저자: PeterLynch · 외국인
요약 보기
한 줄 결론: 투자는 인내와 기업 이야기(스토리) 이해가 핵심이며, 단기 가격 예측이 아니라 장기 보유가 성과를 만든다. 투자 심리: 투자는 개인적인 일이며 변동성을 견딜 정서적 힘이 필요하다. 주식을 2~3주나 2~3개월이 아닌 수년간 보유해야 좋은 성과가 나며, 본인의 최고 종목도 5~7년차에 성과가 났다. 매도 기준: 매도는 보유 종목 간 스토리를 비교하는 것이다. 더 나은 스토리를 가진 종목으로 교체하며, 좋은 스토리는 시장에서 인정받기까지 수년이 걸릴 수 있다. 종목 발굴: 소비자, 직장인, 이웃으로서의 직접 경험이 투자 우위의 출발점이다. 예시로 볼보, 1950년대 소방관이 발굴한 탐팩스(Tampax), 미니밴 사례를 들었다. 리서치 방법: 기업 실적을 끌어올릴 이유(비용 절감, 신제품 등)를 찾는 '기업 스토리' 개발이 핵심이며, 복잡한 계산보다 이해가 중요하다. 아마추어는 5~8개 기업을 깊이 알면 충분하다. 사례 교훈: 맥도날드는 메뉴와 해외 확장으로 수십 배 성장했고, 토이저러스와 홈디포는 너무 일찍 매도한 실수였다. 월마트는 장기 성장 스토리가 유효했다. 매도 시점: 경기순환주는 실적이 회복되면 매도하고, 성장주는 장기 성장 스토리가 유지되는 동안 보유한다. 리스크: 좋은 투자도 틀릴 수 있으며, 높은 승률이 필요하지 않고 맞을 때 크게 벌면 된다. 주가 하락 시 펀더멘털이 악화되지 않았다면 추가 매수 기회가 될 수 있으나 악화된 기업에 추가 투자하지 말아야 한다. 탐욕·자만·안일함(complacency, concern, capitulation)을 경계해야 한다. 출연자 전망: 특정 자산에 대한 단기 가격 방향 예측은 없다.
다듬은 글
Investing is a personal thing. You have to do it yourself, not with a committee. You need the emotional strength to stand the volatility of the market, and of stocks in general. The key organ here isn't the brain, it's the stomach. Do you have the stomach for it? Do you have the patience? You should be able to look in the mirror and ask yourself: what am I going to do if the market goes down? If you want to double your money quickly and safely, fold it in half and put it in your wallet. Any other way, you're simply gambling.
A good stock can take two, three, even five years before it really pays off. It's not two or three weeks, and it's not two or three months. My best stocks were my fifth, sixth, and seventh year. Give your investments time to grow.
Many people ask me when the right time to sell a stock is. Selling is a matter of comparing stories. If story A is better than story B, sell B and buy more A. If you own eight companies, you're playing eight simultaneous games of poker, so only stay in the games where you have the best chance of success. But remember, stories rarely change overnight. It may take years for a good one to be recognized by the market. Give your good stories the time to grow.
Your advantage in picking stocks is your direct experience with companies, as a consumer, on your job as a professional, or as a neighbor. Use those advantages as a place to start looking for good stocks. You have several things that you possess that will make you a good investor. They're inherent to your life: it's the field you work in, it's the area where you live. There may be some local company that's terrific. You're a consumer, you see products and services that are terrific.
We bought a Volvo. It was better than the American station wagons, it was safer, and the price was right. I did a little research and found that Volvo, the stock, as a Swedish company, was selling equal to its cash. You were paying almost nothing for the company, and they had lots of other divisions doing terrific. Sometimes people take things for granted.
My field was the mutual fund industry. In the early 1970s the industry grew slowly, but then it took off in the '80s. Money piled into money market funds and equity funds. Like an idiot, I missed stocks like Dreyfus, Pioneer, T. Rowe Price, Strategic Investments, and Franklin Resources. Lots of companies went up dramatically. These were my own field, and all I had to do was buy them. It was really dumb.
Back in the 1950s, a fireman from New England noticed the factory in his town seemed to be hiring and expanding all the time. This person wasn't a professional investor, he was just an observant neighbor. He decided to put two thousand dollars per year into Tambrands, then called Tampax. By 1972, the fireman was a millionaire just from using his local edge.
If you know something that will drive a company's earnings higher, you know something that will drive the company's stock higher, sooner or later. But you can't just guess at it. You have to have reasons, such as costs are coming down, our new products are going to be a big hit, research is developing. A company story is an idea of why earnings should go up or down. It doesn't mean sitting in the library for hours reading SEC filings or fiddling with a calculator. Research is exciting, and there's very little math.
When I owned Chrysler, it was the biggest position in my fund. When I was at a movie theater or a sports event, I'd run into somebody driving a minivan. I'd ask them, what do you think of the minivan? Would you buy another one? What do you like about it? Some would say, well, it's a little underpowered, they only have a four-cylinder engine. I knew they were already working on a six-cylinder engine. So this is research.
Research starts with the things you know, your edge. If you're a mechanic, look at the tools you use: which are the best, which are the best value? If you're a doctor, see what new technology saves the insurer money, or what software systems reduce costs at hospitals. You probably already know a few companies quite thoroughly. The amateur investor can probably follow between five and eight companies, and could lecture on those five or eight because they know them very well. There are ten to fifteen thousand public companies in the United States, and many more overseas, so you don't have to be an expert on lots of companies. You just have to know a few very well.
I owned Dunkin' Donuts for twelve years. I might talk to the management once a year. The story didn't change much. You don't have to worry about low-cost imports coming from Korea when you own a donut company. You don't have to worry about the economy, or someone inventing a new computer chip. The story doesn't change that much.
McDonald's earnings have gone up, I think, more than 80-fold over the last thirty years, and the stock has gone up 100-fold. What made McDonald's earnings continue to grow? If they had just stuck with a cheap cheeseburger and a cheap hamburger at lunch, they probably would have run into earnings problems ten or fifteen years ago. But they expanded their menu, they kept their costs low, they added breakfast, and they went overseas. Every day they had two or three more restaurants. People thought there was no room for more McDonald's five, ten, fifteen years ago. They were wrong. If they had done the research, they would have said, well, there are a couple hundred countries out there, there are lots of places to grow. You have to figure out what inning you're in, like in a baseball game.
I sold Toys "R" Us way too early. It went up 20-fold after I sold. I did the same thing with Home Depot. Those are probably the two greatest mistakes I ever made.
When should you sell? You ought to find out why you bought a stock. If it's a cyclical company and they're doing poorly, awful, you wait until things are getting better, they're doing terrific, and then you sell. But with a growth company, you have to ask whether the story still holds. Take Walmart: ten years after they went public, you could have bought the stock and made 500 times your money, because they were still only in fifteen states. You could ask, why can't they go to seventeen, why can't they go to nineteen, why can't they go to twenty-three? For the next four decades they expanded around the country. So you have to say to yourself, in this stock I have a ten-year story, a twenty-year story. I'll write that down and follow it. That's what I do with a company, and that's your decision. That's how you sell.
Many investors today have a novel element in the trust issue. We also have security problems that we traditionally didn't have in America. Has that changed the way you pick and believe in stocks? No. You still buy a company to grow. If it's a textile company, an electronics company, or a software company, you'd better understand what they do. If they do well, the stock will do well no matter what happens in the market. If the Dow Jones today were at a thousand or at 500, you'd have made a lot of money in McDonald's. You'd have made a lot of money in Johnson & Johnson. You'd have made a lot of money in Gillette. These companies' earnings have gone up a lot over the last thirty years. And if the market were at 50,000, you'd have lost money in Burlington Industries. I recommended that in 1969. I think it's gone from 34 to 2, with no stock splits, and the earnings have been terrible.
Well, your modesty actually makes an important point: the people with the best batting averages in the world don't bat a thousand. I sometimes get angry mail, particularly during bear markets, saying so-and-so recommended such-and-such and it went down. How often did you come up with a clinker? This is a funny business. You don't have to be right even five times out of ten. If the times you're right, you make a double or a triple, that offsets all the times you lose twenty or thirty percent. So when you buy a stock, ask yourself: how much can I lose, and how much can I make? You ought to be able to make a lot. Stocks are risky. Look at how much we lost on AT&T, or how much less Xerox was worth. These were quality companies, and you could lose a lot in the stock. So ask yourself how much you can make, because if you're right you're going to make a double or triple.
Does your own confidence ever get shaken? Every day I think the market's going to go up. I keep calling a lot of my companies, so I keep calling the company.
Can you be greedy in your business? Yeah. I call it the three C's: complacency, concern, and capitulation. Complacency is "I don't agree, everything's going right." You sort of forget to check the facts. You say things are starting to slip, in the comments, not the fundamentals. They're starting to mature, the same competitors are coming along. So complacency is the worst one, and it's the one that happens most often. Unless you're working hard. If you're working hard, you're always checking with competitors, checking with customers and suppliers, trying to find out whether the company is still early. Do they have years and years of growth ahead? Then you stay with it. The stock goes down, but you know your reasons.
There's also the idea that you should never invest in something you don't really understand. That's part of why you went out on the road so much, right? If I don't understand it, I don't want to. The key thing is, when the stock goes from ten to six, if you understand what they do and you know they're financially solvent, you're fine. If you don't understand it, you can call the psychic hotline, but you're probably going to do the wrong thing. If you understand exactly what they're doing and the stock goes from ten to six, you'll buy more. If you're confused to start with, you'll say, well, there must be something wrong there, and you're out.
A lot of times stocks are going to decline. My best stocks went from 18 to 8, then sometimes to 40, and some went from 18 to zero. But at least I wasn't adding to it on the way to zero. If it's going down, you're not adding to it. Sometimes you are, if the fundamentals are getting better or are the same. But if they're deteriorating, you don't.
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