저자: BillGross · 외국인
요약 보기
빌 그로스의 생애를 다룬 다큐 영상으로, 시장 전망보다는 투자 철학과 경력 서사에 초점이 맞춰져 있음. 결론: 도박 확률 원리(우위 있을 때 크게, 없을 때 작게 베팅)를 채권 투자에 적용해 성공한 인물의 이야기이며, 특정 자산의 향후 1~3개월 가격 방향에 대한 예측은 없음. 초기 생애: 22세에 교통사고로 중상을 입고 입원 중 'Beat the Dealer'를 읽고 블랙잭 카운팅으로 200달러를 1만 달러로 불림. 이 자금으로 UCLA MBA 학비를 충당. 베트남전 참전: 대학 친구의 전사 이후 자원입대해 해군 복무 후 MBA 과정에 진학. 채권 투자 초기: 1971년 퍼시픽뮤추얼에서 채권 애널리스트로 시작, 1970년대 고인플레이션 환경에서 능동적 채권 트레이딩으로 차별화. 금리·선물 차익거래를 활용해 1980년대 초 초기 진입 이점을 얻음. PIMCO 성장: 1971~1980년대 걸쳐 PIMCO를 설립·성장시켜 1999년 기준 운용자산 약 30억 달러, 이후 Alliance에 매각(3.3억 달러). 주택시장 경고: 2005년 주택가격 급등을 버블로 판단, 서브프라임 위기 경고 서한 발송. 당시 시장은 무시했으나 PIMCO는 2008년 위기를 회피. 정부 구제금융 참여: 2009년 정부 요청으로 모기지 채권 투자에 참여, 정부 보증 구조로 약 25% 수익 구조를 확보했다고 묘사. 퇴사와 은퇴: 2014년 PIMCO 내부 권력다툼으로 축출, 8,100만 달러 지급 받음. 이후 Janus Henderson에서 운용하다 2019년 74세에 현역 은퇴. 리스크: 영상은 과거 성과 서술 중심이며 현재 시장 전망 및 리스크 평가는 없음. 출연자 전망: 특정 자산에 대한 1~3개월 방향성 발언 없음. 장기 투자 원칙(레버리지 제한, 베팅 사이즈 관리) 강조.
다듬은 글
with just two hundred dollars in his pocket the young William Hung...
이 원문은 영어 자막이므로 영어로 다듬어 드리겠습니다.
With just two hundred dollars in his pocket, the young William Hung...
Wait — the source names: the transcript says "william hung" and "belle groves" which are auto-caption errors for **Bill Gross**. I should correct to Bill Gross, Pacific Investment Management Co. (PIMCO), etc.
With just two hundred dollars in his pocket, a young Bill Gross set out to make a fortune in Las Vegas, camping out at a $1.99-a-night motel off the Vegas Strip. His options were limited. Then, after a near-fatal car accident, the 22-year-old spent almost an entire year in the hospital. To pass the time, he started reading about the art of gambling, and came across a book by mathematician Edward Thorp called *Beat the Dealer*. It showed how you could beat the casinos at blackjack. He read the cover to cover, and it became his holy bible.
Gross firmly believed it was possible to get rich by gambling. The objective of card counting is to tell the player whether he has the advantage or the casino does. If the player has the advantage, he makes a big bet; if the casino has the advantage, he makes a small bet. Over the long run, he wins the majority of the big bets and loses the majority of the small ones, and comes out ahead. To most people, getting rich by gambling is a fruitless endeavor. Not to Bill Gross. He felt a sense of confidence backed by a kind of mathematical certainty. Methodically, he turned his initial $200 stake into $10,000 within six months, enough to pay for his MBA tuition at UCLA.
Perhaps the best-known bond investor, Bill Gross really is in a league of his own. He built PIMCO from the ground up into the world's biggest bond fund. He beat 90% of the competition, and he was so large that in some ways he created his own reality. At this point, his core portfolio had risen at an average annualized rate of 10.6% since 1973.
Think about that for a second. His returns were comparable to a stock market index, yet Gross had only three negative years, with average returns of 2.3%. A stock market can fall as much as 23%.
Bill Gross was not knowing at the time that he had Asperger's syndrome. "I'm an Asperger, and Aspergers can compartmentalize. They can operate in different universes without the other universes affecting them as much." In my experience, it allowed me to stay at 30,000 feet rather than on the ground. I think that was very important, because it allowed me to take what we call the secular approach at PIMCO, the long-term view. That was a good view to take as an Asperger. Now, if I were a quantitative trader or hedge fund manager, day to day, minute to minute, that wouldn't be so good.
Because of Asperger's, school was easy for Gross. He was accepted to Duke University, one of America's most prestigious schools, hoping to learn more about his own mind. He chose a psychology major. But in a cruel turn of events, just before he graduated, a severe accident turned his life upside down. In his senior year at Duke, the 22-year-old was involved in a near-fatal car accident when his Nash Rambler skidded head-on into traffic on an icy road. He was thrown through the windshield, and three-quarters of his scalp was sliced off. He spent the rest of the semester in the hospital, receiving multiple skin grafts and treatment for a collapsed lung.
To pass the time during recovery, the mathematically inclined Gross started reading *Beat the Dealer*, which claimed to have a new system for blackjack players. Its core argument was that consistently placing smaller bets with an edge would lead to maximum returns in the long run. That ran afoul of my old blackjack maxim, which said you can never bet more than 2% of your stake. Within six months, he turned his initial $200 stake into $10,000, a considerable sum in the late 1960s.
By then Gross knew his future was in business. In particular, he wanted to try his gambling skills in a different kind of casino: the financial market. But just before he was ready to pursue his MBA with the money he had earned, tragedy struck again. His best friend from college, almost a brother to him, was killed in the Vietnam War. Gross decided to voluntarily join the military, even though he had not been drafted. For the next three years, Bill Gross served in the deep trenches of the Vietnam War as assistant chief engineer aboard the USS Diamond, transporting Navy SEALs to landing sites along the coast of Vietnam. He left the Navy in 1970 with combat and Vietnam service ribbons, and as he had originally intended, he enrolled in UCLA's MBA program.
The 1973 oil crisis paralyzed the U.S. economy. The crisis shattered business confidence, Wall Street slumped, and economists forecast the biggest recession since the Great Depression. The 1970s saw some of the highest inflation rates in the United States, and as a result, fixed-income investments were entering their worst phase in decades. A friend of Gross's who was a bond trader at Merrill Lynch in the 1970s had to take a night job as a trained conductor because he had three kids and couldn't support them on what a bond trader made. Clearly, it was not the best time to become a bond trader. But Gross felt he could bring his unique insight as a gambler to bond trading.
"I said, 'Mom, I'm going to be the best portfolio manager in the world,' and they looked at me like I was from Mars. But somehow I knew that was my goal. I didn't know what was going to happen, but that was my goal."
In 1971, Gross was hired as a junior bond analyst at Pacific Mutual Insurance Company. Back then, bonds were traded in a sort of captive market, but because inflation was so high, it was almost impossible to earn real returns on bonds. Gross had a solution: active trading. Trading bonds actively on a daily basis sounds risky, especially in the 1970s, but Gross argued that by doing so they could anticipate broad swings in inflation and also have the option to hedge risk.
"We got in early. We got into financial futures very early. In the early '80s, when people and clients thought that Treasury bonds and Treasury bill futures were akin to soybeans, trading Treasury futures against Treasuries was a sort of riskless arbitrage. We got there early, and a lot of alpha was generated from that, not necessarily from brilliant long-term interest rate calls."
Persuaded by a strong argument, his boss at Pacific Mutual agreed to give $15 million to form a bond portfolio. By the end of the 1970s, Pacific Investment Management Company, aka PIMCO, was born. To give an idea of how crazy this sounds, it's almost like asking your parents to trade their savings. Although it seemed risky to ordinary people, Bill Gross had a different idea of risk, one backed by sound mathematics. Gross strongly believed that as long as he followed gambling principles, his portfolio would always be okay. First, for every bet there must be an edge, meaning a 51% chance of being right. Second, each bet must be properly sized: small bets on less certain situations and bigger bets on more certain ones. Bet sizing may be the most important concept in gambling, but traders in finance often overlook it. "It's basically the only important question: what are your bet sizes?" It all sounds good in theory, but none of it matters if a strategy fails to deliver in the real world.
Because bonds were heavily traded and the market was relatively liquid, PIMCO became one of the earliest active bond traders, building and selling a range of positions such as mortgage-backed securities, TIPS, bond futures, and convertibles. "In the early '80s, when people and clients thought Treasury bonds and Treasury bill futures were akin to soybeans, you had to go out with a T-shirt saying, 'The wave of the future.' The client would say, 'Is this like soybeans, or are you trading corn?' But the spreads were enormous in terms of value, and on and on. With TIPS and global bonds, we got in early." Just like gambling, Gross was playing a zero-sum game while the rest of the market didn't even know the game existed.
Four years later, his bond portfolio had grown to $40 million. The strategy paid off in 1975, a year in which passive bondholders struggled, as Gross's portfolio returned 17.6%, followed by nearly 18% in 1976. Over the next three decades, he continued to outperform the fixed-income world with an array of unique trading strategies. By the end of 1999, PIMCO had grown to $300 billion.
At the same time, Gross saw a huge financial bubble forming. He warned in his monthly investment column that a dot-com bubble would soon burst, but few listened. Gross couldn't care less. He understood that a crash in the stock market can be good news for the fixed-income market. That same year, he and his partner sold PIMCO to Allianz for $3.3 billion. He received $233 million for his stake, and Allianz also agreed to pay him $40 million in retention bonuses.
Now rich as ever, Gross enjoyed a life of luxury. According to the *Wall Street Journal*, he bought a house in Southern California's famed Newport Beach with the intent of demolishing it and then building a new one. Although he relished his immense wealth and inflated lifestyle, he remained grounded in market reality. One morning in 2005, while standing on his head, he had a vision: the collapse of the U.S. housing market. PIMCO is in Southern California, and Gross discovered that housing prices in that area were climbing into the stratosphere. The fact that someone in Modesto, California, would buy a home for $500,000 that had sold 24 months earlier for $250,000 was simply a mistake, just as the dot-coms were, just as many stocks were, and just as many leveraged bonds and bond structures were. Subprime was the prime example, so to speak.
He wondered whether this was happening all around the country. PIMCO dispatched 11 mortgage analysts to 20 cities to find out. They posed as prospective homebuyers and drove around with unsuspecting real estate agents and mortgage brokers, who told them how easily they could get a home loan. In an October 2005 letter to investors, he made one of the most prescient calls of the last decade, warning of the looming subprime mortgage crisis. But everyone ignored him.
"What is the worst-case scenario, if in fact we were to see prices come down substantially across the country? Well, I guess I don't buy your premise. It's a pretty unlikely possibility. We've never had a decline in house prices on a nationwide basis."
While Wall Street was losing big, PIMCO's Total Return Fund returned 4.3% in 2008. "PIMCO avoided the entire subprime crisis, and our 2008 numbers, relative to everybody else, were more than outstanding, and they really set the stage for the next 10 years."
However, the possibility of a total collapse of the entire financial system was still imminent. The U.S. government was desperately trying to put out the fire. It wanted to bail out the banks without creating moral hazard. Moral hazard arises when someone takes bigger risks because he knows he will be bailed out. Instead, officials came to Gross for help, asking him to help bail out the banks. Nationalizing banks went against everything Bill Gross stood for, but as a bond speculator, this could be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to make huge profits. Gross negotiated a deal with the government that was almost risk-free and guaranteed a 25% return. By the end of 2009, he had invested 61% of the fund's money in mortgage bonds. What made the investment almost risk-free was that if things went south, the government was responsible for repaying all the debts on PIMCO's behalf.
After the collapse of Wall Street in 2008, Gross emerged as one of the nation's most influential financiers. Year by year, under his leadership, PIMCO kept growing, managing trillions of dollars and adding billions to Gross's personal fortune. He was literally the Bond King, and when you're the king, everyone wants your throne.
In a surprise move, Bill Gross left the company he had founded more than four decades earlier. He had built PIMCO from the ground up into the world's biggest bond fund. His departure came amid turmoil at the company, which was torn by destructive tensions at the top due to a power struggle. In 2014, Gross was pushed out by the very company he had founded.
"The executive committee and Allianz at some point said, 'This guy has got to go.' The lesson is not to pack the executive committee or the Supreme Court, but to make sure you have some friends on it. I didn't have a single supporter on there."
Furious, Bill Gross sued PIMCO and received an $81 million payment. That same year, Gross joined PIMCO's Vegas competitor, Janus Henderson, to manage Janus Henderson's Global Unconstrained Bond Funds. In many ways, this was a classic Bill Gross move. He was not interested in leaving quietly. He had something to prove. But in 2019, at the age of 74, Bill Gross officially retired from active fund management.
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