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The business of value investing – Six essential elements to buying companies like Warren Buffett- Charlie Tian 2009
https://bbs.pinggu.org/thread-695143-1-1.html (Page 172-182)
Swimming against the current
阅读到的有价值的内容段落摘录
The modern financial world does everything it can to exacerbate the short-term orientation of many investors. The perilous consequence of these activities is promoting the mistaken belief that investing is easy, when in truth investing demands rigor, intensity, and painstaking work. To the crowd, patience is madness; to the value investor, patience is wisdom. Further waging the fight against a steady and patient investment approach is the industry’s view of cash. The investment industry trains us to think of cash as a deteriorating asset. If we are sitting on cash, then we obviously do not know what we are doing. To the patient long-term investor, the value of cash is indirectly proportional to the availability of bargain securities. As bargain securities flourish, holding cash is as imprudent as investing in overvalued securities. When bargain securities are scarce, sitting on cash is the most intelligent investment decision. As is often the case with cash, when we don’t have it is when we need it most. The patient investor is very comfortable waiting, ready to make an opportunistic investment when the time is right. Cash allows the investor (a) to avoid selling what is cheap in order to buy another cheap asset and (b) the opportunity to take advantage of any special situations. As we end 2008 with many security prices approaching 1973 valuations, the population of those hiding in cash is as great as ever. This is evidenced by investors’ willingness to accept a yield of .05 percent on 3 - month Treasury bills and 2.4 percent on 10-year Treasury notes. In comparison, some of the strongest and most profitable U.S. companies are serving dividend yields north of 4% and selling at very attractive valuations. With the pool of investment bargains greater than it’s been in decades, the vast majority of “market investors” prefer cash. Contrast this with the euphoria of the Internet boom, when cash was viewed as the dumb man’s asset against equities trading at 40 times earnings. As the saying goes, the more things change, the more they stay the same. Warren Buffett has often compared investing to baseball. Like a batter, investors are simply waiting for Mr. Market to serve up a fat pitch to knock it out of the park. But investors have one very distinct advantage over baseball batters: There are no called strikes. Investors have the luxury of waiting as long as they want before making a swing. Waiting can be of immense value to investors if they are disciplined and patient enough to use it to their advantage. It’s far more profitable to wait for the fat pitch and then invest big. Investors can wait and wait until Mr. Market throws them the perfect pitch before they decide to invest big. Unfortunately, many investors invest as if they truly were under the three strikes and we’re out rule. This leads investors to feel the need to be buying and selling something all the time. No matter how we examine it, more activity in the stock market generally leads to poorer results. If it’s not the investments that do we in, the increased frictional costs — namely brokerage fees and increased administrative costs — will add up. There are many advantages to making a few sound, sizable investments and just sitting back and waiting:
• We pay fewer brokers’ commissions.
• We’ll hear a lot less nonsense from everybody and anybody eager to give us sales pitches.
• And if your investments work, the government will let we keep more of your profits every year as they compound over and over again.
It’s easy to speak of the benefits of patience and long-term investing; but as is characteristic of many investing philosophies, it’s easier said than done when it comes to patience. Most investors have become trained to have their minds think dependently, not independently, when it comes to the stock market. They operate under the assumption that the market realizes their existence when in fact the market exists at the mercy of the investor. The stock market is nothing more than a voting machine on the price of securities. Each day security prices are determined by the available supply of buyers and sellers in the market. Value investors understand this important distinction and thus view the stock market only for what it is: a forum to acquire ownership interests in undervalued companies or dispose of those securities at fairly valued prices. Aside from these two purposes, value investors are content to sit still and wait until the market serves up prices conducive to their liking. When there are no bargains, patience is bliss to value investors.
阅读到的有价值信息的自我思考点评感想
The stock markets, especially the U.S. markets, have arguably been one of the most successful wealth -creating machines in the world, besting returns of all other asset classes over the long haul. Unfortunately, the unmatched wealth creation created by the stock market over the decades also leads to crippling wealth destruction. Investors fail to see the markets for what they truly are— creators of long - term wealth — and instead conclude that simply being invested in the stock market, regardless of the general level of valuation, automatically creates wealth. This thinking is a tragic mistake, and it’s the source of much investor anger toward stocks. When the mood is jubilant, folks are glad to put money in stocks, often at overvalued prices. When the market is filled with euphoria and stocks are expensive, the financial world tells we what a wonderful place the market is for your hard - earned money. Many investors are made to feel stupid from all angles by not participating. Some will get lucky and happen to get in and out having made great sums of money. Those outlier success stories are the ones we will read on the front page of the paper. For the majority, the end result is substantial loss of capital and a permanent detachment from stocks. When we participate in the market as a gambler and not an investor, we should not expect results to be different from what we would expect at a roulette wheel.
The independent - minded value investor, however, observes this euphoria and sits still while the market is consumed with speculative activity and overvalued securities. Value investors realize that sometimes doing nothing is the best thing we can do. The possibility of earning quick returns is of no concern when it comes alongside a heightened risk of permanent capital loss. Instead, value investors will wait patiently and continue to analyze securities, learning as much as they can in anticipation of a better buying opportunity. Armed with more capital and information, the value investor is in the ultimate sweet spot when bargains do begin to crop up. Patience is a painstaking process in investing because we never know how long the wait will be. But the future opportunity to make significant investments at bargain prices alongside a minimal probability of permanent capital loss rewards patient investors magnificently. The philosophies of value investing — deep fundamental analysis, limiting risk, and margin of safety — are by nature designed for unfavorable (or bear) market environments. During bull markets, the value investing approach is deemed unnecessary. If bull markets were constant, the need for the value investing framework would not be required. Many might be surprised to find out that Warren Buffett’s investment strategy often has consisted of long periods of doing nothing, or what Buffett calls it “sitting on my butt” that is waiting patiently for good opportunities to appear.
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