Howard Marks on the Single Biggest Mistake Investors Make — And How to Avoid It

요약 보기

1) 투자 성공의 핵심은 좋은 자산을 사는 것이 아니라 가치보다 싸게 사는 것이다. 2) 리스크 통제와 일관성(상위 5%보다 장기간 중간 이상 유지)이 중요하며, 14년간 27~47 백분위 유지 사례를 인용. 3) 투자는 '지지 않는 게임'이며 실수를 피하는 것이 승리 전략이다. 4) 거시 예측은 대부분 외삽이라 수익을 내기 어렵고, 극단적 예측만 가치가 있으나 맞추기 극히 어렵다. 5) 투자 결과의 우연성(운과 실력 구분)과 과신, 시기상조 판단의 위험을 강조.

다듬은 글

※ 자동 자막 원문(다듬기 전)

01. how do you make money as an investor the people who don't know think the way you do it is by buying good assets a good building stock in a good company or something like that that is not the secret for Success the secret for success in investing is Hello friends today we are diving into the wisdom of Howard Mar one of the greatest investors of all time I've distilled the most powerful insights into five key principles that will transform your approach to investing these aren't just simple tips they are complete mental Frameworks they are an introduction to second level thinking a concept that marks is explaining in depth in his book The most important thing it is a way of looking at the world and at the stock market that allows us to find opportunities that other investors are missing and I encourage you to stick till the end because you will also get some extra wisdom from Howard marks how do you make money as an investor the people who don't know think the way you do it is by buying good assets a good building stock in a good company or something like like that that is not the secret for Success the secret for success in investing is buying things for less than their worth so if you buy a high quality asset you know there's a and I say in the book there's a guy in on the radio I I used to when I lived in La I listened to NPR on the way to work and there was a guy who's and I heard him say it he said well if you go into a store and you like the product buy the stock couldn't be more wrong because what determines the success of an investor is not what he buys but what he pays for it and if you buy a high quality asset but you overpay for it you're in big trouble and you can buy a very low quality asset but if you pay less than it's worth chances are you're going to make money so the so the book says chapter three says the most important thing is value figuring out what the value of an asset is but number chapter four says the most important thing is the relationship between price and value so let's assume that you're able to figure out the value if you pay more than that you're in trouble if you get it for Less the wind is at your back the real secret to success in investing is buying things for less than they are worth this might sound obvious but it's actually profound most people focus on buying good assets rather than focusing on the price they pay Nvidia is a backbone of AI Revolution buy Microsoft controls chat GPT buy Tesla has the best self-driving buy but we are investors we want to buy great companies because they are more predictable or they have a better chance of winning against competitors or they have some other mode but if we are overpaying if we are following the crowd we are not putting ourselves in a great position as Marx put it you can buy a very low quality asset but if you pay less than it's worth chances are you are going to make money what determines your success as an investor is not what you buy but what you pay for it the first one says that the the most important thing is risk control and we tell the clients we think that for a for excellence in investing the most important thing is not be making a lot of money it's not beating the market it's not being in the top quartile the most important thing is controlling risk that's our job that's what we'll do for you and the clients come to us who want to invest in our asset classes with the risks under control there are other people who who who put less emphasis on controlling risk and they have better results in the good times and worse results in the bad times our clients want what we give them number two we have an emphasis on consistency so we say we don't try for the moon at the danger of crashing you know uh the first memo that I wrote in 1990 I'm sure you remembered that J uh talked about uh a guy who was head of an an asset manager that had a terrible year and he said well it's very simple if you want to be in the top 5% of money managers you have to be willing to be in the bottom I have no interest in being in the bottom 5% I don't care about being in the top five perc I want to be above the middle on a consistent basis over the long term and there's a funny bit of math this will confound the uh what do you call yourself data scientists this will confound the data scientists in the room but the so in that first memo I contrasted the comments from that uh uh money manager with uh a comment from one of my clients who told me right about the same time it was the ju to position that caused me to write that first memo he told me that for the previous 14 years his pension fund had never been above the 27th percentile or below the 47th percentile so it was solidly in the second quartile every year for 14 years so let's see 27 47 the average of that is 37 right what percentile do you think that fund was in for the whole 14 years four four and it it if you think about it it's really almost mysterious why why the fourth not the 37th and the answer is that when people blow up they really blow up and so uh uh we said we want consistency we want to be a little bit above the middle all the time maybe we'll pop up to the top in the years when the markets are terrible and our risk control is rewarded but we think that over a long period of time we'll be uh very respectable that way and our clients will have an absence of bad experiences which I think for them is very important if we want to achieve great results we shouldn't concentrate on making a lot of money we should concentrate on controlling our risk Mark's philosophy is captured perfectly in his statement I don't care about being in the top five I want to be above the middle on a consistent basis over the long term that shows the power of consistency security and risk control that is level thinking not trying to be the best but trying to be above average for the longest time possible there are two kinds of winning tennis players if you look at Pete SAS or uh Nadal or jokovic how do they win the winning Champion tennis player wins by hitting winning shots he hits shots that the opponent can't return the amateur tennis player like him and me we win not by hitting winners but by avoiding hitting losers and we believe that if we can just push it back 20 times and just get it over the net 20 times our opponent can only do it 19 we believe that that we'll out steady him Outlast him and eventually he'll hit it into the net or off the court we'll win the point but we'll win the point without having hit a winner so there are obviously two styles of tennis and so same is true for investing uh so Charlie Ellis wrote an article called The Losers game and he said he thought that investing is a losers game and so the best way to win at tennis is by at investing is by not hitting losers now uh I believe also that it's a losers game uh not as much as Charlie believes and not for the same reason Charlie believes that that investing is a losers game uh because the market is efficient and securities are priced right I believe there are inefficiencies I just think it's hard to consistently take advantage of them and you have to be an exceptional person to take advantage of them on a consistent basis you know in in in scoring tennis matches they keep track of something called unforced errors and the reason they keep track of them is because there are so few the pro doesn't make a lot of unforced Errors we make un forced errors all the time and so we have in order to survive we have to avoid them so the point is if you're going to be an investor you have to decide am I good enough to go for winners or should I emphasize the avoidance of losers in my approach this article called The Losers game deeply influenced Howard Marx and I believe we should also think about our strategy through this perspective we should remember that we don't win by hitting spectacular winners but by avoiding losers that corresponds beautifully with the previous point of risk control Charlie manger said that we should never disrupt the compounding effect we have to give it time to do its magic and it is similar here we have to stay in the game long enough without making any silly mistakes to come out on top this idea became Central to Mark's philosophy eventually distilled into Oak Street's motto if we avoid the losers the winners will take care of themselves now I don't believe in forecasts uh macro forecasts people who forecast interest rates performance of economies performance of stock markets and I don't think that my efforts to be a superior investor and most other other peoples are aided by macro forecasts am I saying that that the forecaster is never right no I'm not saying that the forecasters are often right last year GDP grew 2% many forecasters forecast that GDP will grow this year at 2% that's called extrapolation and usually in economics extrapolation Works usually the future looks like the recent past so usually the people who forecast a continuation of the current are right the only problem is they don't make any money because let's take let's take the economy most people forecast two something for this year a growth rate of two something is cooked into the prices of Securities today if the growth rate turns out to be two something everybody who forecasted that will be right but the security but security prices will not change much because that to something growth was anticipated and discounted a year or two ago so uh all those people who are right won't make any money logically am I saying that forecasting that forecasts never make any money no the forecasts that make money are the forecasts of radical change if if I predict if everybody's predicting 2.4% growth for this year and if it turns out if I predict minus two and it turns out to be minus two or I predict six and it turns out to be six I'll make a lot of money so forecasts which are not extrapolations forecasts which are radically different from the recent past are potentially very valuable if they're correct of course they're not of any value if they're incorrect then if they're incorrect they'll they'll cost you a lot of money if if everybody else thinks it's going to be 24 and you predict six and it turns out at 24 you're probably going to have taken the wrong Investments and lost a lot of money so deviant forecasts which turn out to be right are poten potentially very valueable but it's very hard to make them it's very hard to make them correctly it's very hard to make them correctly consistently this is another point that aligns with Warren Buffett believe that macroeconomic Trends and predictions should not influence our investment decisions I really like the way Marx explains his philosophy when it comes to forecasts basically if you want to beat the market then forecasts are not very helpful to beat the market you have to be a contrarian but there is a catch you need to be a contrarian and you need to be right that's extremely difficult you need radical change to get extraordinary results but radical forecasts are very seldom correct so investing by believing them can get you into a lot of trouble if you just follow them blindly so it's not that forecasts are always wrong or that they are misleading it's just that they can't really be of any help for us as investors trying to beat the market in investing there's a lot of Randomness and if you look at investing as a field without Randomness where everything where everything is determinative you'll get confused because you will not draw the proper uh inference from what you see for example you see somebody and they report a great return for the year the science the scientist who thinks that the world that that the investment world runs like the world of physics might think well great return that means the guy's a great investor but in truth it it might be somebody who took a crazy shot and got lucky why because there's a lot of Randomness in the world you can't tell from an outcome whether a decision was good or bad it's very important most people don't understand this totally totally counterintuitive good decisions fail to work all the time bad decisions work all the time the investment business is full of people who are quote right for the wrong reason made this a bad decision it didn't work out the way they thought but they got lucky and they were bailed out by events and so uh for every possible phenomenon there is there is a a range of things that can happen there may be one where it's possible to discern which one is the most likely and if we draw a probability distribution that may be the highest point on the distribution the most likely single outcome but that doesn't mean it's going to happen and the reason we the reason we don't have many probabilties distributions that look like this but rather that look like this is because a range of things can happen and it's very very important to notice that number one there are lots of things can happen so you have to allow for them and number two the thing that is most likely to happen is far from sure to happen if we make an investment decision and it does not go the way we anticipated it it may mean that we were wrong but it's not certain good decisions can fail due to bad luck and bad decisions can succeed due to good lack we have to understand this because we may draw wrong conclusions from the results of our decisions and either repeat the mistakes or never again make decisions that could actually make us money in the long term and the second point is that being too sure betting it all on one position because it is a sure thing can get us into a lot of trouble like we heard before in this great quote from Mark Twain it ain't what you don't know that gets you into trouble it's what you know for sure that just ain't so first of all what the wise man does in the beginning the fool does in the end in every Trend in investing it eventually becomes overdone if you find an asset which is cheap and buy it that's great if everybody else figures it out that it's cheap then it'll go up every then people see that it's rising and more people jump on the bandw and goes up up up and the last person to buy it is a is a fool and the first person to do do it buy it is a wise man it's the same asset just at different prices and and as as people say first the you know inovator then the imitator then the idiot so that's another way to look at this adage number two never forget the six foot tall man who drowned crossing the stream that was 5et deep on average kind of like that sky diver who's right 98% of the time it's not sufficient depending on how you want to live your life to survive on average we have to survive on the bad days so we have to be able to survive the low spots in the Stream your portfolio has to be set up to survive on the bad days so you won't be shaken out uh of your Investments and then finally being too far ahead of your time is indistinguishable from being wrong and yet that's a great challenge because as I said before the things that are supposed to happen will not necessarily happen and they absolutely will not happen on time so you have to be able to live until the wisdom of your decisions is proved if at all so all of these things I think say something about uh modesty and humility of belief rather than shess which I think is the greatest risk