저자: CharlieMunger · 외국인
요약 보기
워런 버핏과 버크셔 해서웨이·데일리 저널의 성과는 평범한 상식(basic morality, sturdy common sense)과 소수 기회 집중에서 비롯됐다고 주장. '최고의 아이디어 모음' 같은 과잉 분석 투자는 실패한다는 사례(연금술 비유)를 들고, 명문대 교육·금융학과 교수들의 비합리성을 비판. 할아버지의 '몇 번의 기회만 잡으면 된다'는 교훈을 인용하며 분산투자는 자신이 모를 때만 의미 있다고 정리.
다듬은 글
What the hell are you thinking about? It's weird. And what's happened of course 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 [clears throat] 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 have built an enormous amount of high IQ people
trying to be more skillful than normal. You hardly imagine another activity that gets so much attention. And weird things have happened. And years ago, one of our local investment shop, so very big one, 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 Wharton and 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 create 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 Wharton. And so they tried it out. And of course it failed utterly. So they tried it again. And it failed utterly. And they tried the third time and it also failed. And of course what they were looking for is the equivalent of the alchemists of centuries ago who were on the third lead into gold.
They thought if you could just buy a lot of lead and wave your magic wand over it and turn it into gold, that would be a good way to make money. 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.
Nothing. The interesting thing about this situation is that this is a very intelligent group of people who's come from all over the world. We've even got a lot of bright people from China where people tend to average out a little smarter. And the issue is very simple, this simple question. Why did that plausible idea fail?
Just think about it for a minute. You've all been to fancy educational institutions. I'll 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 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 a 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.
But that's one you should be able to answer and it shows how hard it is to be rational on something very simple. Now, hard it is and 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.
And 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 that a lot of the faculty are a little crazy. It's so left-wing now in the humanities. And it's very peculiar. That's another thing. Why should 90% of the college professors in the humanities be very left-wing? I leave that question for you, too.
But it happens. Now, a place like Berkshire Hathaway or even the Daily Journal, we've done better than average. And now there's a question, 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 and so on.
We never had that dream. We never thought we could get really useful information on all subjects, like Jim Cramer pretends to have. 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 had asked 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 worked beautifully. But he wouldn't try to know all. 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 health and took it away from the Indians. He fought in the Black Hawk War. He was a captain in the Black Hawk War, of course, and he stayed there and he bought cheap land and he He aggressive and intelligent and so forth and eventually he was the richest man in the town on the bank and highly regarded and a
huge family and a very happy life. 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 black top soil grew the modern rich civilization in some of the best land in the world. His attitude was that in a favored life like his when you're located in the right place you just got a few opportunities if you live to be about 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 I was a 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. They think they study a million things they can know a million things.
And of course the result is almost nobody can outperform an index. Whereas I sit here with my daily journal stock my Berkshire Hathaway stock my holdings in Li Lu's Asian fund my Costco stock and of course I'm outperforming everybody. And I'm 95 years old and I apparently never have a transaction. And the answer is I'm right and they're wrong.
And that's why it's worth for me and not for them. And now the question is do you want to be more like me or more like them? 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're going to want to diversify.
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