저자: Value Investor · 외국인
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in the investment world people it involves an enormous amount of high iq people trying to be more skillful and normal you can 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 just 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 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 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 horton and and 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 also failed and of course what they were looking for is the equivalent of the alchemists of centuries ago who wanted to turn led into gold they thought if you could just buy a lot of lead and weaker magic wand over to turn into gold that would be a good way to make money so 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 that this is a very intelligent group of people which 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 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 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 but that's when you should be able to answer 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 not 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 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 jen cramer pretends it 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 worked beautifully but he was trying to know the whole he would give you one or two stocks he had lit 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 hole he was a captain in the blackhawk wars and he he stayed there and he bought cheap land and he he he was aggressive and intelligent and so forth and eventually he was the richest man in the town on the bank and uh and highly regarded 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 blacktop soil created a modern rich civilization in some of the best land in the world his attitude was that 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 and 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 at 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 can outperform an index 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 outperforming 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's worked for me and not for them another issue of course that's happened in the world of of stock picking where all this money and effort goes into trying to be trying to be rational is that we've had a really horrible thing happen to the investment counseling class and that is these index funds have come along and they basically beat everybody and not only that the amount by which they meet everybody is roughly the amount of cost of running the operation and making the changes in investments so you have a whole profession is basically being paid for accomplishing practically nothing this is very peculiar this is not the case with bowel surgery or even the criminal defense bar and the law or something they have a whole profession where the chosen activity they've selected they can't do anything now in the old days the people in the profession always had some of this problem and they rationalized as follows we are saving our clients from the insurance salesman and the stock broker the standard stock broker for the it serves the active trader and they were saving people from the life insurance salesman and the the hustling stock broker who liked acne trading and i suppose in the sense that the investing class is still saving those people from an even worse fate but it is very peculiar when a whole profession that works so hard and is so admirable and the members of which we are delighted when they marry into our families and they just can't do what the profession is really trying to do which is get better than average results how is that profession handling this terrible situation as index investing gets more and more popular and including by a lot of fancy places i'll give this very simple answer they're handling with denial they have a horrible problem they can't fix so they just treat it as non-existent this is a very stupid way to handle a problem now it may be good when you're thinking about your own death which you can't fix and just denial all the way to the end but but in all the practical fields of life this problem thoroughly understood is half solved or better coped with so it's wrong to have all these people in just a state of denial and doing what they always did year after year and hoping that the world will keep paying them for it even though an unmanaged index is virtually certain to do better and i don't have any solution for for this problem i do think that index investing if everybody did it won't work but for another considerable period index investing is going to work better than active stock picking where you try and know a lot
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