were used to winning as old-time value investors who are now just quitting the profession that's a very understandable thing to do i i regard it as more noble than staying in you know playing along with the denial it's an interesting problem i can see i'm not trying to make your morning i'm just trying to describe things the way they are you
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