If you spend enough time studying investors like Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett, Bruce Berkowitz, Bill Miller, Eddie Lampert, Bill Ackman, and people who have been similarly successful in the investment world, you will understand what I mean.
There’s one thing you should remember if you remember nothing else from my talk: You have almost no chance of being a great investor. You have a really, really low probability, like 2% or less. And I’m adjusting for the fact that you all have high IQs and are hard workers and will have an MBA from one of the top business schools in the country soon. If this audience was just a random sample of the population at large, the likelihood of anyone here becoming a great investor later on would be even less, like 1/50th of 1% or something. You all have a lot of advantages over Joe Investor, and yet you have almost no chance of standing out from the crowd over a long period of time.
And the reason is that it doesn’t much matter what your IQ is, or how many books or
magazines or newspapers you have read, or how much experience you have, or will have
later in your career. These are things that many people have and yet almost none of them end up compounding at 20% or 25% over their careers.
I know this is a controversial thing to say and I don’t want to offend anyone in the
audience. I’m not pointing out anyone specifically and saying “You have almost no
chance to be great.” There are probably one or two people in this room who will end up compounding money at 20% for their career, but it’s hard to tell in advance who those will be without knowing each of you personally.
On the bright side, although most of you will not be able to compound money at 20% for your entire career, a lot of you will turn out to be good, above average investors because you are a skewed sample, the Harvard MBAs.
Your best hope in a situation like this is to be acquired or go public and sell all your shares before investors realize you don’t have a sustainable advantage. Technology is one type of advantage that’s short-lived. There are others, such as a good management team or a catchy advertising campaign or a hot fashion trend. These things produce temporary advantages but they change over time, or can be duplicated by competitors.
An economic moat is a structural thing. It’s like Southwest Airlines in the 1990s – it was so deeply ingrained in the company culture, in every employee, that no one could copy it, even though everyone kind of knew how Southwest was doing it. If your competitors know your secret and yet still can’t copy it, that’s a structural advantage. That’s a moat.
There are 8,000 hedge funds and 10,000 mutual funds and millions of individuals trying to play the stock market every day. How can you get an advantage over all these people?
What are the sources of the moat?
Well, one thing that is not a source is reading a lot of books and magazines and
newspapers. Anyone can read a book. Reading is incredibly important, but it won’t give you a big advantage over others. It will just allow you to keep up. Everyone reads a lot in this business. Some read more than others, but I don’t necessarily think there’s a correlation between investment performance and number of books read. Once you reach a certain point in your knowledge base, there are diminishing returns to reading more.
And in fact, reading too much news can actually be detrimental to performance because
you start to believe all the crap the journalists pump out to sell more papers.
You can’t buy or study your way to being a great investor. These things won’t give you a moat. They are simply things that make it easier to get invited into the poker game.
So what are the sources of competitive advantage for an investor? Just as with a company or an industry, the moats for investors are structural. They have to do with psychology, and psychology is hard wired into your brain. It’s a part of you. You can’t do much to change it even if you read a lot of books on the subject.
The way I see it, there are at least seven traits great investors share that are true sources of advantage.
Trait #1 is the ability to buy stocks while others are panicking and sell stocks while others are euphoric. Everyone thinks they can do this, but then when October 19, 1987 comes around and the market is crashing all around you, almost no one has the stomach to buy.
When the year 1999 comes around and the market is going up almost every day, you
can’t bring yourself to sell because if you do, you may fall behind your peers. The vast majority of the people who manage money have MBAs and high IQs and have read a lot of books. By late 1999, all these people knew with great certainty that stocks were overvalued, and yet they couldn’t bring themselves to take money off the table because of the “institutional imperative,” as Buffett calls it.
The second character trait of a great investor is that he is obsessive about playing the game and wanting to win. These people don’t just enjoy investing; they live it. They wake up in the morning and the first thing they think about, while they’re still half asleep, is a stock they have been researching, or one of the stocks they are thinking about selling, or what the greatest risk to their portfolio is and how they’re going to neutralize that risk.
They often have a hard time with personal relationships because, though they may truly enjoy other people, they don’t always give them much time. Their head is always in the clouds, dreaming about stocks. Unfortunately, you can’t learn to be obsessive about something. You either are, or you aren’t. And if you aren’t, you can’t be the next Bruce Berkowitz.
A third trait is the willingness to learn from past mistakes. The thing that is so hard for people and what sets some investors apart is an intense desire to learn from their own mistakes so they can avoid repeating them. Most people would much rather just move on and ignore the dumb things they’ve done in the past. I believe the term for this is “repression.” But if you ignore mistakes without fully analyzing them, you will undoubtedly make a similar mistake later in your career. And in fact, even if you do analyze them it’s tough to avoid repeating the same mistakes.
A fourth trait is an inherent sense of risk based on common sense. Most people know the story of Long Term Capital Management, where a team of 60 or 70 PhDs with
sophisticated risk models failed to realize what, in retrospect, seemed obvious: they were dramatically overleveraged. They never stepped back and said to themselves, “Hey, even though the computer says this is ok, does it really make sense in real life?” The ability to do this is not as prevalent among human beings as you might think. I believe the greatest risk control is common sense, but people fall into the habit of sleeping well at night because the computer says they should. They ignore common sense, a mistake I see repeated over and over in the investment world.
Trait #5: Great investors have confidence in their own convictions and stick with them, even when facing criticism. Buffett never get into the dot-com mania thought he was being criticized publicly for ignoring technology stocks. He stuck to his guns when everyone else was abandoning the value investing ship and Barron’s was publishing a picture of him on the cover with the headline “What’s Wrong, Warren?” Of course, it worked out brilliantly for him and made Barron’s look like a perfect contrary indicator.
Personally, I’m amazed at how little conviction most investors have in the stocks they buy. Instead of putting 20% of their portfolio into a stock, as the Kelly Formula might say to do, they’ll put 2% into it. Mathematically, using the Kelly Formula, it can be shown that a 2% position is the equivalent of betting on a stock has only a 51% chance of going up, and a 49% chance of going down. Why would you waste your time even making that bet ? These guys are getting paid $1 million a year to identify stocks with a 51% chance of going up? It’s insane.
Sixth, it’s important to have both sides of your brain working, not just the left side (the side that’s good at math and organization.) In business school, I met a lot of people who were incredibly smart. But those who were majoring in finance couldn’t write worth a damn and had a hard time coming up with inventive ways to look at a problem. I was a little shocked at this. I later learned that some really smart people have only one side of their brains working, and that is enough to do very well in the world but not enough to be an entrepreneurial investor who thinks differently from the masses. On the other hand, if the right side of your brain is dominant, you probably loath math and therefore you don’t often find these people in the world of finance to begin with. So finance people tend to be very left-brain oriented and I think that’s a problem. I believe a great investor needs to have both sides turned on. As an investor, you need to perform calculations and have a logical investment thesis. This is your left brain working. But you also need to be able to
do things such as judging a management team from subtle cues they give off. You need
to be able to step back and take a big picture view of certain situations rather than
analyzing them to death. You need to have a sense of humor and humility and common
sense. And most important, I believe you need to be a good writer. Look at Buffett; he’s one of the best writers ever in the business world. It’s not a coincidence that he’s also one of the best investors of all time. If you can’t write clearly, it is my opinion that you don’t think very clearly. And if you don’t think clearly, you’re in trouble. There are a lot of people who have genius IQs who can’t think clearly, though they can figure out bond or option pricing in their heads.
And finally the most important, and rarest, trait of all: The ability to live through
volatility without changing your investment thought process. This is almost impossible for most people to do; when the chips are down they have a terrible time not selling their stocks at a loss. They have a really hard time getting themselves to average down or to put any money into stocks at all when the market is going down. People don’t like shortterm pain even if it would result in better long-term results. Very few investors can handle the volatility required for high portfolio returns. They equate short-term volatility with risk. This is irrational; risk means that if you are wrong about a bet you make, you lose money. A swing up or down over a relatively short time period is not a loss and therefore not risk, unless you are prone to panicking at the bottom and locking in the loss.
But most people just can’t see it that way; their brains won’t let them. Their panic instinct steps in and shuts down the normal brain function. I would argue that none of these traits can be learned once a person reaches adulthood.
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