저자: HowardMarks · 외국인
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다듬은 글
When I was offered the opportunity to speak about investment philosophy, I said, "There is nothing I would rather do on my birthday." It starts with a conscious decision about what you want to achieve. Now, this may sound simple. Well, we want to have more money instead of less. We want to achieve higher performance rather than lower performance.
But the initial question for any organization investing should be: will we settle for average or will we try to be above average? It sounds simple, but you have to admit that, when investing, it's extremely easy to be average. You can buy standard products that will guarantee you average results. Or you can try to be above average, which is extremely difficult.
And there is no foolproof solution on how to achieve it. And if you try to be above average, you risk falling below. They are inseparable. So, thoughtfully, consciously, and intentionally, what does it mean for you and your organization ? Then, I think an organization should have a creed, a religion, the things it believes in, the things it does n't believe in, what it will do and what it won't do because it doesn't trust it, and you have to stand firm.
And, again, it has to be something conscious and intentional. We must make decisions: What will our intention be? What do we believe in? Will we trust macroeconomic forecasts? about how you take the approach for nobody. Do you believe in market efficiency? This is extremely important, the most important concept I learned in my graduate education at the University of Chicago in the late 1960s.
Many people understand the concept, but very few incorporate it and think about it in their daily lives. These are some of the things we need to consider. So, let's first talk about the concept of market efficiency. The efficient market theory says that there are many people out there and they are all intelligent, and they all want to earn more than you through competition.
How will you manage to access it instead of them, without having thought it through? Now, what we call the strong form of the efficient market hypothesis says that, because of these circumstances, all information is immediately incorporated into the price of assets, to the point that no one can distinguish which are bargains and which are overvalued.
Now, the really strong form is actually a little different. He says that asset prices, as a result of this intense process, are always correct. You can't beat them, and therefore you can't beat the market. I don't think that's right. I think the prices aren't necessarily correct. They are simply the best that consensus can do.
And it's difficult for anyone to consistently outsmart the consensus. Two different things, but the conclusion of both is the same. You can't beat the market. So the question is: do you accept it? And does that push you towards a passive approach, aiming for average performance, low cost, low risk, and a high probability of success, to achieve your goal of being average?
Or will you try? To be above average in the face of very strong competition. Will you be able to bear the costs? Your quest to...be above average? The initial idea was that people achieve an average before commissions and below average after them, and the idea back then, in 1968, was : "Well, why don't they just buy one share of every stock in the S&P 500?" There was no talk of index funds or indexing; They basically had to be invented by Jack Bogle at Vanguard in '74.
But you can see where the concept went, and today , most of the equity capital in mutual funds is managed passively or through indexing. So it wasn't irrelevant; He was persuasive. Will you try to be proactive and above average, or passive and average? Do you have the people on hand who can achieve this, or the ability to find those people and hire them as external managers?
Hmm. What happens at the moment when , you know? The average performance is X, and some people post much better performance, and your bosses say, "Who was the idiot who accepted average performance?" So, these are questions, but it is fundamental to selecting an investment approach to understand and reflect the concept of market efficiency.
The next step is to find out where the returns come from. You can have an average portfolio that gives an average return, or you can say: "Well, this is a company that I think will deliver positive news that was not anticipated by others, positive surprises." And if you can discover which ones will produce positive surprises, you can overweight your portfolio towards those.
And then, when the news comes out and it agrees with your point of view, uh, everyone else says, "Oh, I wish we knew more." " How incredible." That is, if you think differently from others, you have what we call a deviant perception, an out-of-the-ordinary perception. How often will you be right when the consensus is right and you are wrong?
Um, this is at the heart of it all again. You're up against smart competition, and, uh, you know, when I started my career at a large, bureaucratic institution, uh, in the stock department, people would ask, "Well, what do you think you can win for us?" And the answer was 12%. "Okay, so how do you get to 12?" "Well, the S&P 500 yields 10 on average, it has done so at that time for 60 years." If you get 10 without any effort, you can get 20% better with a little extra effort.
But what if all the effort is for nothing because the market is efficient and you can't gain an advantage? So it's not just a waste of effort, but also a waste of management fees, and of course, management fees are the only certainty in investing. Now, another important question is: will you base it on macro forecasts?
Everyone makes macro forecasts, and yet I do n't think they are of any use. That's a slight exaggeration, but not by much. Um, the truth is that most of the time things stay the same , so an extrapolated forecast is correct most of the time. Your forecasts, the profitable ones for, um, a radical departure from the trend, a radical departure from extrapolation.
These are very meaningful when you do them and you're right. The problem is that they are usually not correct, because most of the time things are extrapolated, so we have extrapolation forecasts that are usually correct but not profitable, and trend deviation forecasts that are potentially very profitable but are usually not correct.
I take that and the analysis to conclude that macroeconomic forecasting doesn't work. And, uh, one thing: when we started Oak Tree 29 years ago this month, uh, we sat down and wrote down the things we had been doing. We had the advantage of having worked together for years already, on average, and , uh, we have a very simple six-point investment philosophy that governs everything we do.
And number five says that our actions are not driven by macro forecasts. We are bottom-up investors, analyzing individual companies, not the other way around. Where knowledge comes from. Other people trying to surpass performance simply by trying will not help you if you don't know something they don't know.
Therefore, we believe we can gain a competitive knowledge advantage . For those who don't know and for those who don't know that they don't know, and I 've known for decades that I don't know, so I think we have an advantage in that . And then that kind of, like, forecast is misleading; the truth is, it can be worse than neutral; can have a harmful effect.
And I quote the American humorist and novelist who said: "It's not what you don't know that gets you into trouble; it's what you know for sure that just isn't true." The phrase "I don't know, but I could be wrong" has never gotten anyone into trouble. The ones who get you into trouble are the ones who say " I'm sure this is so," because if you strongly believe in something and bet heavily on it and you're wrong , that's how you get into serious trouble.
So, will you bet on macro forecasting? This, in my opinion, is a critical and global decree. A year and a half ago, I think it was in October 2022, titled "The Illusion of Knowledge," and it is basically a diatribe against macro forecasting, beginning with a famous quote in one section. And I think it's extremely important to decide whether or not to start with a top-down macro forecast , and most people do.
Many people know that they do n't work. They do it anyway. And I quote someone there saying that most people wouldn't be able to get out of bed in the morning if they admitted how uncertain the future is. And I think that macro forecasting, from my point of view, often takes the form of, may I say, an organized religion.
It gives them something to believe in to dispel the great uncertainty present in the world they live in. And you know, I think very few people have the ability to do it in a superior way. Now, the next question is: how do you and your organization think about risk? What is risk? You know, in all the work with mathematical formulas in the investment business, people use the variability of results as a measure of risk.
I don't think that's the real risk. I believe the real risk is the risk of bad results. But the problem with my form of risk is that it is not measurable. It cannot measure the probability of negative outcomes in the future. It cannot even measure what the probability of negative outcomes was in the past.
It can only measure what happened, which is a subset of what could have happened. On the last slide I included a quote from Elroy Dimson, a professor at London Business School. He said that risk means more things could happen than will actually happen. The conventional view of risk is shown in this graph.
You have the return on the vertical axis, the risk on the horizontal axis, and a line that goes up to the right. Mathematicians call this positive correlation. If one goes up, the other goes up too. Most professionals interpret that riskier assets have higher returns. There is something wrong with that formulation.
If it were possible to count on riskier assets to have higher returns, by definition, they would not be risky. So the way I see it is more like this. I take these small bell-shaped curves . I simply overlap them on the same line. It's the same underlying line. But now, as you move from left to right, not only does the expected return increase, but the range of possible outcomes widens and the bad outcomes get worse .
That's the risk. That's what people should be worried about. Not the possibility that their return flows may be irregular. Buffett said: "I prefer a 15% irregular return to a stable 12% return ." And I think that makes a lot of sense. So, I think the most important job of the professional investor is to manage risk, and we must assess and manage it, even if we do so from a micro level upwards and not downwards.
But I think you have to constantly work with risk, but you should never assume, as Mark Twain warns, that you know it for sure. We never know what's going to happen, and events in the world prove it. We never know how the market will react to what happens in the short term. And if you want proof of those two claims, take a look at the 2016 US presidential election.
Everyone was certain of two things. That Hillary would win with an 80% probability and that, if by some chance Trump won, the market would collapse. In contrast, Trump won and the market rose 30% in 14 months. So we know nothing, and we never assume that our intellectual process allows us to keep risk under control.
And finally, you have to accept that it is very difficult to have both superior returns and low risk or a high degree of security. Seeking higher returns means taking on some risk. You have to bet on riskier ventures, riskier proposals, things that are considered unpopular or out of fashion. and things that, if you make a mistake, will end up underneath.
And you have to discover for yourself what your approach is. I am a tennis player and last summer, while watching tournaments, especially Wimbledon, I wrote a memo entitled "fewer losers or more winners"; In my opinion, you need to have an approach that organizes your search for superior returns, and there are really two ways to do that.
You should have more of the things that perform above average or fewer of the things that perform below average. There is no alternative. Of course, you could do both. I think that, for most people, given their mindset, one or the other is more likely. A conservative person can, in theory, have less of the things that perform poorly.
An aggressive and skillful person can, in theory, have more of the things they perform well . Each person must understand their own mindset, what is possible for them , and therefore, what their search will be . And these things, in my opinion, taken together, are examples of the elements that combine to produce an investment philosophy.
And we've done it in a way that makes sure everyone knows where we stand. They are all rowing together in the same direction. Thank you so much.
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