저자: CharlieMunger · 외국인
요약 보기
찰리 멍거는 투자의 핵심이 많은 것을 아는 데 있지 않고 '어려운 것은 피하고 쉬운 기회만 잡는' 데 있다고 말한다. 좋은 미국 기업은 보통 25~35배 이상 PER에 거래되어 실수 시 손실이 크므로 주의가 필요하며, 상위 5% 수준의 실력이 아니면 자산운용사에 맡기기보다 인덱스가 낫다고 주장한다. 주식은 사업의 일부로 보고 안전마진을 확보하며, 시장 하락(50%)을 감내할 평정심을 강조한다. 야심보다는 낮은 목표와 운, 규율, 역발상적 사고(역전법)를 강조한다.
다듬은 글
of our secret is that we don't attempt to know a lot of things. I have a pile on my desk that solves most of my problems. It's called the too hard pile and I just keep shifting things to the too hard pile and every once in a while an easy decision comes along and I make it. That's my system. Everything was the too hard pile except for a few easy decisions which I make promptly.
It isn't that we were so good at doing things that were difficult. We were good at avoiding things that were difficult, finding things that are easy. But of course, everybody's looking for the same thing. And the trouble with it is you will find when you get into those good businesses in a place as picked over and analyzed as American stocks are, and you can imagine the amount of time spent thinking about American stocks.
And you will find by and large in America if it's really a great business, it's at least 25 times earnings and maybe 30 or 35 or something. So that makes it much harder of course because if something goes wrong, you can lose a lot of your investment. And and of course that's what makes investment so difficult is the fact that the good the good businesses don't stay cheap.
You got to somehow recognize a good business before it's recognizable as a good business. That's very hard to do. Some people get good at it, but not many. I don't think I would want. 95% of the people who are America's professional asset managers, I wouldn't want working for me. Really, I think it's that hard.
I think you need to be in the top 5%. to have a reasonable chance. It's very difficult. Now, it's not difficult just by an index fit on your ass. That that that's the great default position. Your assets I've never seen, you know, we Warren talks about these discounted cash flows. I've never seen him do one.
Yeah. If if it isn't there are some things you only do in private Charlie. If if it isn't blue perfect obvious that it's going to work out well if you do the calculation he tends to go on to the next idea. Yeah. It it sort of ought to I it is true. You don't if you have to if you have to actually do it on with pencil and paper it's too close to think about.
I mean it ought to just kind of scream at you that you've got this huge margin of safety. I mentioned the three ideas. The three ideas I should elaborate on. One is that to think of yourself to think of investing as owning a business and not and not buying something that's wiggles around in price and and and uh the second one is your attitude which ties in with that the attitude toward the market that's covered in chapter 8.
And if you have the proper attitude toward market movements, it's an enormous help in securities. And the final chapter is on the margin of safety, which u which means uh don't try and drive a 9,800 lb truck over a bridge that says, you know, capacity 10,000 lb, but go down the road a little bit and find one that says capacity 15,000 lb.
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.
They think if they study a million things they can know a million things and that 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 Lelu's Asian fund my Costco stock and of course I'm outperforming everybody and I'm 95 years old and I frankly 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.
Now at a place like Birkshire 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 Kramer pretends to have. And and we always realized that if we worked very hard, we could find a few things where we were right and that a 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 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 would trying to know the whole, 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 Blackhawk. He was a captain in the Blackhawk Wars and he he stayed there and he bought cheap land and he he was aggressive and intelligent and so forth.
And eventually he was the richest man in the town and owned the bank and and uh and highly regarded and 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 black top soil created a modern rich civilization and some of the best land in the world.
His attitude was that in 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 that 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.
One of my favorite tricks is the inversion process. And I give you an example. When I was a meteorologist in World War II, they told me how to draw weather maps and predict the weather. But we're actually doing is clearing pilots to take flights. and he just reversed the problem. I inverted. I said, "Suppose I wanted to kill a lot of pilots.
What would be the easy way to do it?" And I soon concluded that the only easy way to do it would be to get the planes into icing the planes couldn't handle or to get the pilot to a place where he'd run out of fuel before he could safely land. So, I made up my mind I was going to stay miles away from killing pilots by for by either icing or getting them into sock conditions when they couldn't land.
I think that helped me be a better meteorologist in World War II. I just reversed the problem. How worried are you by the declines in the share price of Berkshire Hathaway the difficulty in this is the third time that Warren and I have seen our holdings in Berkshire go down top tick to bottom tick by 50%.
I think it's in the nature of long-term shareholding with the normal vicissitudes in in worldly outcomes and in markets that that the long-term holder has his quoted value of his stock go down and then by say 50%. In fact, you can argue that if you're not willing to react with equanmity to a market price decline of 50% two or three times a century, you're not fit to be a common shareholder and you deserve the mediocre result you're going to get.
It's amazing how if you just get up every morning and keep plugging and have some discipline and keep learning and and it's amazing how it works out. Okay. And I don't think I don't think it's wise to have an ambition to be president of the United States or a billionaire or something like that because the odds are too much against you.
much better to aim low. I did not intend to get rich. I wanted to get independent. I just overshot. And and by the way, while you're clapping, some of the overshooting was accidental. There's some there's a there's a big you can be very deserving and very intelligent and very disciplined, but there's also a factor of luck that comes into this thing.
And the people who get the good the outcomes that seem extraordinary, they're the people who have discipline and intelligence and good virtue plus a hell of a lot of luck. Why wouldn't the world work like that? So, you shouldn't give credit for the unusual. Uh, a lot of the people, a friend of mine said about a colleague of his in his fraternity, he says, "Old George was a duck sitting on a pond and they raise the level of the pond.
There are a lot of people that just luck into the right place and rise and then and there are a lot of very eminent people who have many advantages and they've got one little flaw or one bit of bad luck and they they're mired in misery all their lives. But that makes it interesting to have all this variation.
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