저자: ChrisFranco · 외국인
요약 보기
하워드 막스의 『The Most Important Thing』을 인용해 시장을 이기려면 2단계 사고(남들과 다르면서 더 정확한 견해)가 필요하다고 설명. 평균 수익(인덱스)은 누구나 가능하나 초과수익은 소수만 가능하며, 1단계 사고(좋은 회사니 매수)는 단순·흔하다고 강조. 과신이 투자 실수의 원인이라는 점과 군중 추종 경계를 강조. 특정 종목·자산에 대한 가격 방향 예측은 없음.
다듬은 글
hey this is Chris Franco and you are listening to Compound Money Quiet Le, the CMQ Investing Podcast. CMQ Investors, welcome to the show. It's great to have you here. In this episode you will learn about the way you have to think if you have any chance of beating the market. It's a concept called second level thinking, and I'll be reading from one of my favorite investing books of all time, *The Most Important Thing Illuminated*, written by Howard Marks. It made a big impression on me when I first read it several years ago, and it still affects me today. Make sure to listen till the end, because I will share my key takeaways after we finish reading from this book. Let's get to it.
Few people have what it takes to be great investors. Some can be taught, but not everyone, and those who can be taught can't be taught everything. Valid approaches work some of the time but not all. Investing can't be reduced to an algorithm and turned over to a computer. Even the best investors don't get it right every time. The reasons are simple: no rule always works, the environment isn't controllable, and circumstances rarely repeat exactly. Psychology plays a major role in markets, and because it's highly variable, cause-and-effect relationships aren't reliable. An investment approach may work for a while, but eventually the actions it calls for will change the environment, meaning a new approach is needed. And if others emulate an approach, that will blunt its effectiveness. Investing, like economics, is more art than science, and that means it can get a little messy.
It's never my goal in this book or elsewhere to suggest investing can be routinized. In fact, one of the things I most want to emphasize is how essential it is that one's investment approach be intuitive and adaptive rather than fixed and mechanistic. At bottom, it's a matter of what you're trying to accomplish. Anyone can achieve average investment performance: just invest in an index fund that buys a little of everything. That will give you what is known as market returns, merely matching whatever the market does. But successful investors want more. They want to beat the market. In my view, that's the definition of successful investing: doing better than the market and other investors. To accomplish that, you need either good luck or superior insight. Counting on luck isn't much of a plan, so you'd better concentrate on insight. In basketball they say you can't coach height, meaning all the coaching in the world won't make a player taller. It's almost as hard to teach insight as any other art form. Some people just understand investing better than others. They have, or manage to acquire, the necessary trace of wisdom that Ben Graham so eloquently calls for.
Everyone wants to make money. All of economics is based on belief and the universality of the profit motive, and so is capitalism. The profit motive makes people work harder and risk their capital. The pursuit of profit has produced much of the material progress the world has enjoyed. But that universality also makes beating the market a difficult task. Millions of people are competing for each available dollar of investment gain. Who will get it? The person who's a step ahead. In some pursuits, getting to the front of the pack means more schooling, more time in the gym or library, better nutrition, more perspiration, greater stamina, or better equipment. But in investing, where these things count for less, it calls for more perceptive thinking, at what I call the second level.
Investors can take courses in finance and accounting, read widely, and if they are fortunate, receive mentoring from someone with a deep understanding of the investment process. But only a few of them will achieve the superior insight, intuition, sense of value, and awareness of psychology required for consistently above-average results. Doing so requires second-level thinking. Remember, your goal in investing isn't to earn average returns. You want to do better than average. Thus your thinking has to be better than that of others, both more powerful and at a higher level. Since other investors may be smart, well informed, and highly computerized, you must find an edge they don't have. You must think of something they haven't thought of, see things they miss, or bring insight they don't possess. You have to react differently and behave differently. In short, being right may be a necessary condition for investment success, but it won't be sufficient. You must be more right than others, which by definition means your thinking has to be different.
What is second-level thinking? First-level thinking says, "It's a good company, let's buy the stock. Buy it, baby, this one's hot." Second-level thinking says, "It's a good company, but everyone thinks it's a great company, and it's not, so the stock's overrated and overpriced. Let's sell." First-level thinking says, "The outlook calls for low growth and rising inflation, let's dump our stocks." Second-level thinking says, "The outlook stinks, but everyone else is selling in panic, so buy." First-level thinking says, "I think the company's earnings will fall, sell. Trust me, my intuition is never wrong." Second-level thinking says, "I think the company's earnings will fall, but less than people expect, and the pleasant surprise will lift the stock, so buy."
First-level thinking is simplistic and superficial, and just about everyone can do it, a bad sign for anything involving an attempt at superiority. All the first-level thinker needs is an opinion about the future, as in "the outlook for the company is favorable, meaning the stock will go up." Second-level thinking is deep, complex, and convoluted. The second-level thinker takes a great many things into account. For example: What is the range of likely future outcomes? Which outcome do I think will occur? What's the probability I'm right? What does the consensus think? How does my expectation differ from the consensus? How does the current price of the asset comport with a consensus view of the future? Is the consensus psychology incorporated in the price too bullish or bearish? And finally, what will happen to the asset's price if the consensus turns out to be right, and what if I'm right? The difference in workload between first-level and second-level thinking is clearly massive, and the number of people capable of the latter is tiny compared to the number capable of the former.
First-level thinkers look for simple formulas and easy answers. Second-level thinkers know that success in investing is the antithesis of simple. That's not to say you won't run into plenty of people who try their darnedest to make it sound simple. Some of them I might characterize as mercenaries. Brokerage firms want you to think everyone's capable of investing at $10 per trade. Mutual fund companies don't want you to think you can do it; they want you to think they can do it. In that case, you'll put your money into actively managed funds and pay the associated high fees. Others who simplify are what I think of as the prophets. Some are academics who teach investing. Others are well-intentioned practitioners who overestimate the extent to which they're in control. I think most of them fail to tote up their records, or they overlook their bad years, or attribute losses to bad luck. Finally, there are those who simply fail to understand the complexity of the subject. A guest commentator on my DriveTime radio station says, and I quote, "If you have had good experience with a product, buy the stock." End quote. Write that down, buddy, that's genius. There's so much more than that to being a successful investor.
First-level thinkers think the same way other first-level thinkers do about the same things, and they generally reach the same conclusions. By definition, this can't be the route to superior results. All investors can't beat the market, since collectively they are the market. Before trying to compete in the zero-sum world of investing, you must ask yourself whether you have a good reason to expect to be in the top half, to outperform the average investor. You have to be able to outthink the consensus. Are you capable of doing so, and what makes you think so?
The problem is that extraordinary performance comes only from correct non-consensus forecasts, but non-consensus forecasts are hard to make, hard to make correctly, and hard to act on. You can't do the same things others do and expect to outperform. Unconventionality shouldn't be a goal in itself, but rather a way of thinking. In order to distinguish yourself from others, it helps to have ideas that are different and to process those ideas differently. The upshot is simple: to achieve superior investment results, you have to hold non-consensus views regarding value, and they have to be accurate. That's not easy. For your performance to diverge from the norm, your expectations, and thus your portfolio, have to diverge from the norm, and you have to be more right than the consensus. Different and better: that's a pretty good description of second-level thinking.
Those who consider the investment process simple generally aren't aware of the need for, or even the existence of, second-level thinking. Thus many people are misled into believing that everyone can be a successful investor. Not everyone can. But the good news is that the prevalence of first-level thinkers increases the returns available to second-level thinkers. To consistently achieve superior investment returns, you must be one of them.
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Okay, it's funny, I said I was going to have my key takeaways, but really what Howard Marks just wrote is perfectly said. What I want to do is look at a few of the key points and elaborate. The first, and probably the biggest idea we all need to remember, is that overconfidence is a killer for us as investors. That's what causes us to make mistakes, and those mistakes interrupt the compounding process. To consistently achieve superior investment returns is extremely hard. What I like about that chapter is that it lays out the reality of what any investor who attempts to beat the average rate of return is up against. Sometimes when we break down the Warren Buffett and Charlie Munger methodology, it's great because we can describe it in simple terms, but many investors are likely looking at it in an overly simplistic way. When I was earlier in my investment journey, I definitely did. I thought I just had to find a company I knew something about and load up, because that's what you do. What I didn't factor in was the psychology. I've discussed that in some of our Instagram lives, and it reminded me of another Charlie Munger quote, which is that mimicking the herd invites regression to the mean, or merely average performance. In order to be a second-level thinker, you have to go against the consensus, and the consensus by definition is the majority. So the majority can't all do exceptionally well. The majority is not going to achieve superior returns. That's only going to be reserved for a small percentage of the participants. I love the logic here. If you start seeing everyone saying something is a sure thing, well, in all likelihood they're wrong. They're first-level thinkers. I was getting at that without saying second-level thinking in our episode, which I believe was just one episode ago, about whether Bitcoin is the greatest investment opportunity of a lifetime. I'll let you go back and listen to that rather than turn this into another Bitcoin rant, but it's the same idea. The logic is that superior returns are only reserved for superior performers, and superior performers are not going to be the majority. They're going to be a small percentage. I think I've heard Charlie Munger say that only one out of five can be in the top 20%. It's a bit of a tongue-in-cheek expression, but it really says what we're trying to say here. If you're going to do better than the consensus, you're going to have to think differently than the consensus. But not just "Oh, I'm a contrarian, I think differently, I'm an independent thinker." No, you have to diverge from the consensus, and you also have to be right. That's what I love about Howard Marks's point that second-level thinking is different and better. It's not just different; it's different and better.
Hey, guess who's back? It's me, Conor, the overconfident investor. What's up with that Howard Hughes guy making investing sound so tough? Stocks go up, you buy the dip, you get the Doge, then you pick out your Lambo. I'm so rich. To be honest, I thought I'd never walk again when I bought my Segway last week. This thing's awesome.
This has been Compound Money Quiet Le, the CMQ Investing Podcast. My name is Chris Franco. Thank you for listening, and we'll talk soon.
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