저자: PeterLynch · 외국인
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기관투자자는 규모·지배구조·성과압박 등 구조적 제약이 있어 개인투자자가 유리하다는 주장. 소형주는 기관이 외면해 저평가되기 쉽고, 창업자 지분이 많은 기업은 성장 여력이 크다고 설명. 개인은 투자 시점을 스스로 통제할 수 있어 시장 공포 때 매수 가능. 대형 기관의 분산투자·헤징은 수익을 깎는다는 점을 강조. 개별 종목·자산에 대한 향후 가격 방향 예측은 없음.
다듬은 글
I frankly think it's a tragedy in America that the small investor has been convinced that they don't have a chance, that the big institutions with all their computers, all their degrees, and all their money have all the edges. That just isn't true at all. Most investors believe that big institutions have an edge over them when it comes to investing in the stock market.
They attribute that to obvious reasons: institutions have expert analysts with Ivy League educations who work countless hours every day, far more available data, more advanced analysis tools, and much more. But what if I told you that the legendary investor Peter Lynch, regarded as perhaps the greatest mutual fund manager of all time, who consistently managed to double the yearly return of the market for more than a decade, claims just the opposite?
He strongly believes that institutional investors have a number of big disadvantages compared to the average value investor. If individual investors are aware of them and use them to their advantage, they can easily outperform the majority of these institutions. Peter Lynch believes this so strongly that he wrote two books on the subject, *One Up on Wall Street* and *Beating the Street*.
So in this video, we will explore his and some of Warren Buffett's timeless advice on what those disadvantages are, and discover how you can use them to outperform more than 90% of institutional investors.
The first and most notable difference is size, more specifically the amount of money someone invests. This matters because an institutional investor cannot simply invest in a small company and expect a meaningful return. For example, a fund like Warren Buffett's Berkshire Hathaway currently has around $600 billion to invest. That is a combination of around $315 billion in cash and around $250 billion already deployed in the market.
For them, buying a company with a market capitalization under one billion dollars would not make any sense, since even a fivefold increase in that company's size would lead to less than a 1% increase in the value of Berkshire's portfolio. That means most companies of that size or smaller are often left out by institutions.
Warren Buffett has said publicly that he could achieve a much higher return if he were investing a small amount of money. I think I can name a half dozen people who could compound a million dollars, or at least earn 50% a year on a million dollars. Those people could not compound a hundred million or a billion at anything remotely like that rate. Working with a very small sum, there is an opportunity to earn very high returns, but that advantage disappears very rapidly as the money compounds. From a million to ten million, I would say it falls off dramatically.
So what Buffett explained is that big institutions are forced to shy away from smaller companies and focus on big enterprises. This creates something amazing for the individual investor, which Peter Lynch calls "100-bagger" opportunities: investments that have the potential to return 100 times the initial investment. In *Beating the Street*, he describes how it can be very profitable to go where institutional investors and fund managers are afraid to invest.
In the book, Peter Lynch lays out his investing principles. His principle number 18 says, "When even the analysts are bored, it's time to start buying." This often results in companies trading at prices far below their real value. One advantage of such companies, as he explains, is that the founders typically own a large portion of the shares. That makes it much easier for them to follow their core principles, and for you to assess them, than for a company owned by ten large institutions with ten different ideas about where the company should go.
These companies also usually have much more growth potential. It is much easier for a small company selling, say, a million dollars' worth of goods in one city to expand into more cities than for an established company to grow across an entire country, and then go international and multiply its sales a hundredfold. Even most big companies started that way. Take Facebook, which initially offered its services to only one university, then expanded to many more, and now is used by about half the world's population. Or Amazon, which started by selling books online and is now the go-to place for a large part of the world when they want to buy something online.
By comparison, an already well-established company like Apple or Coca-Cola already has an enormous number of users, so it is almost unimaginable for them to suddenly sell to several times as many people.
The second big advantage for individual investors is that you have full control over the amount you invest. You heard that right. Institutions have much less control over how they invest than you do. Most institutions do not own their funds; they rely on other people's money to buy and sell securities. So what usually happens is that when the market declines or crashes, people withdraw their money from these funds exactly when securities prices are low. That forces institutions to sell some of their investments at a loss to refund investors.
The reverse happens in a bull market. They end up holding a lot of cash just when prices are extremely high, forcing them either to buy at overvalued prices or to hold cash and produce lower returns on the overall portfolio. Both of these things run directly against the beliefs of Peter Lynch and Warren Buffett, who believe you should buy stocks only when they sell at a big discount to their intrinsic value.
Buffett put it this way: "We think just the opposite. When a stock goes down, we love it, because we'll buy more. If it goes up, it kills us to buy more. But if you can't get yourself into that mental attitude, you're going to be scared whenever everybody else is scared." That is where the famous Buffett quote comes from: be fearful when others are greedy, and greedy when others are fearful.
This is why, if you look at the SPIVA indicator, you can see that in the US almost 90% of institutions underperform the S&P 500 index fund. The same thing can be seen in countries around the world.
To top this off, all fund managers managing over $100 million are required to submit a 13F filing to the public every three months, in which anyone, even normal investors like you and me, can see what they bought and sold in the current quarter. Other investors and institutions can see which positions they've bought into or sold out of and copy them, which pushes up their buying prices and lowers their selling prices.
I think the public can do extremely well in the stock market on their own. The fact that institutions dominate the market today is actually a positive for small investors. These institutions push stocks to unusual lows and unusual highs. For someone who can sit back, form their own opinion, and know something about an industry, this is an advantage, not a disadvantage.
Finally, a big challenge most institutions face is shareholder expectations for steady yearly returns and risk avoidance. Institutions cannot simply buy a stock of a company that is expected to produce a positive return a few years from now. Because investors want steady returns, most institutions shy away from long-term investments and concentrate on stocks that can produce results in the short term. And investors get unhappy if a fund posts a negative return, even when the market as a whole fell that same year.
As a result, these funds are forced to do two things that hurt their returns. The first is hedging: after buying a stock, they often buy put options to cover the downside in case the stock drops, which eats into returns. The second is over-diversifying across many industries and markets, so that the great stocks are offset by mediocre ones and the portfolio becomes less risky.
Peter Lynch was blunt about this: "I don't believe in diversification at all. I would own one stock if I could find one great stock. Diversification is a big mistake. You buy this thing that might balance that other thing, and they both go down."
These are clear signs of why Peter Lynch and Warren Buffett both believe that individual value investors have big advantages over most major institutions. If you want to learn how to invest like those legendary value investors, check out my other videos, where I explore their strategies and principles in detail and explain how they consistently outperformed the market.
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