저자: StanleyDruckenmiller · 외국인
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S&P500 내 150여 개 기업이 연초 대비 하락, 그중 다수가 20~50% 하락. 지수 상승에 가려진 대형 우량주 괴리 주장. 사업 생존성·10년 후 이익 성장·가격 적정성 3단계 질문으로 옥석 가리기 제안. 일부 기업은 저평가가 아니라 구조적 쇠퇴로 함정일 수 있음 경고. 특정 종목명은 언급하지 않음.
다듬은 글
I can't believe how cheap some of these mega-cap stocks are right now and almost no one is talking about it. While the headlines continue to tell us that the market is at all-time highs, a huge group of the world's largest and most famous companies are quietly losing half their value. I'm not talking about some obscure small-cap companies that you've never heard of.
I'm talking about the companies you use every day. Companies your children use. Companies that appear on your bank statement every month. Whether you realize it or not. And now a significant part of them have such prices that even after 40 years of working in this field, it honestly surprises me. So, here's my warning to you before we go any further .
If you wait for everyone on financial television to shout about how cheap these names are, you'll already miss the whole movement. Money is not made when everything is obvious. They are making money right now, in this awkward window when half the market is euphoric and the other half is left to its own devices.
By the end of this video, I'll tell you which of these giant companies I think the market has mispriced. How I personally distinguish a real bargain from a " falling knife" and what system I used for decades to avoid getting burned chasing cheap stocks that deserved to be cheap. But before I go any further, I need to say something.
And I say this quite seriously. What I'm about to share with you took most of my career and more painful losses than I'm willing to admit to truly learn. There were years when I would have paid a fortune to have someone just sit down with me and explain it the way I'm about to explain it to you. So, if this video helps you, do me a favor— click the subscribe button right now.
Before you forget: it costs you nothing , but it means everything to me because it's a sign that I should keep creating them. Well, let's get down to business. Let's start with what's really going on beneath the surface of this market, because the surface is lying to you. The index itself has grown quite well this year.
And if you just look at the main number, you'll think everything is fine. Everyone makes money. There's no reason to look any closer. But go one level lower, and the picture changes completely. In the same index, more than 150 companies are in the "minus" for the year. This is not a handful of companies fighting for survival.
That's about one in every three companies in the entire index. And when you actually look at who's on this list, it's not junk. These are well-known brands. Some of the country's largest, most influential, and most profitable companies have fallen by tens of percent. Some of them are 30, 40, and even 50 percent.
While the index as a whole is showing record-breaking performance, the gap between what the market looks like on the surface and what is actually happening with each individual company—it is in this gap that opportunities lie. I've built my entire career on the idea that the crowd looks at averages and misses the exceptions.
And now these exceptions literally scream for themselves, if you, of course, take the trouble to look closely. So, why is this happening? Why is a truly wonderful business that has existed for decades, brings in huge profits, and to which every viewer of this video has given their money at least once , why is the stock of such a company falling by half while the market is celebrating?
There are several reasons, and none of them are complicated, if you put aside the unnecessary noise. Sometimes a company misses a forecast by a cent, and the algorithms instantly punish it, without waiting for even one person to ask if that cent affects the next 10 years. Sometimes an entire industry is raked into a pile and sold off just because one company in the group has bad news, even though the others are not to blame for anything.
And sometimes, frankly , stocks have simply become too popular, too desirable, and too expensive, so they return to an adequate price, which is not a realistic possibility at all . It's just gravity. Your main job, the only one that really matters, is to understand which of these three categories you are dealing with.
Because two of them are a gift, and one is a trap. And if you don't see a difference, you shouldn't buy these stocks on a downtrend. Let me give you a sense of scale, because the numbers make it real. Generalization—never . If you look at the full list of companies in the main index, dozens of them have fallen by 20% or more this year.
Some fell by 30%. Several—by more than 50%. And these are not little-known firms on meager exchanges that you have never heard of. These are the companies whose software runs your job, whose streaming services you used yesterday, whose shoes are on your feet, and whose payment app helped you split the bill at a restaurant last week.
I mention this because it's easy to talk about undervalued stocks in the abstract and let your imagination paint some questionable companies you would never own. The situation here is completely different. What's happening now is that some of the country's most recognizable and influential companies are trading as if they're falling apart.
And in most cases, they don't fall apart at all. They simply fell into a market that chose to reward a small group of popular names and punish almost everything else, regardless of how those businesses actually perform. I want to show you how I do it, because it's not difficult at all. But almost no one does it in that order.
The first question I ask myself before looking at the stock price is whether I believe this business will exist and be important in 10, 20, or even 30 years. Not whether it's exciting, not whether it's trendy, but whether it even exists. Think about how many of these “beaten” companies instantly pass this test.
People will need payroll and tax reporting software in 30 years. People will continue to drive cars, wear sneakers, use streaming services, go to doctors, and buy software to run businesses. These are not just whims. These are things woven into the way the world works. If the company overcomes this barrier, I move on to the second question, and it is just as important .
Do I believe that the profits generated by this business will be significantly greater in ten years than they are today? Not on the same level, not a little higher, but much higher. If I can't answer it with complete confidence, I stop. No matter how cheap a stock seems, a cheap stock in a declining business is not a good buy.
It's a slow bleed with a discount price tag attached. Only after the company overcomes both barriers do I allow myself to ask the third question that everyone wants to jump to immediately: does today's price give me a fair deal for the risk. But this is where most people go wrong, because they do it the other way around.
They see a 30 or 40% drop and rejoice in the price before thinking about what should have been their first priority. I myself have made this mistake more than once, even after ten years of professional activity. So don't worry if you've done that too. The stock seems cheap compared to how it was trading previously.
You buy it, and then you find out that the business actually deserved to be cheaper because real changes took place inside. The problem was n't the price at all. The problem was in your sequence of actions. I will give you a personal example without naming the companies, because the lesson is more important than a specific ticker.
Early in my career, I found a company whose stock was trading at a price that seemed almost embarrassingly low compared to what it had been a year earlier. I became interested in arithmetic before I started seriously studying business. I bought them, felt confident for about a month, and then watched the price drop quarter after quarter as the industry the company operated in was radically transformed by a competitor with a better product and a lower cost structure.
The shares were not cheap. They were accurately priced for a business that had continued to lose ground for years. I lost real money on this position. And worse, I wasted time because I held on to them out of stubbornness rather than conviction, convincing myself that they should just bounce back because they had fallen too low.
This never happened, at least not significantly. This single mistake taught me more discipline than all the successful deals I had had up to that point combined. And that's why I refuse to immediately look at the price today, despite how many decades of experience I've accumulated since then. Let's talk about what a real opportunity looks like if you apply this approach correctly.
Because this is where it gets interesting, in my opinion. Imagine a company that has been profitable for 20 years straight and has a product that is almost impossible to replace once a customer starts using it. This is the case when switching to a competitor is such a hassle that the business simply doesn't want to deal with it .
Now imagine that the value of these shares has more than halved this year. Not because the business broke, but because it was growing a little slower than some analyst expected, or because a competitor announced a big new product that has n't actually won a single customer yet. The business itself, that engine that generates cash, remains essentially the same company as a year ago, perhaps even a little better, but the stock price is behaving as if the world has ended.
This gap between business and price is not a coincidence you stumble upon by chance. That's the whole point of the game. This is what 40 years in this business have taught me to seek purposefully every day . Now let me be just as candid about the other side, because I think that's more important than the exciting part.
Not every company on that list deserves your money. And if I told you otherwise, I would be doing you a disservice. Some of these companies are failing because the world around them has truly changed. Maybe a competitor has created something better and faster than they can respond. Perhaps the entire industry is being reshaped by new technologies, and this particular company has found itself on the wrong side of these changes.
Perhaps management has been making one bad investment decision after another for years. And the shares are not cheap, their price is fully consistent with a business that is actually declining. This is something no one wants to hear because it's not as fun as buying everything at a discount. Buy everything.
But I promise you: avoiding businesses that deserve to fail is at least as important, if not more important, than finding those that don't . I've seen smart people lose serious money because they couldn't distinguish between temporary setbacks and ultimate failure . And, honestly, I was like that myself.
At the beginning of my career, stocks seemed cheap. I bought them and watched them get cheaper and cheaper as business got worse and worse. And not because the market behaved irrationally. Cheapness is not a reason to buy something. Cheapness is just a question that opens the way to real analysis, not the answer itself.
Here's something I want you to really think about, because it took me a long time to realize this. Being first and being wrong — for a while, they look exactly the same. When you buy a great business that has lost popularity , it can continue to decline for months after the purchase. The market doesn't know or care that you've done your homework.
He can remain irrational, mistaken, or fearful for much longer than seems reasonable. And if you don't have real confidence in the two questions I mentioned earlier—whether the business will survive and whether it will grow— you won't have the fortitude to hold the stock while this continues. That is why the sequence of actions is so important.
If you buy something just because the price has dropped, you have nothing to hold on to when it drops even lower. But if you are buying because you have done your analysis and sincerely believe in the business for a 10- year perspective, a further drop in price should be perceived as an opportunity to buy more, not as a reason to panic and sell at the worst possible moment.
This difference between confidence built on real analysis and confidence based on falling numbers is the difference between investors who build real capital over decades and those who get pushed out of the market just before the recovery. There is another aspect that almost no one talks about - this is determining the size of the position.
Even if you've done all the work and truly believe you've found an undervalued, large- cap company, that doesn't mean you should invest your entire account in it on day one. I have always believed in asset concentration when your confidence is backed by facts. But concentration is not the same as recklessness.
That's what I mean. If you have analyzed four or five such undervalued companies and really believe in two or three of them, calculate the position size so that a mistake in any one of them will not destroy you. But the profit from the right choice should not seem like a statistical error. Too many people either invest everything in one idea because they've fallen in love with the story, or scatter themselves into 30 different titles because they're afraid to settle on anything .
And both of these approaches are guaranteed to lead to mediocre results. The whole point of all the hard work beforehand— thinking 10 years ahead, asking about profit growth, price discipline—is so that once you find something you believe in, you can invest according to that belief, rather than treating every position the same regardless of your confidence.
I also want to touch on something people consistently get wrong: the confusion between a great company and a great investment. This is not the same thing. And because of this confusion, people lose real money every year. A company can be an incredible business led by brilliant people, growing steadily and dominating its niche, but remain a terrible investment if you overpay for it .
Conversely, a company can be a fairly ordinary, unremarkable business that becomes a fantastic investment only because you entered at a price where expectations were so low that any decent result became a pleasant surprise. When I look at this current list of devalued megacorporations, I don't ask myself what I would most like to show off at a party.
I ask which of them now have expectations so low that the bar for success has effectively been buried underground. Because when a business overcomes such a low bar, its shares usually start to move. And they move significantly and quickly, because Wall Street hates to be wrong about pessimism as much as it hates to be wrong about optimism.
I also want to warn you about a trap that even experienced people fall into: assuming that if a stock has fallen, the bad news has already been fully priced in. Sometimes it is, and sometimes it is not at all. Stocks that have fallen 40% could fall another 40% if business continues to decline and the market simply hasn't had time to adapt yet.
That's why in this video I return to the same sequence of actions over and over again, almost intentionally repeating myself. The size of the fall in itself means nothing. This is not a signal. This is not a green light. It's just a number. The only way to know if bad news is priced in is to analyze the business and compare the findings to what the current price suggests about the future.
If the price indicates significantly worse prospects than what you think are likely, that is to your advantage. If the price assumes a future that matches your expectations, there is no advantage. No matter how big the fall you see on the screen, here's something else before the end. And this is more about psychology than analysis.
The reason most cannot act on this, even though they understand every word I say, is because of emotion, not intellect. It's very uncomfortable to buy something that everyone else avoids. It's safer to buy something that's already growing, because if it keeps growing, you feel smart. And if it stops growing, at least everyone else loses money too.
So it's not taken as something personal. Buying something that's down 40% feels like an admission that the crowd might be right and you're about to lose money very publicly and obviously. I completely understand this feeling, having experienced it countless times over the decades. And it never goes away completely, regardless of your experience.
I still remember holding a position that everyone around me thought was a mistake, watching it get cheaper for weeks, answering questions from people who thought I was wrong, and having no way to prove otherwise except to wait. This waiting is the real work. Everyone can work with spreadsheets. Very few people can withstand the discomfort of being rushed and not flinch.
And this skill, more than any formula, distinguishes those who truly grow their capital over a lifetime from those who have a few successful years and then lose everything. The difference is not that the discomfort disappears. The difference is that you learn to do the work first, strengthen your beliefs, and then take discomfort as a signal that you are probably ahead of your time, rather than as a signal that you are wrong.
So, here is my real challenge to you. And I say that literally, not as another phrase to end the video. Before you close it , open the list of the largest companies in the market that have fallen significantly this year. Don't take my word for it. And don't take anyone else's word for it either. Go through my three questions on your own, one at a time, in exactly that order.
Will this business still exist and be important in ten years? Will his profits be significantly higher in ten years? And only then, is today's price a fair deal for such a rate? You will find that some names on your list are eliminated instantly. And that's okay. This is a process that works exactly as it should .
But I'm willing to bet that a few of them will pass all three questions. And they are the ones worth spending time on this week. Not because I told you to buy them, but because you yourself understood why they are really worth serious attention. That's the whole point of the game. Not chasing what excites you, not avoiding what scares you, but simply doing boring, thankless work—separating a truly profitable offer from a business that deserves to be cheap.
Do this consistently for years and you will be amazed at where it takes you. See you next time.
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