저자: HowardMarks · 외국인
요약 보기
하워드 막스는 시장 폭락 시 하락 자체를 매도 신호로 보지 말고 할인 세일로 해석해야 한다고 강조한다. 2008년 리먼 붕괴 때 Oaktree는 약 110억 달러 현금을 주간 약 5억 달러씩 15주에 걸쳐 투입했으며, 가격이 더 떨어져도 분석이 맞다면 추가 매수해야 한다고 말한다. 핵심은 분석이 틀릴 수 있다는 전제 아래 자신의 판단을 주기적으로 재점검하고, 감정을 통제하되 확신을 과신하지 않는 태도다. 2016년 2월 시장 급락 때도 시장이 비이성적 공포에 빠졌다고 보고 'What does the market know' 메모를 통해 하락을 매도 신호로 보지 말자고 주장했다. 하이일드 채권(1990년), 기술주 버블 매도(1989년 일본 시기 등) 사례처럼 공포 속에서 매수·매도를 한 경험을 언급하며, 두렵지만 행동해야 한다고 말한다. 2008년 10월 리먼 파산 직후에는 미래를 예측할 수 없었지만, 매수 자산은 극히 낮은 가격의 선순위 채권이었고 기업 가치가 1/3~1/5로 떨어져도 원금 회수가 가능한 수준이었다고 설명한다. 금융시스템이 무너지면 어떤 행동을 해도 무의미하고, 무너지지 않는데 매수하지 않으면 직무를 다하지 못한 것이라는 결론으로 매수를 정당화했다. 영상은 특정 개별 종목이나 지수에 대한 현재 가격 방향 예측은 거의 없고, 위기 시 역발상 투자 원칙을 설명하는 데 초점이 있다. 리스크: 분석이 틀리면 하락이 계속될 수 있으며, 영상 속 사례는 과거 사례로 현재 시장에 그대로 적용되지 않을 수 있다.
다듬은 글
the market is supposed to be efficient, knowing everything we know. But it doesn't know everything, and I believe there are times when it doesn't know anything at all. That's why I say you can't let falling prices be a sell signal, because falling prices are the equivalent of investments being put on sale.
2008, Oaktree's Experience
Let's dwell on 2008, because what Oaktree did then was remarkable. Lehman just collapsed, and you had 10 or 11 billion dollars on the shelf, ready to deploy. You deployed it at the rate of half a billion dollars a week, for about 15 weeks. And at first it didn't look like you were right, because markets were still falling. That was a difficult period. I think you even had to go back to co-investors and convince them to put in more money. Did you ever have a crisis of confidence and think you weren't getting it right? What was the mindset at that time?
Well, Max, I don't remember having a crisis of confidence. Of course, if you buy, the price goes down, you buy more, and it goes down further, and you're not questioning yourself and not a little scared, then you're a fool. But one of the important things I've realized and built into my thinking is that you're never going to get it exactly right. Sometimes, if we're lucky, we know what's going to happen, but we never know when. If you accept that, it gets you off the hook. You buy today at nine, it goes to eight, you buy more. It goes to seven, you buy more. You don't say, "Oh my God, I bought at nine, I must be an idiot and I must be wrong." You understand the nature of this. Warren Buffett says he likes hamburgers, and when hamburgers go on sale, he eats more hamburgers. So if you did an analysis at nine, and the analysis was sound, and it goes to eight, you should buy more.
Now, of course, in our business there's always the question of when conviction turns into hubris, and there's no easy answer. But it always comes back to rechecking your analysis, and ultimately to whether your analysis is correct. You always think it's correct, but you have to be very vigilant, and you have to believe it's correct for a good reason.
The 2016 Memo: "What Does the Market Know?"
I wrote a memo, you probably know it, in February 2016 called "What Does the Market Know?" The market got off to its worst start in history, and essentially all markets were collapsing. I wrote a memo called "On the Couch," because I said every once in a while the market needs a trip to the shrink, and that it was really the victim of irrational fear. The next day I went on Bloomberg, as I usually do after putting out a memo, and the hosts kept peppering me: "Stocks are collapsing, isn't that a sell signal? Isn't that a sell signal?" So I went back to my office and wrote another memo that day, "What Does the Market Know?" This is a very important concept. The market is supposed to be efficient, knowing everything we know. But it doesn't know everything, and I believe there are times when it doesn't know anything. Again, you can't let falling prices be a sell signal, because falling prices are the equivalent of investments being put on sale. How can they be a sell signal? If anything, they're a buy signal.
I went through this whole subject in that memo. But I also want to say this: when we bought high-yield bonds in 1990 when they were collapsing, when we sold into the tech bubble in 1999, and when we bought in the period you're describing, we never did it without trepidation. You can have great advantages, a strong intellect, and act on the basis of your intellectual analysis, and you can control your emotions. But that doesn't make you right. There's always the possibility that you're wrong, and we must bear that in mind. And since we're only human, when we do these things, it terrifies us. When we bought in October 2008, it terrified us. If you think about it, buying at the low point has to terrify you. I think you've said this yourself: having raised the money and seeing the valuations you saw, it was a case of "if not now, then when?"
Yes. Lehman went bankrupt on the 15th, and as I recall, I put out a memo around the 18th or 19th titled "What Now?" or maybe it was "Now What?" What I said in there, by the way, is this: believe me, if you weren't there, it was impossible to figure out what was going to happen. It was impossible to prove that the financial system of the world either would or would not collapse. In general, we can't prove anything about the future of the system, and that's particularly true when you're going through an event that has never occurred before. So there was nothing intelligent to say about the future of the financial system at that time.
So what made us buy? Number one, objectively speaking, the things we were buying were extremely low priced. We were buying the senior debt of companies that had been the subject of LBOs one or two years earlier, and we were buying the most senior debt at prices where, if the companies turned out to be worth a third, a quarter, or a fifth of what these great buyout firms had paid a year earlier, we would still have broken even. We figured that out. Let me put it this way. When you go to buy a car, you negotiate with the salesman. You say, "Wow, I probably could have gotten another five percent off." Do you negotiate car prices in this country? Yes? Okay, good. Sometimes you come away thinking you could have gotten another five percent off. But did you ever think, "I probably paid too high by a factor of four. I bought that car for sixty thousand, and if I'd only negotiated a little, I could have paid fifteen"? So similarly, we concluded that the great private equity firms, who had done all that due diligence, probably did not overpay by a factor of three, four, or five.
Then the other thing we concluded, and what I wrote, is this: if we buy today and the financial system falls apart, it doesn't matter what we did. But if we don't buy and the financial system doesn't fall apart, then we didn't do our job. So we should buy. That was about as profound as it got.
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