저자: JoelGreenblatt/진행자WilliamGreen · 외국인
요약 보기
Greenblatt는 실수에서 교훈을 배우되 자책에 머물지 말고 앞으로 나아가라고 강조한다. 큰 손실 후 보통 2~3일 내 회복하며, 주식시장의 감정적 변동이 투자 기회를 만든다고 말한다. 투자자는 기업 가치를 직접 평가할 수 있어야 하며, 가치 대비 할인된 종목을 사서 괴리가 좁혀지기를 기다리는 것이 핵심이라고 설명한다. 가치평가 능력이 없다면 인덱스 펀드가 낫다는 입장이다. 특정 종목이나 자산에 대한 가격 방향 예측 발언은 없다.
다듬은 글
I remember once asking Joel about this question of how he deals with mistakes and he said to me, "Look, I I learn the lesson. I study in the mistake. I try to learn the lesson. I try to internalize it. But then I let go of it. I don't become paralyzed by it. I move forward." And I thought about this a lot because I think I tend to have this habit of messing up and then kind of flagellating myself and feeling like, "Oh, I can't believe I did this incredibly stupid thing." And it it kind of haunts me.
And I I've tried actually to wean myself away from that habit. I know that Charlie Munger talks about the importance of rubbing your nose in your mistakes. And I think it's important not to bury your mistakes. You want to study them. You want to admit them. You want to talk about them. But you don't want to overdo it and become paralyzed by it.
You learn the lesson and then you move forward. And I often think about this line from this great Buddhist meditation teacher called Sharon Salzberg who would say, "All is not lost." And she would say, "Let Let go and begin again with self-compassion." And this has become a kind of mantra for me. It's helpful when you're meditating and you lose your breath and you see your mind goes elsewhere and you start to think, "Wait, where was I?
I'm a terrible meditator." And then And you're like, "No, no, that's fine because really the the rep here is to notice that your mind wandered and to come back to the breath and begin again. But this also is such a beautiful microcosm of life, right? We mess up. We trip up. We make mistakes as investors.
We make mistakes as parents. We make mistakes in every area of our life because we're human. And the ability to learn the lesson, to say to ourselves, "All is not lost." And to let go and begin again with self-compassion seems to me actually a really important aspect of resilience. So again, just to sum up, I guess the key really is to focus on what you can control, right?
There's so much we can't control. We can't control necessarily what's going to happen. We don't know we don't know whether we're sitting on top of a sinkhole or not. But we can diversify, we can live within our means, we can set aside a cushion, we can decide not to overreach, and we can also learn the rules of the game of investing so that we actually know what we're doing.
That's a pretty helpful idea as well, which I think we'll probably come back to. Another really important theme that I discussed with Joel Greenblatt is the question of how to deal with the emotional intensity of investing, especially in tumultuous times like we've been through over the last year or so.
Here's the question I asked him followed by his answer. Have you ever figured out ways to handle your emotions and to become more emotionally resilient? Because I I think of someone like Howard Marks, right, who we talked about before. Howard I think is He says that he's a worrier, but I think also he's not super emotional.
I always felt like when I was with him it felt like being in the presence of a of a most superior machine, you know, with with about 50 more IQ points than I had. And when I think of someone like Charlie Munger, who said to me that at the bottom tick in March 2009 when he was buying Wells Fargo, he didn't feel any any emotion, any fear.
And I was wondering if if you were wired that way yourself not to be too anxious, to be kind of focus on odds, or if there were things that you had to do actually to get your emotions under control during these very rocky periods. Yeah, so I think what you're alluding to is to be a really good investor and have a strong enough stomach.
Do you have to have a screw loose someplace to be able to handle it? And I think the answer is yes. You have to have a little bit of a screw loose to be able to take those risks. On the other hand, usually I do feel the kick in the stomach when I lose a lot of money, but I usually adjust to it in two or three days.
Try to get my wits about me to take advantage of the opportunity. So, I think I'm human at least in that uh part where the kick in the stomach, but you kind of get used to it. So, I think different parts of your career are different. When you're young, you figure you have time to make it back. When you're older, you maybe have the experience to know that it will come back, and I've seen this before, and I've seen it not only once, but many times.
And so, what do you do here? I'm not saying you can completely defeat the emotions that are involved in in and and those emotions are very strong, but I do think, at least for me, being able to adjust and and count your blessings, you know, fairly quickly, and say, "Okay, can I live with where I am now?
Yes, let's move forward. Let's, you know, let's move forward and try to do it the right way." One of the best experiences I had was when I had a summer job, and a friend of mine was working for I actually the head of risk arbitrage at uh Drexel. And the guy running that department was about 72 at the time, which I thought was ancient.
Now, I think he was a youngster. And uh I forgot uh why I had an opportunity to talk to him, but either we were taking a walk someplace or whatever, and I was saying that, you know, I was so upset that I lost money in this thing, and how unfair it was, and this thing came out of the blue, and and this gentleman turned to me, and he says, "Well, have you ever made money where, you know, you were kind of lucky?
And, you know, it turned out better than you expected." And I said, "Yeah, that happens a lot." He said, "Well, does it happen more than when the bad things happen?" I said, "Yeah." And he said, "Well, stop complaining." And, you know, it's a good way to contextualize, you know, if you didn't take risk uh you couldn't make extra money.
You can you can put your money in the bank and only take inflation risk or whatever that might be, but at least you know what you have. But one of the reasons you're able to make money is that the stock market gets very emotional sometimes and creates these opportunities, but it also comes along with pain.
If it didn't everyone would do it and you wouldn't have this opportunity and of course I'm saying something now not in the heat of the moment that sounds very logical and but eventually you get there. Eventually when bad things happen in a few days, if you can get your sea legs back and start thinking, "Okay, where are my opportunities?
What can I do? You know, can I trade around in my portfolio? Is is there a new opportunity that came up that's maybe better than what I have?" And that's that's been the case. So, I think good investors maybe still get kicked in the stomach, but they come back soon enough to take advantage of the opportunities that come there.
But yeah, I think big big picture you have to have a little bit of a screw loose to take the pain, especially with a very concentrated portfolio that a number of people I know pursue. I did it for a number of reasons. I don't I don't when I'm looking for really what I would call unfair bets, I don't have 50 or 100 unfair bets at a time to take.
So, by necessity I have to when I was running a very concentrated portfolio, take six or eight of them. And uh just have a very fine I I think you have to have a very high hurdle. Meaning well, to get into the portfolio it has to be really great. And if you own six or eight great things or at least great bets, uh that's more comforting if you actually know what you own.
If you don't know what you own, if you don't know how to value a business then yeah, you're just going to react to the emotions because you don't actually understand what you own. But if you actually understand what you own and the premise that you bought those things with is still intact, uh that's actually the only way I think you can deal with the emotion because you realize it's uh what you own is still good.
There are a number of things that I found really striking in this answer from Joe. The first of which is that it's interesting to me that even he feels the kick in the stomach. That this is not a painless process that even someone I think is temperamentally well suited to this game as Joel is. I do remember when I asked Howard Marks whether he found it difficult to invest during you know, the financial crisis around early 2009, late 2008 when he was investing incredibly aggressively in toxic bonds.
He said, "No, I don't remember it being difficult at all." And I said to him at the time, "Do you um were you always this unemotional?" And he said, "Yeah." And I said, "Have you had trouble with your relationships as a result?" cuz I knew that he'd been married a couple of times. And he said, "Yeah, it was difficult in my first marriage." He said, "I I've become better about it, but yeah, I was always pretty unemotional." So, I do think that the greatest investors tend to have a a temperamental advantage.
There's a difference in their wiring sometimes, I suspect. But then it's interesting to me that you hear Joel Greenblatt saying that that even he feels the the kick in the stomach. And I think that gives you a sense of the emotional intensity of this game. This is This is tough. And one of the things that also Joe points out that I think is really important is this idea that because it's painful, because it's emotional, that's actually why we can make money, right?
We can This is something that goes back to Ben Graham with his concept of Mr. Market, that the market is basically bipolar. And so, it's driven by these intense emotions. And so, you as the investor can decide, well, I don't actually have to take the deal that I'm being offered because nothing is cheap enough for me to buy.
And so, part of the advantage that people like Joel or Howard Marks or Charlie Munger or Warren Buffett have is that they're able to stand aside in a fairly dispassionate way and watch the craziness of this game, the bipolar mood swings of the market. And most of the time just not do anything. And then just wait for a few a few mispriced bets, a few opportunities that are very appealing.
And then and then they strike with with what Munger calls gumption. So, it's a mixture of these these long periods of inactivity followed by some periods of extreme aggressive activity. That that's a very common pattern among the greatest investors. I'm also reminded of something that Joel said to me when I was interviewing him for my book.
He said, "Look, on the subject of opportunities coming out of pain." He said, "People are crazy and emotional. They buy and sell things in an emotional way, not in a logical way. And that's the only reason why we have any opportunity. So, if you have a way to value businesses that's disciplined and makes sense, you should be able to take advantage of other people's emotions." Right.
So, there's this central idea that you're trying to take advantage of other people's emotions. You're not just trying to control your own emotions. But this raises this really important question that Joel mentions, which is do you actually have a disciplined logical way to value businesses? And one of the things that Joel explained to to that I think had a a profound effect on me is he said, "Look, if you don't know how to value a business, you really have no right to play this game.
You should own an index fund or you should invest with an active fund manager who does know what they're doing." So, this is a really central idea, right? You have to actually ask yourself if you're qualified to win this game, and you need to understand the rules. You need to understand how to value a business.
And so, one of the things that Joel impressed upon me is he said, "Look, the whole game, basically, stocks are ownership shares of businesses, and you're valuing them. And then you're trying to buy them for much less than they're worth. And that's it. That's the essence of investing, as he sees it." So, he said, "If you don't know what you're looking for, it's like running through a dynamite factory with a burning match." And he said, "You may live, but you're still an idiot." And I think that's something that we've seen in this recent period where people were getting extremely carried away by high-tech stocks that they thought you could own forever, or by cryptocurrencies that they didn't understand that were driven to some degree by the greater fool theory, the idea that someone stupider was going to come along and buy it from you.
And so, it didn't really matter. It was just price momentum. And I'm not trying to be insulting cuz I made plenty of dumb mistakes myself, but I I think this this fundamental understanding from Joel is an important one to internalize this idea that we we have to know what we own. We have to value it in an unemotional way.
And that if we don't know how to do that, then we're at a tremendous disadvantage because we're just carried away by the mood swings of the crowd. And this is something that comes up again and again in the interviews that I've done with great investors. If If you listen to one of the most recent episodes that I did with Fred Martin, who's remarkable.
He talks about this fundamental process where you value a business and you buy it at discount to what it's worth. And then, as he puts it, there's a trueing up between the intrinsic value and the stock price. And as he puts it, you have no idea how long it's going to take. It It's pretty random. But he tends to own stocks for about 11 years.
You know, so one of the keys to being a successful investor is to have the patience to wait for that gap to close. But Joe Greenblatt said to me once, he thinks typically it only takes two or three years. Sometimes it can take longer. The market, as we know from John Maynard Keynes, can remain irrational for longer than you can remain solvent if uh if you're really unlucky.
So again, it's understanding the fundamental underlying process, the rules of the game, buying stuff at a discount, knowing how to value it in a sensible, disciplined way, and then waiting for that gap to close. And um I just think these rules are really vitally important. And it's a recurring theme of these interviews that I've done, whether it's François Rochon explaining that's that's how he's investing, or Howard Marks, or Joel Greenblatt.
You see it again and again in my book. You see it from someone like Monish Pabrai when he was reverse engineering Buffett and Munger and saying, "Oh, these are the rules of the game." And and it's so strange that almost nobody is playing the game this way. So, I just wanted to draw your attention to this this recurring theme that we want to be exploiting the emotional intensity of the market if we possibly can.
Comments 0