Seth Klarman – Timeless Value Investing (EP.328)
发布时间 2023-07-17 08:21:39 来源
Hello, I'm Ted Cites and this is Capital Allicators. This show is an open exploration of the people and process behind capital allocation. Through conversations with leaders in the money game, we learn how these holders of the keys to the kingdom allocate their time and their capital. We can join our mailing list and access premium content at capitalallicators.com. All opinions expressed by Ted and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of capital allocators or their firms. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions. Clients of capital allocators or podcast guests may maintain positions and securities discussed on this podcast.
你好，我是泰德·塞茨 (Ted Cites)，欢迎收听《资本分配者》。这个节目旨在开放探索资本分配背后的人物和过程。通过与金融领域领导者的对话，我们学习这些掌握权力之匙的人是如何分配他们的时间和资本的。您可以加入我们的邮件列表，并在capitalallicators.com网站上访问优质内容。泰德和播客嘉宾所表达的观点仅代表他们个人的看法，并不反映《资本分配者》或其公司意见。此播客仅供信息分享，不应作为投资决策的依据。《资本分配者》的客户或播客嘉宾可能持有在此节目中讨论的证券。
I guess on today's show is Seth Kharman. A legendary value investor and president of the BALPOST Group, an investment firm founded in 1982 that manages $27 billion. Seth authored the very out of print margin of safety and edited the recently released seventh edition of Graham and Dodd's Value Investing Classic Security Analysis. Our conversation covers Seth's early experience in business and investing, path to BALPOST, timeless value investing principles and those that have changed over time.
在今天的节目中，我们的嘉宾是塞斯·卡尔曼。他是一位传奇的价值投资者，也是于1982年成立的投资公司BALPOST集团的总裁，该公司管理着270亿美元的资产。塞斯撰写了极为罕见的《安全边际》，并编辑了最近发布的格雷厄姆和多德的价值投资经典著作《证券分析》的第七版。我们的对话涉及塞斯早期的商业和投资经历、他加入BALPOST的历程、永恒的价值投资原则以及随着时间变化的那些原则。
We discuss BALPOST's application of value investing across sourcing, diligence, portfolio construction and risk management. We then turn to Seth's thoughts on illiquidity, international investing, the weird current environment, positioning portfolios for it, alignment with clients, succession at BALPOST, and his updated perspectives on the book's security analysis and margin of safety. We close discussing Seth's personal investments in the Boston Red Sox, risk racing and philanthropy. Seth generally stays away from the public eye, so I was particularly grateful to share this conversation some 25 years after we first met.
我们讨论了BALPOST在项目搜寻、尽职调查、投资组合构建和风险管理中应用价值投资的方法。接着，我们探讨了Seth对流动性不足、国际投资、当前奇怪环境、为此调整投资组合、与客户的合作、BALPOST的继任计划，还有他对书中关于证券分析和安全边际的最新观点。最后，我们聊到了Seth个人在波士顿红袜队、赛车风险及慈善方面的投资。Seth通常很低调，所以时隔25年后能再次进行这次对话，我感到特别感激。
Before we get going, we're hosting our fourth cohort of capital allocators' university in New York City on September 14th. Capital allocator's university, or CAU, is a chance to connect and learn with peers. We'll bring together a few dozen allocators, each with around five to fifteen years of experience, to share frameworks on interviewing money managers, investment decision-making, leadership and management, and investing. And we'll engage with four fantastic chief investment officers, Jenny Heller from Brandy Wine, Kim Liu from Columbia, on a Marshall from the Hewlett Foundation, and Brian O'Neill recently retired from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation.
在我们开始之前，我们将于9月14日在纽约市举办第四期资本分配者大学。这次活动是一个与同行交流学习的机会。我们将邀请几十位拥有五到十五年经验的资本分配者，共同分享关于面试基金经理、投资决策、领导与管理，以及投资的框架。此外，我们还将与四位出色的首席投资官互动，他们是来自布兰迪葡萄酒公司的Jenny Heller，哥伦比亚大学的Kim Liu，惠特基金会的Marshall，以及最近从罗伯特·伍德·约翰逊基金会退休的Brian O'Neill。
You'll get a chance to meet some great people and learn a lot in an information-filled day. Hop on our website at capital allocators.com slash university to apply. Please enjoy my conversation with Seth Klarman. Seth, thanks so much for joining me. It's great to be with you. Thanks so much for having me. I'd love to go all the way back to your first memories of your interest in business and investing.
你将有机会在这一天里结识一些优秀的人，并学到很多知识。请访问我们的网站capital allocators.com/university申请。希望你喜欢我与塞思·克拉曼的对话。塞思，非常感谢你加入我们。很高兴能与你在一起。非常感谢你邀请我。我想回到你对商业和投资产生兴趣的最初记忆。
Well, it goes way back to childhood, maybe even early childhood. I was always starting small businesses. I was a micro entrepreneur in the sense of doing leaf-raking and lawn mowing. I had a snow cone stand and got in trouble with the Baltimore Health Authorities when we added hot dogs. That's a snow cone stand because we didn't have a license. I was having little carnivals in our yard for kids and built a mini golf course in my yard. Although my mom did really appreciate that. Had a tiny interest in collecting coins and used to buy and sell some coins by mail, a mini activity as well. I was just doing a lot, mostly just getting my feet wet and learning a lot.
好吧，这可以追溯到我的童年，甚至是早童年时期。我总是开创一些小生意。我就是一个微型企业家，比如会去耙叶子和割草。我还开了一个冰沙摊，但当我们加卖热狗时，就被巴尔的摩卫生当局找麻烦了，因为我们没有执照。我在自家院子里为小朋友们举办小型嘉年华，还建了一个迷你高尔夫球场。尽管如此，我妈妈还是非常欣赏这个。我对收集硬币有一点小小的兴趣，曾通过邮寄方式买卖一些硬币，也是一个小活动。我尝试了很多东西，主要就是积累经验和学习。
My main interest was in the stock market. I was a numbers guy. I loved the baseball statistics. I was always turning the Baltimore Sunpapers to the sports section. They would have every batter and every pitcher in the American League and all their stats. I was learning how to calculate those statistics as well. At some point I noticed there were a whole bunch of numbers a few pages after the baseball statistics. I asked my dad what those were and found out. Those were the stock exchange listings. We just began another journey of trying to connect my interest to figure out what was going on and what was that all about. I read a bunch about the market. I remember reading a book about how I made a million dollars in the stock market. I remember reading How to Buy Stocks by Lewis Ingle. Kind of up and down the spectrum of what was out there.
我的主要兴趣是股票市场。我是个喜欢数字的人。我非常热爱棒球统计数据，总是翻开《巴尔的摩太阳报》的体育版面。他们会列出美国联盟每个击球手和投手的所有数据。我也在学习如何计算这些统计数据。某天我注意到在棒球统计数据之后的几页有一大堆数字，我问我爸爸那是什么，结果发现那是股票交易列表。于是，我们开始另一个探索，试着把我的兴趣与这些内容联系起来，搞明白那到底是怎么回事。我读了很多关于市场的书。我记得我读过一本关于如何在股票市场赚到一百万美元的书。我还记得读过刘易斯·英格尔的《如何购买股票》。总之我涉猎了市场上各种书目。
How old were you when you bought your first stock? I bought a share of Johnson and Johnson when I was around 10 years old with money I got from my birthday. A few days later it split three for one which I didn't know had been announced but it must have been announced a little bit before that. I own three shares of Johnson and Johnson. Why did I buy it? I knew what the company did and you got to start somewhere. My mom found me a very kind stockbroker named Max Silverman down in Baltimore and he was happy to execute an order where he couldn't possibly make any money and he was my stockbroker for a number of years but it was always at a very small scale.
你买入第一支股票时是几岁？我在大约10岁的时候买了一股强生公司的股票，那是我用生日收到的钱买的。几天后，这只股票进行了三拆一的分拆，我当时并不知道已经宣布了这个消息，但显然是在我买入之前不久宣布的。我现在拥有三股强生公司的股票。为什么我要买它呢？因为我知道这家公司是做什么的，而且你总得从某个地方开始。我妈妈帮我找了一位非常和蔼的股票经纪人，他叫马克斯·西尔弗曼，住在巴尔的摩。他很乐意为我执行这笔他几乎赚不到钱的订单，他做了我多年的股票经纪人，但交易规模一直很小。
Where did that take you as you got older and went through college? I was really fortunate. My uncle Paul, my mother's brother lived in New York and he was a tax attorney and an old old friend of Max Hina who was a founder head of Mutual Shares. My uncle introduced me to Max when I was junior in college and I got a job for the summer and then ultimately an offer to come back full time when I graduated which was in January of 79. So that's how I got to Mutual Shares and my history there. I continued to hold stocks, trade stocks and read but the key was getting that job. It was a value investing mutual fund. Like Price had started by then and was Max's protege and running a lot of the activities day to day.
当你长大并进入大学时，这段经历带你走向了哪里？我的运气很好。我舅舅保罗，也就是我母亲的兄弟，住在纽约，他是一名税务律师，并且是Max Hina的老朋友，Max是 Mutual Shares 公司的创始人之一。我在大学三年级时，舅舅把我介绍给了Max，我在暑假时获得了一份工作，最终在1979年1月毕业的时候得到了全职工作的机会。这就是我如何进入Mutual Shares公司并开始我的职业生涯的过程。我继续持有股票、买卖股票和阅读，但关键是获得了那份工作。这是一个专注于价值投资的共同基金公司。当时Price已经成立，并成为Max的得意门生，负责日常的许多活动。
It was like being let in on a secret that you could read about it all you want but when you actually start doing analysis and you see individual companies trade at a discount from what they're pretty obviously worth, it's easy to get excited that there's some inefficiency here and you have a chance to really add value and do well. What was your first aha moment from having picked a bunch of stocks yourself to now working and seeing a philosophy behind it? The most clear thing was that picking stocks yourself you knew what the companies did. I knew that Johnson and Johnson made bandages which I apparently was an extensive user of when I was a small kid but I didn't really know how to connect that to anything tangible about why would I pay a particular price or what would make that stock go up or down.
这就像被告知一个秘密，你可以读很多相关内容，但当你真正开始进行分析，并发现某些公司以明显低于其实际价值的价格进行交易时，你会很兴奋，因为这表明市场存在某种效率缺失，而你有机会真正增加价值并取得好成绩。从自己挑选一堆股票到现在工作并看到一套背后的理念，你的第一个“顿悟时刻”是什么？最明显的是，当你自己挑选股票时，你知道这些公司是做什么的。我知道强生公司生产绷带，因为小时候我经常用到这些产品，但我并不真正知道这与我们应该支付什么价格有什么联系，或是什么因素会让这只股票上涨或下跌。
So being in the business and watching every day and seeing some of the peripheral things like you can't just assume that just because the stock trades at a price or bond trades at a price that you can actually buy any there because it's a market and maybe you can buy it and maybe it's not that liquid or maybe by the time you get around to deciding what you want to buy, it's moved a lot. So there were just a lot of nuts and bolts that all went into the entire equation. Real shares was a great place to sit because Max Hina had in his office this old railroad bond trader, Hans Jacobson.
在这个行业中，观察每天发生的事情，并看到一些外围情况，比如你不能仅仅因为股票或债券在某个价格交易就认为你真的能买到。因为这毕竟是一个市场，也许你能买到，也许流动性不够，或者等你下定决心要买的时候，价格已经大幅波动。所以，这中间有很多细节因素需要考虑。Real Shares 就是一个很好的工作地点，因为 Max Hina 的办公室里有一位经验丰富的铁路债券交易员，Hans Jacobson。
You hear all these names that they're bidding various prices and you really have no idea what lies behind that but eventually it became clear that a number of them were US railroad bankruptcies, several connected to the pen central bankruptcy which was unfolding around that time and which led to the creation of a bunch of other securities. It turns out of course that railroads had been granted building rights over the tracks and that they had all kinds of real estate value in addition to any value that might have as railroad. And so there were just a series of securities that went from obscurity because you'd never even heard of them into mainstream at least for somebody sitting at mutual shares because they started to make sense and you understood why the prices fluctuated and why they might be really attractive as an investment.
在你听到这些不同的名字和他们所出价的各种价格时，你真的不知道背后隐藏了什么。但最终，我们发现其中一些是与当时正在发生的宾夕法尼亚中央铁路破产案有关的美国铁路破产事件，这起破产案导致了一系列其他证券的出现。事实证明，铁路公司不仅获得了铁轨的建设权，还拥有各种不动产价值，除了其作为铁路本身的价值之外。因此，有一系列以前从未听说过的证券，从默默无闻变得受欢迎，至少对于“共同基金”的投资者来说开始变得有意义，因为你开始了解为什么这些价格会波动，以及为什么它们可能是非常有吸引力的投资。
I also remember the first stock, I believe Michael Price threw a prospectus on my desk and said here figure this out which was a typical Michael Price instruction to me. A company called Telecore which was an electronics distributor was losing their contract with the Japanese company whose products they were distributing. They were going to get bought out for the value of networking capital or something like that. Telecore also owned a subsidiary called Electrorent which rented and leased the same kind of electronic equipment.
我还记得我第一次接触到的股票。我记得迈克尔·普莱斯把一本招股说明书扔在我桌上，然后对我说：你自己搞明白。这是迈克尔·普莱斯对我一贯的指示风格。当时有一家公司叫做Telecore，是一家电子产品分销商。他们正在失去与一家日本公司之间的分销合同，而他们分销的正是这家日本公司的产品。他们正准备以流动资金价值左右的价格被收购。Telecore还拥有一家名为Electrorent的子公司，该子公司出租和租赁同类型的电子设备。
So you were going to get $8 or so in cash over a period of time but not that long and you were going to receive share of Electrorent or fraction of a share of Electrorent and Electrorent at that valuation that you could create it for was trading it under one time's earnings. And that was math I could do in my head and math that made the nature of that inefficiency seemed so glaring and so obvious and probably was a great example for me of complexity can be an investor's friend that if a person wanted to buy Electrorent previously they couldn't. The only way to get it was this way that most of the time you wouldn't want to pay $8 and change to create a share of something that is only worth sense in that most of the money you were just going to get back from the liquidation payment and the licensing deal with Telecore.
你本来会在一段时间内收到大约8美元的现金，时间不会太长，同时你还会得到Electrorent的股份或部分股份。根据当时的估值，Electrorent的交易价格是低于其一倍的收益。这种简单的计算让我清楚地认识到这种市场低效性的存在是如此明显且显而易见，对我来说，这可能是一个很好的例子，说明复杂性有时是投资者的朋友。之前如果有人想购买Electrorent股份是行不通的，唯一的方式是通过这种途径，而大多数情况下，你不会想花8美元来创造一个只值几分钱的股份，其中大部分钱你只会从清算支付和与Telecore的授权交易中收回。
Nevertheless it. was a great lesson that there are arbitrage opportunities that complexity leads sometimes to opportunity that you need to really soak yourself in the details that opportunity may not immediately be apparent it certainly wouldn't be apparent from reading a financial report from last year because that's not an ongoing concern but rather understanding how the pieces all come together using your own ideational thinking to understand what might get in the way is there an approval needed or are some payments owed to somebody that you've got to subtract before you think about your proceeds or are their taxes due on the transaction. It was really a broadening example of the kind of things an arbitrage investor needs to think about compared to an investor in a going concern.
尽管如此，这仍然是一个重要的教训：复杂性有时会带来套利机会。你需要深入了解细节，因为机会可能不会立即显现。通过去年的财务报告是看不出来的，因为那是过去的情况，而不是持续关注的问题。关键在于理解各个部分是如何结合在一起的，并运用自己独特的思维来理解可能的障碍。例如，是否需要获得批准，或是有欠款需要扣除，甚至在考虑收益之前需要支付的税款。这的确拓宽了视野，让人了解到，套利投资者需要考虑的因素，与投资于正常运作企业的投资者有所不同。
So as you're learning early on in your career it's also around the same time you had the Bill Sharp's of the world writing about efficient markets hypothesis and I'm really curious as you started hearing about that thinking about the markets and index fund investing and then the other side you're seeing all these security level inefficiencies. How did you think about the investing world more broadly? I read a book after that but quite a while ago called To Conquer the Air and it's about Orville and Wilbur Wright and they're building a flying machine in the early 1900s. At the same time as they were trying to build an airplane you had a guy named Langley at Smithsonian also trying to build a flying machine and he was the respected guy.
在你职业生涯初期学习的时候，正好是比尔·夏普等人撰写关于有效市场假说的时期。我很好奇，当你开始听到这些关于市场和指数基金投资的想法时，而另一方面你又看到诸多证券层面的非效率，你是如何更广泛地看待投资世界的？在那之后我读了一本书，不过已经是很久以前的事了，叫《征服天空》，讲的是奥维尔和威尔伯·莱特兄弟在1900年代初期建造飞行器。与此同时，还有一位叫兰利的史密森学会的人也在尝试建造飞行器，他当时是备受尊敬的人。
He was an academic and famous and everybody thought he would succeed and it all made sense in theory. But the Wright brothers went down to Kitty Hawk where the winds were strong and where they could experiment with what the winds might do to any particular kind of flying craft and how the wings of an airplane might be the same or different from the wings of a bird and how you might maneuver in the air. Langley's machine eventually was launched I believe off of a river and it was all set to launch out over the water and fly except it popped in the water never to be seen again and the Wright brothers over a couple of summers figured it out.
他是一位学者，名声显赫，大家都认为他会成功，从理论上来看也是如此。不过，莱特兄弟前往风力强劲的基蒂霍克，在那里他们可以试验风如何影响各种飞行器，并研究飞机的机翼与鸟翼的异同，以及如何在空中操作。兰利的机器最终好像是在一条河上发射的，虽然一切准备就绪准备飞翔，但它却掉进了水里，再也没被找到。而莱特兄弟经过几个夏天的努力，解决了飞行的问题。
And I say that because it seems to me it's the same thing that I always thought there are these academics sitting in their institutions writing out theories and in theory it makes sense that might be Yogi Berra who said in theory every theory works but in practice a lot of them don't. The academic idea was logical that there are transaction costs and there are a lot of competitors and even when there aren't that many even one competitor can repress and misprice. But had they chosen instead to sit down at the trading desk of mutual shares they might have seen what really inefficient markets look like and realize that what's true in theory is in true in practice in every case.
我之所以这样说，是因为在我看来，这和我一直以来的想法一样：有些学者坐在他们的机构里写理论，理论上看起来很有道理。可能是约吉·贝拉说过，从理论上讲，每个理论都有效，但在实际操作中，很多都行不通。学术观点认为这一切都合乎逻辑，因为存在交易成本，有很多竞争者，即使竞争者不多，只要有一个竞争者也可能会压制和错误定价。但如果他们选择坐在共同基金的交易桌旁，他们可能会看到真正低效的市场，意识到理论上正确的东西在实际操作中并不总是适用。
The first book that I read about the efficient market it was Malkil and it was about the random walk on Wall Street. I appreciated what he was trying to say but I also knew that was just silliness and what's interesting is it was true in the same way that they mused in that book you could try to imagine what it would be like to write a horse by sitting on the fence and observing a bunch of horses in the field or you can go get on a horse. I think it's as simple as that that you need to be creative you need to be curious you need to be not afraid to fail willing to think outside the box and maybe you'll come up with something.
我读的第一本关于有效市场的书是马尔基尔的《漫步华尔街》。我欣赏他的观点，但也知道这只是空谈。有趣的是，这本书中的一些观点就像作者所描述的那样，仅仅通过坐在栅栏上观察牧场里的马群来想象骑马的感觉是不够的，你需要亲自去骑马。我认为，就这么简单——你需要有创造力和好奇心，不怕失败，敢于跳出框框思考，这样你或许能有所发现。
As you're learning at mutual shares back in the day how to make the decision to go to business school. It was actually really tough. I enjoyed mutual shares immensely. I loved sitting side by side. I was literally next to Mike Price and right around the corner of the trading desk from Max Hina and I was the only analyst. It was literally the three of us, met a bunch of traders, Edmund people. It was such a wonderful learning experience and I was so can get in. On the other hand, I had a sense that top business school would be a good place to go. It would round me out. I may have known more and more about stocks but I didn't know a lot about business. To study business to try to understand what's a good company, what makes a company great, how to think about running a company, upside the challenges was certainly appealing. I ultimately thought it's not going to be a negative. It's probably going to have a lot of positive and it will make me better investor if I decide to stick to investing.
当你回忆起过去在Mutual Shares的日子时，做出是否去商学院的决定确实不容易。我非常享受在Mutual Shares的时光。我喜欢与人并肩工作，我坐在Mike Price旁边，而Max Hina就在交易台的拐角处，我是唯一的分析师。那时只有我们三个人，还认识了一群交易员和领域专家。这是一段非常宝贵的学习经历，我全身心投入其中。另一方面，我也意识到顶尖商学院可能会是一个不错的选择，可以让我的能力更加全面。尽管我对股票的了解越来越多，但对商业的了解却相对有限。学习商业，了解一家公司优秀与否的标准，思考如何经营公司，了解其面临的挑战，这些都让我很有兴趣。我最终认为，去商学院不会是个坏选择，应该会带来很多积极的影响。如果我决定继续投资生涯，这将让我成为更优秀的投资者。
I also wanted to rule out that it was something else I'd rather do, although I kind of suspected that investing was my thing. I did investing before, took a summer job at Solomon and brothers just to see what investment banking was. It was very popular back then and a lot of people were going in that direction. I didn't think I'd love it but I figured I'd try it. I actually had a great experience. I enjoyed the young people at Solomon and brothers and met some of the partners who stayed in touch over the years but I realized that investing was where my heart was. As soon as I graduated, I had an offer to go back to mutual shares but I serendipitously had an opportunity to come in at the ground floor of BALPOST being formed and that's what I chose.
我也想排除自己有其他更想做的事情，虽然我有点怀疑投资是我真正热爱的事情。我以前做过投资，还在Salomon Brothers找了个暑期工作，就是为了看看投资银行到底是怎么回事。那个时候，这个领域非常热门，很多人都朝这个方向发展。我当时并没有觉得自己会热爱这份工作，但决定尝试一下。实际上，我有过一次很好的经历。我喜欢Salomon Brothers那里的年轻人，也认识了一些合伙人，和他们多年来保持了联系。但我意识到投资才是我心之所向。毕业后，我获得了回到Mutual Shares的机会，但我偶然有机会参与创立BALPOST，于是选择了后者。
How did that come about? I had a professor of real estate and I took his course. At some point he called me in to talk about a test I'd done my exam but what really had happened was he and some friends had a stake in Channel 5 in Boston. Channel 5 at the time was being sold to Metrimedia for a pretty fancy price. Maybe the highest price for a TV station up to that point and he had decided that he'd want to join with a few other friends, some from the TV station, one not from that background and create an expanded family office. This was the early 80s. It was an era of bank failures and rapidly rising interest rates and inflation and in some ways a general distrust of the financial system and where should you put your money and how could you make sure the taxes got paid and the coupons got clipped and all of that. At the exact same time that I was graduating, this plan was in motion.
这是怎么回事呢？我当时有一位房地产教授，我选修了他的课程。有一次，他找我谈一场考试的事。但实际情况是，他和一些朋友对波士顿5频道持有股份。当时5频道正在以相当高的价格卖给Metrimedia，可能是当时电视台交易中的最高价。他决定与一些朋友组建一个扩展的家族办公司，其中有些朋友是来自电视台的，还有一些则不是这个背景的。这大约是在80年代初，那是一个银行倒闭频繁、利率和通货膨胀迅速上升的时代，从某种意义上说，人们对金融系统普遍不信任，不知道该将钱放在哪里，又如何确保税款支付到位并及时兑现息票。就在我毕业的同时，他们的计划也在推进。
BALPOST would have been formed without me but might come along, maybe change the trajectory and they realized the original plan was to hand out the capital to smart money managers and in the earliest days of BALPOST when I joined after I graduated in May of 82, we went to New York a bunch and met with money managers and thought about, well, would this one be good to hire with that one be good to hire? What's the playing field look like? It revealed a lot but it also ultimately led to the decision that we would actually be better off managing the money ourselves. What did it reveal? Among other things, it revealed a great deal of groupthink. Everybody's favorite stocks were the same stocks. Everybody was buying Warner Brothers back then because they owned a Tari. There was a lot of excitement around video games as there has been excitement every few years about something different in the market and then shockingly to me how few of the managers of money actually put their own money in the same product that they were expecting their clients to be in and how important that alignment is.
BALPOST本来就算没有我也会成立，但可能会沿着不同的轨迹发展。他们意识到原本的计划是将资金交给聪明的资产管理者。在我1982年5月毕业后加入BALPOST的初期，我们多次前往纽约与各类资产管理者会面，并考虑哪一位更值得雇用，以及整个市场的情况。当时的市场调查揭示了很多东西，但最终促使我们决定自己来管理资金。那么市场调查揭示了什么呢？其中之一就是严重的从众心理。大家喜欢的股票都是一样的。当时每个人都在买华纳兄弟，因为他们拥有Atari。当时围绕电子游戏有很多热情，就像每隔几年市场上会出现新的投资热点一样。让我倍感震惊的是，那么多资产管理者居然没有把自己的钱投入到他们期望客户投资的产品中，而这种利益一致性是多么重要。
It's one of the main reasons BALPOST didn't invest with any of those managers. We've realized that people talked a good game but they didn't put their money where their mouth is and why eating home cooking is such a foundational principle of BALPOST where still today, the employees and their families are by far the largest client on a collective basis. When you went to launch BALPOST, you were instilled in the early years in what was called and probably still is value investing. I'd love to hear how you define value investing. The key definition for value investing comes from Graham and Dodd and the idea of it is that because markets are inefficient, prices deviate from value and that deviation sometimes they fall below underlying value and that makes them a value investment. It makes them attractive.
这是BALPOST没有选择与那些经理人投资的主要原因之一。我们发现人们常常说得很好听，但他们并没有真正地兑现自己的承诺。这就是为什么"自己煮的饭自己吃"这样的原则在BALPOST中如此重要。即使到了今天，BALPOST的员工及其家人依然是名副其实的最大客户。当你创办BALPOST时，你在最初的几年里就受到了所谓的“价值投资”的熏陶，而这种理念可能至今仍然存在。我很想了解你如何定义价值投资。价值投资的关键定义来自格雷厄姆和多德，其理念是市场存在效率低下，价格会偏离实际价值，而这种偏离有时会低于内在价值，这使它们成为价值投资，从而变得有吸引力。
Other times they get two full value and maybe even significantly exceed it at which point you should have sold and if you were inclined to be a short seller, perhaps shorted it. The principles made sense. I was probably too literal in my earliest understanding of Graham and Dodd, which I'm sure I read the Intelligent Investor first being the more accessible of the two books. Security analysis came later but I think what I was applying was not Graham and Dodd value investing but mutual shares value investing.
有时候，他们获得了两倍的价值，甚至可能大大超过这个价值，这时你应该卖掉它，如果你倾向于做空，或许还可以选择做空。这些原则是有道理的。我在最初理解格雷厄姆和多德的思想时，可能过于字面化了，我确信我首先读的是《聪明的投资者》，因为这本书比另一本更容易理解。而《证券分析》是后来才读的，但我认为当时我应用的并不是格雷厄姆和多德的价值投资，而是互惠基金的价值投资。
I was already looking at special situations, looking at broadly across the landscape to equities but also to arbitrages and to credit and in the case of these lower bonds distress credit. I think it gave me a good analytical grasp rather than being pigeonholed into one single asset class to understand that investors can broadly across the landscape and if you can figure out a stock for example, why can't you figure out the value of the entire private business? If you can understand a bond, why can't you understand a bank loan or convertible bond or a municipal bond for that matter?
我已经在关注特殊情况，并广泛地研究股票市场，同时还关注套利和信贷，特别是在较低评级的债券中研究不良债务。我认为这让我具备了良好的分析能力，而不仅仅局限于单一资产类别。在这一过程中，我意识到，投资者可以在广泛的市场中寻找机会。如果你能够分析一只股票，那为什么不能评估整个私营企业的价值呢？如果你能够理解一只债券，为什么不能理解银行贷款、可转债或市政债券呢？
Perhaps one backed by a piece of real estate. There was just a lot of learning there that the broad scope was attractive and perhaps also valuable for an investor because the ability to move capital into whatever was attractive, maybe sometimes stocks were high but bonds were low or sometimes stocks and bonds were both high but real estate was low. That was also a piece of the thinking. One aspect of what you originally read of Graham and Dodd, did you stick too closely to? I was too enamored of book value.
也许由一处地产做支持。这其中包含着许多值得学习的东西，广泛的视野很有吸引力，对投资者来说可能也很有价值，因为将资本投入到有吸引力的地方的能力是很重要的。有时股票高，债券低，有时股票和债券都高，而房地产则低。这也是考虑的一部分。关于你最初读到的格雷厄姆和多德的理论，有哪个方面你是否过于坚持？我过于沉迷于账面价值。
When you think about book value, you need to go back to the founding principles era in which Graham and Dodd were writing. So security analysis came out in 1934, first edition. There's description among other things of the super investors article that Warren Buffett wrote in the Columbia Business School magazine in the early 60s. And the super investors article looked at several investors, all of whom were familiar to Buffett and how they'd all had exceptional performance.
当你考虑账面价值时，你需要回到格雷厄姆和多德撰写那个时代的基本原则。1934年，他们首次出版了《证券分析》一书。书中不仅描述了其他内容，还提到沃伦·巴菲特在20世纪60年代初为哥伦比亚商学院杂志撰写的“超级投资者”文章。这篇文章考察了几位投资者，他们都为巴菲特所熟悉，并且都表现出色。
Now, I'm not sure this was a perfect scientific test because not all of them maybe had previously been identified. Nevertheless, they followed general value principles in their investing. They followed them very differently. One followed bigger cap companies and another followed smaller cap companies and one was global, not just United States. And so you saw at least the idea that this approach might apply in a variety of places.
现在，我不太确定这是不是一个完美的科学测试，因为可能并不是所有的公司都事先被识别出来。尽管如此，他们在投资中遵循了通用的价值原则，但他们的方式非常不同。其中一位投资于大市值公司，另一位则投资于小市值公司，还有一位则不仅限于美国，而是进行了全球范围的投资。因此，你至少可以看到，这种方法可能适用于各种情况。
And then Buffett also in that article makes the observation that value investing is something not everybody is comfortable with but that it's like an inoculation. When you get introduced to the approach, either it makes sense and you get it or you don't. And I felt like that inoculation had taken with me that it made complete sense that people have trouble being patient and holding out for the best opportunities to show up and not just plunging in.
在那篇文章中，巴菲特还指出，价值投资并不是每个人都能轻松接受的，就像一种免疫接种。当你第一次接触这种方法时，你要么理解并接受，要么就不会接受。我感觉这种“免疫”在我身上起了作用。我完全理解，人们往往难以保持耐心，等待最佳机会的出现，而不是盲目投资。
Bill Ackman once said to me that value investing in a classical sense is like watching paint dry, but I bring a hair blower. I thought well that's a good definition of activism. And certainly I'm not one to just want to own stocks forever and sit on them forever. There are times when it actually can be challenging. In effect, the hard thing about investing in general is the market tells you you're wrong all the time that the very reason that you can find a mispricing, the very reason that you can find a market inefficiency that causes a stock to go to a discount might well still apply after you own it and it might go to a bigger discount.
比尔·阿克曼曾对我说，传统意义上的价值投资就像看油漆慢慢变干，而我则带来了一台吹风机。我觉得这很好地定义了所谓的激进投资。显然，我不愿意永远持有股票并一直放在那里。有时候这确实是具有挑战性的。实际上，投资的难点在于，市场总是告诉你你错了。正因为如此，你能找到定价错误和市场失效的原因，也正因为如此，当你持有股票后，这些原因可能依然存在，甚至会导致股票折价幅度更大。
And that's not lost on Graham and Dodd. That's right there in security analysis. But the idea of that is perhaps there are ways you can speed it up. Maybe you can apply Bill Ackman's hair dryer into the process. One of the things that Balepost has done over the years, we follow the basic principles. We're looking for bargains, we're patient, we're disciplined, we're willing to say no a lot. As Warren Buffett says, we're not afraid to just leave the bad on our shoulder and not swing.
这点对于格雷厄姆和多德来说并不陌生。它就在《证券分析》一书中指出。不过，这个观点的意思是，或许有一些方法可以加快这一过程。也许你可以像比尔·阿克曼那样，将“吹风机”策略应用到这一过程中。Balepost多年来一直遵循基本原则，我们寻找物超所值的投资，保持耐心和纪律，同时我们也常常拒绝不合适的机会。正如沃伦·巴菲特所说，我们并不害怕错过那些不好的机会，我们宁愿保持观望。
But at times you do swing and then you've got to be comfortable with some of the important elements of value investing. You've got to be comfortable that a bargain can become an even bigger bargain. And this is what resonated with me, maybe the most. If you look to the market for feedback, the market might regularly say you're an idiot, you bought it, now it's down, you don't know what you're doing.
有时候，你确实需要采取行动，而这时你必须对价值投资的一些重要因素感到放心。你需要接受这样一个事实：便宜货可能会变得更加便宜。这一点对我影响很大，也许是最重要的。如果你寻求市场的反馈，市场可能经常会让你觉得自己是个傻瓜，比如你买入后股票下跌，让你觉得自己不知道在干什么。
But the reality is that you've got to see that a little bit differently. You've got to see that as the market is now offering you a better bargain, either you have confidence in yourself or you believe in the market as giving you valuable information. And then as Graham and Buffett say, if you look to the market for the answers, you're going to just be following popular opinion. But if you look to the market as a man-a-counter party that sometimes sells you something at a big discount from what it's worth and other times pays you more than it's worth. Now you're talking. Now you're going to be able to take advantage of the erratic market to profit as an investor. A lot of businesses you could buy in the form of stock or assets you can buy, they're not static values, things change over time.
但实际上，你需要用不同的角度来看待这个问题。你应该看到，现在市场正在为你提供一个更好的交易机会。要么你对自己有信心，要么你相信市场能够提供有价值的信息。就像格雷厄姆和巴菲特所说的，如果你依赖市场来寻求答案，你只是在追随大众的意见。但如果你把市场看作一个买卖对手，有时候它以远低于实际价值的价格卖给你东西，有时候它又付出超出价值的价格购买你手中的东西。这样理解的话，你就开始了。你就能够利用市场的波动来作为一名投资者获利。很多公司你可以通过股票或资产购买，而这些价值并不是固定不变的，随着时间会发生变化。
And I'd love to hear a bit about from those early lessons of Graham and Dodd, how you've thought about adapting the way you apply valuation to businesses and assets. Graham and Dodd lived in a world where I believe there was considerably less technological innovation. There wasn't none. Over that period of time we invented radio and refrigeration and air conditioning eventually and automobiles decades before, but a lot of innovation. But there was no venture capital industry. These innovations often took a while to take hold. The rollout was slow. It wasn't like downloading software at a click with no cost of goods sold.
我很想听听您如何从格雷厄姆和多德的早期课程中学习，并思考如何在商业和资产估值中进行调整。格雷厄姆和多德生活的时代，我相信技术创新相对较少。当然，并不是说没有创新。在他们的时代，我们发明了收音机、制冷设备、空调，甚至汽车也早在几十年前就问世了，但那时没有风险投资行业。这些创新往往需要一些时间才能被广泛接受，推广的速度较慢。这与如今下载软件的便捷程度截然不同，现在只需点击一下即可完成，而且几乎没有销售成本。
When the economy suffered, when a stock became mispriced in the 1930s, it was almost certainly because we're in a depression and that there was a cyclical downturn. Graham and Dodd knew that. They wrote about it, which I give them a huge amount of credit for. And they wrote that it would not be reasonable to assume that depression will always be the circumstance. And yet they couldn't know when it would end or if it would get worse before it got better.
在经济困难时期，比如20世纪30年代股市出现估值错误，几乎肯定是因为经济萧条和周期性衰退造成的。格雷厄姆和多德对此十分了解并对此进行了深入讨论，我对此给予了很高的评价。他们写道，假设经济衰退将一直是常态是不合理的。然而，他们也无法预测经济何时会结束衰退或者在好转之前是否会进一步恶化。
That also, by the way, resonates with me because I think the idea of financial writing, you can write a newsletter, I suppose, and try to be right for the next two weeks. Or you can try to write something down and say to yourself, what is the essence of this that's going to matter not just months from now, but years and decades and maybe even a century from now. Just as Graham and Dodd are applicable 89 years after it was written in 1934, what might we say about what we're writing today that will still be applicable in 89 years? So I at least think that lens is really important.
顺便说一下，这让我很有共鸣，因为我认为财务写作的理念，可以写一份新闻简报，试图在接下来的两周内对趋势做出正确的判断。或者你可以尝试写下某些东西，并问自己：其中的本质是什么，不仅在几个月后，而且在几年、几十年，甚至一个世纪之后仍然重要。正如Graham和Dodd的作品在1934年写成后89年依然适用一样，关于我们今天写的内容，我们可以说些什么，在89年后仍将适用？所以，我至少认为这个观点非常重要。
And that to me is what gives that book historical significance that nobody's saying follow their exact formula or go page by page and you'll know what to do. The companies are all gone. They've been merged or liquidated decades ago out of existence. Many of the principles that they talk about are based on laws at the time or on prudent man rule or other regulations that no longer apply. But what's still applicable is that despite all the changes, the general principles, which are essentially dependent on humans and their psychological tendencies to get overly exuberant and to get overly depressed and to have constraints on the humans, you must buy a highly rated bond.
这本书的历史意义在于，它并不是让人照搬书中的方法或逐页遵循以解决问题。书中提到的公司都已不存在，有的被合并，有的在几十年前就被清算了。许多他们谈到的原则是基于当时的法律、谨慎投资人原则或其他已不再适用的法规。然而，尽管时过境迁，其基本原则依然适用，因为这些原则主要依赖于人类本身及其心理特性，如容易过度乐观或过度悲观，以及对人的限制要求，如：必须购买高评级的债券。
You can only own a stock that pays a dividend. You cannot own a stock below a certain market cap or below a certain share price. And those kinds of rules and constraints can lead to inefficiencies. And so while the nature of the exact inefficiencies may have changed a lot in 89 years, the certainty that there will be those I think remains high. And I actually am pretty optimistic that they will remain even if computers are replacing people as money managers and we're doing all the trading.
你只能持有支付股息的股票。你不能持有市值低于某个标准或股价低于某个标准的股票。这类规则和限制可能导致市场低效。虽然这些具体的低效情况在 89 年里可能发生了很大变化，但我相信它们一定会存在。而且，我实际上很乐观地认为，即使计算机取代人类成为资金管理者，并接管所有交易，这些低效现象也会继续存在。
And that's because the nature of what causes the inefficiency is human. But I think the computers will mimic what the humans would do because that's what they're trained to do. And so I think that even AI wouldn't make the markets fully efficient. There is a degree to which AI, as you get closer to general intelligence, tries to replicate how humans would think, where do you think as computers on the short end say of trading and then AI maybe over time replicating thinking will still go wrong relative to human behavior?
这是因为导致低效的原因是人的本性。但我认为，计算机会模仿人类的行为，因为它们就是被这样训练的。因此，我认为即使是人工智能也不会让市场完全有效。当人工智能逐渐接近通用智能时，它会试图重现人类的思维方式。那么，在短期交易中，你认为计算机会在哪里出错，而人工智能随着时间的推移尝试复制人类思维时，相较于人类行为，它还是会出现错误？
A caveat that anything to do with technology, you've got the wrong guess. And I need to know about it. I need to be up to speed. I need to have an opinion about where it might go. But I'm not an early adapter. I don't fall around with it the way some people do. So my opinion may not be as good as some people's. But when I think about it, first of all, my understanding of AI is that it is trained to look at enormous amounts of past data.
关于科技，我有一个需要注意的地方：如果你对它有误解，我需要知道。我要掌握最新的信息，并且需要对其发展方向有自己的看法。但我不是那种早期采用者，没有像某些人那样全情投入研究。因此，我的观点可能不如某些人专业。不过，当我思考这个问题时，首先，我了解到人工智能是通过分析大量的历史数据进行训练的。
I don't fully understand how that is done. Because for example, up until 2022, we'd had the longest bull market in history. And so depending on what period one looked at, one might think, well, the absence of a bull market, maybe we were past that. Is that right? Or is it pent up that the absence of a down market that straight up 12 years of bull market that ended in 21? It's like if you're waiting for a bus and the buses, as you know from the schedule, come every 15 minutes. And it's been 45 minutes. So either four or five buses are going to come right away or the road is collapsed and no buses are coming. Which is it? What will the computer tell you? Which is it? Those are hard questions. I don't think humans will always know the answers.
我不太明白这是如何做到的。比如说，到2022年为止，我们经历了历史上最长的牛市。因此，根据你选择的时间段，可能会认为牛市已经结束。那么是不是这样呢？还是说过去这12年的牛市积累了某种趋势，直到21年才结束？这就像你在等公交车，根据时刻表，车每15分钟来一趟。但已经过去45分钟了，所以要么四五辆车马上就会来，要么是道路塌了，车都不来了。到底是哪种情况呢？电脑会告诉你答案吗？这些都是很难的问题，我觉得人类不一定总能知道答案。
I think AI will be amazing at saying, oh, well, when the Suez Canal gets closed by an attack of some sort, here's what happens to oil prices. Or here's what happens to GDP around the world in the next quarter. Or when there's a war in Europe, here's what happens. And computers will figure that out and humans would have to ton of work to catch up. And maybe computers will see connections that aren't easily seen. But how will a computer figure out the next telecore and electric rent? Electroent hasn't been public. There are no published financials yet, although they'll be in the proxy eventually. I don't know how they'd know what telecore shareholders would get or how to think about the contingencies around those kind of liquidation distributions.
我认为人工智能在以下方面表现出色：例如，当苏伊士运河因为某种袭击而关闭时，它可以预测油价会如何变化，或预测下个季度全球GDP会有什么变化。又或者，当欧洲发生战争时，它可以预见可能发生的情况。计算机能够搞清楚这些问题，而人类则需要花费大量的精力才能跟上。而且，计算机可能会发现一些人们不容易看出的关联。然而，计算机如何预测下一个电信公司和电力公司的发展呢？尤其是电力公司还没有上市，目前也没有公布财务数据，尽管最终这些数据会在文件中披露。我不知道人工智能如何了解电信公司股东会得到什么，或者如何处理这类清算分配的各种可能性。
And that's not the most complicated thing they could come along. How will they think about what a bankrupt or near bankrupt bond might get in a restructuring? Yeah, and I just don't know. Just somebody who really is sophisticated in AI. Maybe that sounds naive. But to me, I believe that it's likely that the artificial intelligence dealing with a sample size of close to one on a particular oddball transaction may not know what to project. So in effect, how does BALPOST practice value investing? I think that we're set up not on a basis of let's look at the world like other people. We don't have industry analysts per se. We don't focus on a certain equity list of let's know these 200 stocks or let's look at certain kinds of industries because we like their growth prospects.
这还不是他们能遇到的最复杂的事情。他们会如何考虑在债券重组中，破产或接近破产的债券可能的收益？是的，我也不太清楚。也许有些真正擅长AI的人对此有自己的见解。可能这听起来很天真。不过我认为，如果人工智能在处理这种接近独特的特殊交易时，可能不知道应该如何预测。那么，BALPOST是如何实践价值投资的呢？我认为我们的布局不是基于像其他人那样看待世界。我们没有特定的行业分析师，也不专注于某些特定的股票列表，不是去了解这200只股票或关注我们认为有增长前景的特定行业。
We're set up in a much more opportunistic way. We're in efficiencies right now and where they likely to lie and how do we get them to come into our inbox so we can look at them. We're looking for supply-demand imbalances in the market. Now if you told me a stock in Turkey is going to be delisted from an exchange, I would tell you that while we don't look at Turkey, we might start to figure out that stock because when it's off the exchange and out of an index, there might be a lot of people that have to sell it. And there might be a lot of people that cause I follow that index that don't hold it anymore.
我们现在以一种更加机会主义的方式运作。目前我们正在寻找效率领域，以及这些效率可能存在在哪里，并如何让它们引起我们的注意，以便我们可以进行分析。我们专注于市场中的供需失衡。如果你告诉我一家土耳其的股票即将从交易所退市，我会告诉你，尽管我们平时不关注土耳其市场，但我们可能会开始研究这只股票。因为一旦它退出交易所和指数，可能会有很多人不得不卖掉它。同时，那些跟踪该指数的人也可能不再持有这只股票。
And so all of a sudden, you've got a chance that stock price just falls into some kind of black hole. I think a computer could of course figure that out. It could say, delisting leads to lower prices and then maybe make the connection that sometimes that's overshot in some new incarnation. The company gets taken over or can come back into an index. But when you multiply that by all the kinds of things that lead to these mispricings and imbalances, is it a downgrade? Is it bankruptcy filing itself?
突然之间，你可能面临股票价格跌入某种“黑洞”的风险。我认为计算机当然可以分析出这一点。它可以判断，退市会导致股价下跌，然后可能会发现有时候这种下跌被过度低估了，而公司可能会被收购或重新纳入某个指数。但当你把所有导致这些错误定价和不平衡的因素相乘时，情况会变得复杂。是降级了吗？还是破产申请本身造成的？
What about with a private asset? Graham and Dodd didn't write about private assets. They didn't write about real estate. They didn't write about privately owned companies. Yet the same general principles that cause stocks to overshoot can cause business prices to overshoot, financing becomes less available. So buyers will need to pony up more money as equity and therefore the price drops. Somebody needs to get a loan that's turning sour off their books by the end of the quarter, a bank or an insurance company or a real estate fund formed 12 years ago that has one or two more assets and once the last assets off the book sig and close out the fund and maybe now go raise the next fund or the fund after that.
关于私募资产呢？格雷厄姆和多德没有写过关于私募资产的内容。他们没有提到房地产，也没有提到私人公司。然而，导致股票价格过度波动的一些基本原则，同样也可能导致企业价格的过度波动。融资变得不那么容易，因此买家需要投入更多的自有资金，价格因此下跌。当一个银行、保险公司或12年前成立的房地产基金想在季度结束前从账面上剔除变质的贷款，或者想把最后的资产处理掉以关闭基金，并可能开始筹集下一个基金时，价格可能会受到影响。
Tracking that way, sourcing opportunities that way is so different that again, I don't know what a machine could be trained to do. It's not easy to train humans to do it. Maybe it'll be easier to train machines, but I'm not sure because it really is a lot of sample sizes of one. You see patterns, but patterns don't exactly repeat. That is what we're doing. That is what Bale Post has done for 40 years. We're looking hunting broad and wide. I like to say we go miles wide to look for opportunity and then when we think we found it, then we drill miles deep.
以那种方式追踪和寻求机会是如此不同，以至于我不知道机器能被训练来做什么。这件事即便对人类来说也不容易训练。也许机器会更容易训练，但我不确定，因为这真的涉及很多独特的个例。你会看到一些模式，但这些模式并不完全重复。这就是我们正在做的事情，也是Bale Post过去40年来所做的事情。我们广泛而全面地寻找机会，我喜欢说我们在广阔的范围内寻找机会，一旦找到潜在的机会，就深入研究。
Maybe the contrast is that other people are going miles deep first so they know everything about every industry. They know deeply, pharma and auto and finance and whatever else, but they're not as focused on why might any of this be particularly mispriced. In fact, maybe they're actually oriented towards not going where the mispricings are. This stocks mispriced because management has not done a good job lately. That's hard for people to recommend to their clients or to their bosses or maybe the company was involved in something that left them with a degree of stigma, a failed acquisition or a management misstep. Yet those things can cause prices to really get out of whack and lead to opportunity.
也许区别在于，其他人首先深入了解每个行业，他们对制药、汽车、金融等行业了如指掌，但他们并不专注于这些行业中的哪些地方可能被错误定价。实际上，他们可能倾向于避开这些错误定价的地方。比如，有些股票被错误定价是因为管理层最近表现不佳，这种情况很难向客户或老板推荐，又或者公司曾经卷入某些事，使其蒙上阴影，例如一次失败的收购或管理失误。然而，这些因素可能导致价格严重偏离实际价值，从而带来机会。
That's the challenge is to find ways to find the bargain. In a sense, you have to be right about less when you don't have to be particularly right about what's a business going to grow into over the next 10 years. Maybe right this second, it's 30 or 40 or 50 percent undervalued. Now, the world has changed more in recent years so that because of technological disruption, in Graham's day, he could look at a balance sheet and an income statement and say, look, I'm buying the stock at six times earnings and two thirds of working capital or two thirds of book value and probably be right about that and realize that the tables will turn what's out of favor will come back into favor, which is what the quote from Horace, the poet, that's at the beginning of intelligent investor.
挑战在于找到获取便宜货的方法。从某种意义上说，当你不必特别准确地预测一家企业在未来十年的发展时，你对判断的正确要求就降低了。或许在这一刻，这只股票被低估了30%、40%或50%。近年来，由于科技的颠覆性变化，世界发生了很大变化。在格雷厄姆的时代，他可以通过查看资产负债表和损益表说："看看，我以六倍的市盈率和三分之二的营运资金或账面价值买入这只股票"，并且可能会实现他的预测，认定失去市场青睐的股票将重新受到欢迎。这正如古罗马诗人贺拉斯在《聪明的投资者》开篇所引用的那样：失宠的事物将会重新回到受人欢迎的位置。
But what changes now is a business could be doing just fine. But if somebody's working on something in their garage that's going to disrupt that company five years now, that company may barely exist or certainly become a lot less profitable. And so an investor has to be thinking about not just cyclical change like Graham and Dodd were worried about in the depression, but secular change as well. And the combination of that, I think, has made investing harder and value investing harder that investors can't just crunch a few numbers and say, this is mispriced. They need to dig a lot deeper than that.
现在情况发生了变化，一家运营良好的公司可能会面临挑战。如果有人在车库里开发一个项目，而这个项目将在五年内颠覆那家公司，那么该公司可能几乎不存在，或者至少变得利润大幅减少。因此，投资者不仅要考虑像格雷厄姆和多德在经济大萧条时期所担心的周期性变化，还要考虑结构性的变化。我认为，这两者的结合让投资变得更加困难，价值投资也更具挑战性。投资者不能仅仅通过简单地计算几个数字来判断价格是否合理，他们需要深入挖掘和研究。
There's nothing wrong with hard work. And I think the investors who look will continue to find mispricing an opportunity. I'd love to dive into how you apply a lot of this at BALPOST. And maybe the first part of that investment process is this idea of sourcing these opportunistic areas that might be ripe for some inefficiency. How do you organize your team to look broadly to try to identify those places where you may then want to dive in deeply? I think the biggest part of it is probably pattern recognition that you notice that patterns from the past have a way of repeating not exactly, but with some similarity. You can find a fund that is in the process of liquidating its last asset.
努力工作没有什么错。我认为那些认真寻找的投资者会继续发现错误定价带来的机会。我很想深入了解你们在BALPOST如何应用这些理念。也许投资过程的第一部分就是要找到那些存在机会且可能隐藏着某些低效领域的地方。你是如何组织你的团队以广泛地寻找这些可能值得深入研究的地方呢？ 我想其中最重要的部分可能是模式识别，你会注意到过去的模式会有某种相似的方式重复出现。你可以找到一个正在清算其最后一项资产的基金。
The pressures on them are you better get that asset off the books. We don't want to carry it through another year end. And so all of a sudden, an asset that wouldn't normally be sold now needs to be sold with some degree of urgency. It could be something as simple as realizing that a bond or a loan is about to default or nearing default and might then trade it a steep enough discount or that there's a restructuring opportunity. It might be that the market misperceives litigation and that either thinks the litigation is unimportant or thinks it's more important than it really is.
他们面临的压力是：最好尽快将那些资产从账面上移除，我们不希望再把它拖到年底。因此，某些通常不会出售的资产，现在需要紧急出售。这可能是因为意识到某只债券或贷款即将违约或接近违约，因此可能会以较大的折扣进行交易，或者有重组的机会。也可能是市场对诉讼的误解，要么认为诉讼不重要，要么认为它比实际情况更重要。
So most investors are trained to analyze cash flow, but to guess legal probabilities. I don't think anybody's probably good at that. I'm not sure we're good at that, although we try. But I think there are factors that are just more important in the business than they've ever been, such as that. There are many, many of them that add up. And so I think that the combination of that leads to some playing fields that probably have fewer people playing on them that can lead to mispricings as well as areas that maybe are more likely to be mispriced than others.
大多数投资者都接受过对现金流进行分析的训练，但在预测法律概率方面，他们通常只是凭猜测。我认为没有人特别擅长这个，我们也不确定自己是否擅长，尽管我们在努力。不过，我认为现在有些因素在商业中变得比以往更加重要。这些因素有很多，它们共同作用。因此，我觉得这种组合导致了一些领域可能人员较少，这也可能导致价格错误估计，以及某些领域相比之下更容易出现价格错误。
So I think by following our nose, by looking for patterns, by pulling on threads of similarities, we end up with a pretty good portfolio of investments that are individually likely to be mispriced and collectively or reasonably diversified. How do you go about communicating with your counterparts so that they start showing you more and more of these idiosyncratic opportunities? I think that's part of the intel inside at BALPOST, but it's not as hard as you might think. In the historic days of BALPOST 35 almost 40 years ago, we'd get a phone call, hey, I'm Joe Smith or Jill Smith and I'm your new coverage for Merrill Lynch. And I'd like to come by and talk about what we can do for you.
我认为，通过跟随直觉，寻找模式，抓住相似之处的线索，我们最终会获得一个不错的投资组合，这些投资单独来看可能被错误定价，而总体上却相对多样化。你怎样与对方沟通，才能让他们开始向你展示越来越多这种独特的机会？我认为这是BALPOST内部情报的一部分，但并没有想象中那么难。在BALPOST大约35到40年前的历史时期，我们会接到一个电话，“你好，我是乔·史密斯或吉尔·史密斯，我是美林证券的新客户经理。我想过来谈谈我们能为您做些什么。”
And time being scarce and just me or a very small group of people would say, look, you don't need to come by. But if you guys ever see on your desk a bond that you've never heard of or a stock you've never heard of or 20% shareholder in a business that wants to move it quickly, where you're called. So don't call us with IBM insights or your new rating of Microsoft, but when you find that secondary partnership interest, or you find that illiquid stake in a private company, call us with that because we'll have a bid for you. And so I think it's seeing those patterns.
由于时间紧迫，如果只是我或少数几个人会说：“你们不需要过来。”但是如果你们在桌子上发现了一份你从未听说过的债券，或某只你从未听说过的股票，或者一家公司里某个持股20%的股东希望快速转让股权的情况，就立刻联系我。所以，不要给我们打电话分享关于IBM的见解或你对微软的新评级，但当你发现了二级市场的合伙权益或者在私人公司中发现了不那么流动的股份时，请告诉我们，我们会给你一个报价。我认为，重要的是看到这些模式。
And then it's a little bit like that quote that when you come to BALPOST as a young person, either what we do resonates or it doesn't. I think for the great majority of our people who tend to be quite long tenured, they come here and it's like they too have been let in on a little secret. And they realize that looking at what everybody else is looking at is probably not that interesting. If you're going to look at what everybody else looks at, look at it in a highly differentiated way. That's fine.
这有点像那句话：当你作为年轻人来到BALPOST时，我们做的事情要么引起你的共鸣，要么就不会。我认为，对绝大多数在这里长时间任职的人来说，他们来到这里，就像是也被告知了一个小秘密。他们意识到，只是看别人也在看的东西可能并不那么有趣。如果你要看大家都在看的东西，那就用一种高度差异化的方式来看，这样才更有意义。
But you're not going to make money by outsmarting people on widely followed stocks with an undifferentiated opinion. But there's a lot out there, right? Private markets are arguably as big or bigger than public markets. The real estate market itself is thought to be around the size of global stock markets. And so there's a lot of assets and a lot of transactions and a lot of things that can be bought.
但如果你只是对那些广受关注的股票有着并无差异的观点，你不太可能通过比别人聪明来赚钱。不过，市场上还有很多其他的机会。私人市场可能和公开市场一样大甚至更大。房地产市场本身就被认为和全球股票市场的规模相当。因此，有大量的资产和交易机会，以及许多可以购买的东西。
The current feedback from the market is you should own the top seven stocks. You should own the stocks that are obvious. You should move your money into indexes because indexes tend to outperform. A stocks kick that of an index in the short run. It underperforms. There's a lot of people that have to sell it. Nobody has to buy it. But I would argue that over a longer period of time, it's those stocks that don't make it into the index that are actually the attractive ones.
市场目前的反馈是，你应该持有排名前七的股票。你应该持有那些显而易见的股票。你应该把资金转入指数基金，因为一般情况下，指数基金表现更好。从短期来看，个股表现可能会超过指数。但它们之后往往表现不佳，因为有很多人必须卖掉它们，而没有人必须买入。不过，我认为，从长期来看，那些未能进入指数的股票其实更具吸引力。
Because if they stay out of it, you're buying the same kind of company at a discount to the ones in the index. And God willing, if it's ever included in the index, now you have significant gain from the step up as well. This is not an argument to index or not index. It's to say that what tends to be in favor tends to be very fully priced and what tends to be out of favor can become even more out of favor, but tends to offer better investment fundamentals.
因为如果它们没有被纳入指数，你会以比指数中的公司更低的价格买到相同类型的公司。而且，如果将来这些公司被纳入指数，你的投资将会因为股价上升而获得显著收益。这并不是在讨论要不要投资于指数，而是强调那些受欢迎的公司往往价格过高，而那些不受欢迎的公司可能会进一步被低估，但往往在投资基本面上更具有吸引力。
Literally, if you and I said, look, there are two companies that are identical, except one’s in the S&P and one’s not. And the one that's not trades at a 20% discount, which is likely to be the better long term investment. I think we'd say on a valuation basis, it's every time it's the one not in the index. Maybe there's some benefits to being in the index, the lower cost of capital. Maybe it gives the other company some kind of advantage.
从字面上看，如果你和我说，这里有两家公司，它们一模一样，只是其中一家在标普指数中，另一家不在。而不在指数中的那家公司股价便宜20%，哪家可能是更好的长期投资？我认为从估值的角度来看，答案每次都是不在指数中的那一家。也许在指数中有一些好处，比如更低的资本成本，可能这也给了该公司某种优势。
But I think a value investor would generally say, give me the one that virtually the same company, but at a much lower entry price, I'm going to have the higher return over time. And of course, looking at returns over a long period of time, measuring them kind of any which way, the better returns come from paying a lower multiple of earnings, the lower multiple of book, a higher dividend yield, whatever it is. So at least that's food for thought.
我认为，价值投资者通常会说，给我那个与其他公司几乎相同，但买入价更低的股票，这样从长期来看，我将获得更高的回报。当然，无论以何种方式衡量长期回报，较好的回报往往来自于以较低的市盈率、较低的市净率或较高的股息收益率投资。因此，这至少是值得思考的。
Once you've found one of these opportunities, pattern recognition, canvassing wide, what does a fully vetted process at BALPOST look like from seeing the opportunity to doing the deep dive to when you're ready to make an investment? It can be days and it could be years that depends on the nature of the opportunity. I like to say that a big enough discount maybe offsets a lack of the deepest possible knowledge.
一旦你发现了这样的机会，通过模式识别和广泛搜索，从发现机会到进行深入研究再到最终准备投资，BALPOST的完整审查流程是什么样的？这个过程可能只需要几天，也可能需要好几年，这取决于机会的性质。我常说，一个足够大的折扣可能会弥补全面了解不足的情况。
Sometimes there's chaos in the markets and you want to move quickly. On the other hand, anybody that looks at the price and says, wow, that stock has fallen 20% in the last couple of days to think that happened for no reason would also be incredibly naive. So I think that investors need to move with the degree of alacrity because opportunities don't last forever, but they also need to do everything with a great deal of humility because the market doesn't just give away free money.
有时候市场会出现混乱，你需要迅速行动。另一方面，如果有人看到股票价格在过去几天里下跌了20%，却认为这完全是无缘无故的，那就太天真了。因此，我认为投资者需要迅速行动，因为机会不会永远存在。但同时，他们也需要抱有极大的谦逊，因为市场并不会轻易送上免费的金钱。
There are a lot of smart people, sellers might know as much or more than you. They after all have owned it for a period of time and you haven't. So you want to really spend enough time to get comfortable to at least make sure you're not the patsy at the table and in the way Warren Buffett would describe it. We do a ton of deep work. We dig deep into company financials.
有很多聪明人，卖家可能知道的和你一样多甚至更多。毕竟他们已经拥有这家公司一段时间，而你没有。所以你需要花足够的时间来确保自己不会在交易中吃亏，就像沃伦·巴菲特所说的那样。我们会进行大量深入的工作，对公司的财务状况进行详细分析。
We look back a number of years. We always ask ourselves about not just what's their reported number, but what's really going on? What's the free cash flow? What are the margins doing? Have they gotten better? They got worse? Is this management doing a good job or their missed opportunities? Or are they stretching to put up good numbers that might go away? So we're digging things that have changed over the course of my career. When I started, there were no expert networks to call. You had to figure out your own and maybe figure out who might know something about this business or piece it together, talking to experts on certain part of the business. So I would argue for sure, there's way more information available. We all have more information available at no cost or low cost at our fingertips than people in the most serious investment positions had 20 or 30 years ago.
我们回顾了很多年。我们总是问自己，不仅仅是他们报告的数字，还要了解背后实际发生了什么？自由现金流是多少？利润率在做什么？它们变好了还是变差了？管理层工作做得好吗？有没有错失机会？或者他们是不是在费力地展示可能消失的好数据？所以我们正在研究这些年来发生的变化。刚开始时，没有可以咨询的专家网络。你必须自己想办法，也许得找出谁可能了解这一业务，或者通过与某领域的专家交谈来拼凑信息。我可以肯定地说，现在有更多的信息可供获取。我们手头上免费或低成本可获得的信息，比20或30年前即使是在最顶尖投资岗位上的人都有的信息量更多。
But that said, information's only so valuable also because it's what you do with it. It's having a differentiated view about it. We have then active internal debates. The teams meet as pods, which tends to be a partner and a more senior and a more junior analyst altogether. That's an approximation, but that's what it looks like. When they're ready to make a recommendation, they may run it by another pod. Just to say, hey, does this sound crazy? We have our analyst meet once a week at lunch. Anybody who's around, wants to meet. The partners don't attend that. So it's a free space for analysts to be running things by each other and not feel like partners going to hear them or they might judge them for being naive or having a silly idea.
不过，话虽如此，信息的价值也在于我们如何运用它。重要的是要有与众不同的看法。我们内部会进行积极的讨论。我们的小组通常由一名合伙人、一名资深分析师和一名初级分析师组成。虽然这是一个大致的描述，但实际情况大致如此。当他们准备好提出建议时，可能会与另一个小组讨论，只是为了确认他们的想法是否过于疯狂。我们的分析师每周都会在午餐时间开会，任何有空的人都可以参加。这些会议伙伴们不会出席，因此分析师们有一个自由交流的空间，他们可以互相讨论，而不用担心伙伴们会听到或对他们幼稚或荒谬的想法进行评判。
So I think that's really important for people's development. When the teams ready to pitch the idea, they run it by me. They run it by our president, Jim Mooney, as well, usually at once in the same meeting. If it's a public idea, we have our traders in the room who can shed insight into how the thing is trading or any particular thoughts about what's going on in the market at the moment on that name. We reach a decision often in an hour. Sometimes we don't reach a decision and we agree to reconvene or we agree that it's interesting but not at the current price. Other times we'll meet, we'll agree, we'll buy it, then in days we're meeting again because the prices drop further and it's now an even better bargain and do we want to own more.
我认为这对于人们的发展非常重要。当团队准备提出想法时，他们会先向我汇报，然后也会在同一场会议中向我们的总裁吉姆·穆尼汇报。如果这是一个公开的想法，我们会邀请我们的交易员参加，他们可以对当前市场情况或者特定交易标的提供见解。我们通常能在一个小时内做出决定。有时我们无法立即做出决定，会同意再召开会议讨论，或者觉得这个想法不错但目前价格不合适。还有时候我们会决定购买，然后几天后因为价格进一步下降，我们又开会讨论，考虑是否要购买更多。
Part of my nature is these things churn in my head. So sometimes I'll wake up after I'm meeting the next morning and think I forgot to ask one question or there's a risk I hadn't thought about that now I'm thinking about. And so we'll reconvene, it probably drives my people a little crazy, but I always think protecting the clients' capital is more important than whether I drive somebody a little crazy. So we are constantly reconvening if it moves closer to our price target. Is this a good sale? When should we get out? Do we sell part of it? How should we think about that? If it falls, should we buy more? How big should it be? If something else gets more interesting, should we keep holding it or is this new thing even more attractive?
我天生容易让这些事情在脑子里反复琢磨。因此，有时候在见面后第二天早上醒来，我会想起我忘记问一个问题，或者考虑到一个新的风险。因此，我们会重新开会，可能会让我的团队有点抓狂，但我始终认为保护客户的资金比让人有点抓狂更重要。因此，如果某个投资接近我们的目标价时，我们会不断重聚讨论。这笔投资是否是个好交易？我们应该什么时候退出？应该卖掉一部分吗？我们应该如何看待这些问题？如果价格下跌，我们应该买入更多吗？应该买多少？如果有其他更有吸引力的机会，我们是否应该继续持有现有的，还是新机会更值得我们投资呢？
There are two things that are limited in investing to constraints on every investor. One is capital and the other is time. And they're both really important. So if something you own falls, sometimes you'll trade out of it even though you don't like it any less than you did. You just like something new that came along more. Those kinds of conversations I think are extraordinarily helpful in optimizing the portfolio. How have you gone about evolving that decision-making process as Bapost has grown a number of people over the years? I would tell you I've done it poorly. I continue to have final say in the portfolio. So the way I wield that power is I have final say, but I defer a great deal to my team.
在投资中，有两件事对每个投资者来说都是有限的：资本和时间。这两者都非常重要。因此，如果你所持有的某个投资下跌，有时你会卖掉它，即便你对它的喜爱程度并未减少，只是因为你更喜欢新出现的另一个选择。我认为这种类型的对话对优化投资组合特别有帮助。随着Bapost团队的壮大，你是如何在决策过程中不断发展的呢？我要坦诚地说，我做得不太好。我在投资组合中拥有最终决定权，但我很大程度上会听取团队的意见。
So I give the team rope. If it's a senior partner who has produced a lot of profit for the clients over the years and they want to do something that I'm not sure about, I tend to give them room to do that. I think that's valuable and probably career extending for them. It makes them feel appreciated, gives them satisfaction that they're getting to make decisions. But I also, it's some sense, I'm deciding on investments, but I'm also deciding on people. Who do I trust? When they say they've done the work, what does that mean? Have they done good work? And for our best people, which are we have a lot of really great people, long tenured people, trusting them has been exactly the right thing to do for a very long period of time.
所以我给团队一定的自主权。如果是一个长期为客户创造了大量利润的资深合伙人，想做一些我不太确定的事情，我通常会给他们一定的空间。我认为这对他们来说是有价值的，可能也能延长他们的职场生涯。这会让他们感到受到重视，并且因为能够做出决策而感到满意。同时，我也在某种意义上做出投资的决定，但也是在判断人。我在决定信任谁。当他们说他们已经完成工作时，这意味着什么？他们的工作质量如何？对于我们最优秀的人，其中有很多资深且出色的人，长期以来信任他们一直是正确的选择。
The final say, a portfolio manager still needs to sit on top of the structure and it's because we slash money into and out of areas. So we might have loaded up on corporate credit over the last six months. But if tomorrow there's something better to do in a private investment or in real estate, we may be reducing positions we like to buy something even better. The organizational key is somehow to have people that are team oriented enough to say, oh, I get it. I work hard on this idea. I'm glad we own it. But if we can own something better, that's going to make more for the clients. I trust that's also in my best interest. And we try to pay people not just on their own bottom line, but on a firm-wide bottom line for that exact reason.
最终的决定权仍然掌握在投资组合经理手中，这是因为我们需要灵活地在不同领域之间调配资金。例如，我们可能在过去六个月增加了对企业信贷的投资。但如果明天在私人投资或者房地产中有更好的机会，我们可能会减少原本看好的头寸，以购买更优质的资产。组织的关键在于团队成员必须具备合作精神，能够理解并支持这一决策：即便他们努力工作的项目被替换掉，但如果这样能为客户带来更高收益，他们也会相信这符合自己的最佳利益。为此，我们不仅基于个人业绩来奖励员工，更会考虑整个公司的绩效。
How do you think about position sizing? Sizing has been one of the strengths of BAL post over its history. I've run into people with unusual views about sizing. So I've come across a number of funds that have a view that the goal in investing is to limit how much you can lose on any idea. So the key is to have 200 ideas in your fund. None of them more than half a percent. You don't understand that. If you can establish that an idea is good versus one that's bad, then why can't you understand that there might be one that's great rather than just good?
你怎么看待仓位管理？在BAL的历史中，合理的仓位管理一直是其优势之一。我遇到过对仓位有不同意见的人。有些基金认为，投资的目标是限制每个投资想法的最大损失。因此，他们的策略是，在基金中持有200个想法，每个想法的仓位不超过0.5%。我对此不是很理解。如果你能判断一个想法是好的，而另一个是不好的，那为什么不能理解有些想法可能非常优秀，而不仅仅是一般的好呢？
And why would that not be bigger? I also think a portfolio can absorb more than a tenth or two tenths of one percent of loss. So we prefer to identify over time through continued work, through price decline, that a good idea has now become a great idea or through an event, through a company announcement that the following is going to happen. And maybe you've studied the company long enough that you understand it can appreciate right away what that news means where somebody else might think it's directly not the direction to go or at least not understand the impact of it.
为什么这不会更大呢？我也认为一个投资组合可以承受损失超过百分之一到百分之二。因此，我们倾向于通过持续的努力和价格的下降来识别一个好的想法何时变成了一个伟大的想法，或者通过一个事件，比如公司宣布某些事情将要发生。可能因为你研究这家公司已经有足够长的时间，你能够立刻理解这条消息的意义，而其他人可能会认为这不是正确的方向，或者至少不了解它的影响。
So we obviously stay very far away from any line of inside information, but we want to capitalize on our insights and patients that are long-term renegotiants give us. We have made our big dollar profits over the years, usually an idea that have gone against us at first and we average down. And when they are catalyzed, which means some event is going to happen that will cause us to make money when that just depends on somebody waking up tomorrow and liking it more than they did today, but rather the company will in fact complete a reorganization plan or will complete a liquidation plan or a merger will close with high probability or an asset will get sold out of their corporate portfolio and they will buy back stock with a lot of the proceeds.
我们显然非常小心地避开任何涉及内幕信息的界限，但我们希望能够利用我们的见解和长期重整计划的客户带给我们的机会。多年来，我们的丰厚利润通常来自于那些最初对我们不利的想法，我们会在价格较低时增加投资。当这些想法实现时，往往是因为某个事件发生，使我们能够获利。这并不是简单地依赖市场情绪的变化，而是因为公司实际上完成了重组计划或清算计划，或者是概率很高的合并顺利完成，或者公司出售了其某些资产并用大量收益回购股票。
Whatever it might be, those are the kinds of catalysts we look for. The presence of a catalyst makes us comfortable having a bigger position. The hardest thing about value investing without catalysts is you can own something that's out of favor for an incredibly long time and over five or ten or longer year period, looking being early and being wrong look exactly the same. And you can start to get confused and your people can start to get confused and your clients can start to get confused.
无论是什么样的催化剂，我们都在寻找这样的机会。有了催化剂，我们就可以放心地持有更大比例的投资。价值投资中最难的是，如果没有催化剂，你可能会长期持有不受欢迎的资产，而在五年、十年甚至更长的时间里，过早投资和投资错误看起来是一样的。这可能会导致你产生困惑，你的团队和客户也可能因此感到困惑。
And so I don't know anybody other than maybe Warren Buffett who could underperform for a decade or more and feel like everybody's just dandy with that because they have confidence it's going to work out. And of course every investor should also be asking themselves those questions that if you're in a stock that just goes down and down and down might you have been wrong or at least maybe you could have figured some things out earlier and not owned it from the highest price you paid.
所以，除了可能巴菲特，我不知道还有谁能够在十多年里表现不佳，却仍然让大家觉得没问题，因为大家对他有信心，认为最终会有好结果。当然，每位投资者也应该问自己这些问题：如果你持有的股票持续下跌，是不是你错了？或者至少，你本可以更早发现一些问题，而不至于以最高价持有这只股票。
One of the things about BALP post also because we know we don't know everything we know we know so little in the scheme of how much there is to know that we spend a great deal of time trying to learn lessons and so we spend time learning both from our successes and from our failures because they both contain valuable learnings. Those learnings aren't always available the first day. It may take quite a while to reflect back. I remember reading years ago in an interview they asked ahead of a mutual fund, tell me about your best idea over the years and they said well I found this stock at $5 and it went to 50 and when I looked up that stock guess what it had gone from 5 to 50 but it was back to 5 so was that a great idea or was that a lucky trade I don't know the answer.
我们在BALP上发帖的其中一个原因是因为我们知道，我们了解得还很少。在如此浩瀚的知识体系中，我们知道自己所掌握的知识是多么的有限。因此，我们花费大量时间去学习经验教训，从成功和失败中吸取教训，因为两者都包含着宝贵的知识。这些经验教训并不总是一开始就显而易见的，可能需要很长时间的反思。我记得多年前读到一篇采访，他们问一个共同基金的负责人，谈谈你这些年来最好的投资想法。他说，他曾经发现了一支股票从5美元涨到50美元，但后来又跌回了5美元。所以，这究竟是个好主意，还是一次幸运的交易，我也不知道答案。
How do you think about risk management? BALP post was founded on the principle of protecting the capital first and foremost of the families that founded it and so why would describe us as having a risk averse we try to think about downside in every individual investment we roll that into a portfolio not in some fancy math formula but intellectually where are our correlations do we have exposure as a portfolio that's as bad as the individual investments or might there be much less exposure because we have offsetting investments if this one does well that one's likely to do less well or if this one does poorly that one's likely to be a grand slam home run.
你如何看待风险管理？BALP post的创建原则是优先保护创始家族的资金，因此我们可以被描述为风险规避型。我们在处理每一项投资时，都会仔细考虑潜在的负面影响，并将这些考虑整合成整个投资组合。我们不是通过复杂的数学公式，而是通过智力分析，来判断我们的投资之间的相关性。我们会检查这个投资组合是否有与个别投资一样大的风险，还是由于相互抵消的投资，使得整体风险更小。例如，如果一种投资表现良好，那么其他可能表现稍差，或者如果一种投资表现不佳，那么其他可能会大获成功。
Are there ways to mitigate risk just with offsets in the portfolio then you could also mitigate with catalysts, catalysts short in your duration they make you less dependent on the overall level of the market in the future and we know Warren Buffett wrote in the 73 74 time frame unfortunate that no one should know common stocks who's not comfortable with a 50% drop in the market I could tell you almost nobody's comfortable the 50% drop in the market yet Americans own more stocks than ever before and so I think people have forgotten that kind of admonition I think that's really important too so it's why I don't just want pure data equity long diversifying into other asset classes into credit for example.
是否有方法仅通过在投资组合中进行对冲来减少风险，就像通过催化剂来降低风险一样？催化剂的短期作用使你对市场整体水平未来的依赖性降低。我们知道，沃伦·巴菲特在1973到1974年间曾写过一句不幸的警告，那就是没有人应该在对市场可能下跌50%不感到舒服的情况下持有普通股。我可以告诉你，几乎没有人会对市场下跌50%感到舒服，但美国人拥有的股票比以往更多。所以我认为，人们已经忘记了这种警示。我觉得这一点非常重要，这也是为什么我不只是单纯地进行股票投资，而是希望通过多元化投资进入其他资产类别，比如债券。
Short in your duration give you a senior position in a capital structure where you're likely to get paid back even if the equity struggles mightily or if you don't get all your money back you get 80 cents on the dollar back a lot of things diversify away from full market risk it's the position diversification it's hedging at the portfolio level we tend to overlay macro hedges and commodity type hedges interest trade hedges as appropriate based on each individual investment and they may be a layer of portfolio hedges that look like essentially puts on the market.
缩短你的投资期限可以让你在资本结构中处于更高的优先级，即使股票表现不佳，你也有更大的机会收回投资，即使不能全部收回，也可以得到80美分的回报。此外，许多因素可以帮助分散市场的全部风险，这是通过持仓多样化实现的，也是在投资组合层面进行对冲。我们通常会根据每个具体投资项目的情况，叠加宏观对冲和商品类对冲、利率交易对冲等。此外，可能还会有一层类似于市场看跌期权的投资组合对冲策略。
The reason for that is that the average long-term multiple of the markets about 17 times but you have moments today it's 20 times you have moments it's hit closer to 30 times and other times it gets to 10 times at times when the market is more expensive than historic averages you are exposed like crazy to just the multiple coming down to the long-term returns winning out and you can lose a lot just from that kind of mean reversion so we try to protect against that too.
这样翻译成中文：
原因是市场的长期平均倍数大约是17倍，但在某些时候，它会达到20倍，甚至接近30倍，而在其他时候则会降至10倍。当市场倍数高于历史平均水平时，你会因为倍数回归长期平均而面临极大的风险，这种均值回归可能导致你的损失很大。因此，我们也会努力保护自己免受这种风险的影响。
I will hold cash in the absence of immediate opportunity that's not a terribly big number these days but the combination of those hedges those midagents do provide a significant degree of downside protection and when we do have downside it tends to be quite limited so bell post is only lost money in five of its 41 years all but um two of those have been in the mid single digit range or less so protecting capital to that extent over four decades I think is the name of the game for what bell post tries to do what value investors hope to accomplish.
在目前没有立即投资机会的情况下，我会持有现金。虽然这些天持现金的数量不算太多，但结合那些对冲策略和中介策略确实提供了显著的下行风险保护。而当市场下跌时，通常损失会相对有限。Bell Post在其41年的历史中只有5年亏损，其中只有两年的亏损超过了中个位数的范围。因此，在四十多年里保护资本到这个程度，我认为这正是Bell Post努力追求的目标，也是价值投资者希望实现的目标。
When you're investing in private securities compared to public securities how do you think about pricing in liquidity I think you have to get paid for liquidity I think that there is a cost to giving up control over getting in and getting out but there are offsets and so one of the offsets is you'd think if you bought a building it's illiquid but if you own the whole building you get to decide when to sell it whereas if you own a hundred shares of stock or a million shares of stock of a company management could do something extraordinarily dumb that you wouldn't have done.
当你投资于私人证券而不是公开证券时，你是如何考虑流动性定价的？我认为你必须为流动性得到补偿。我觉得放弃进出市场的控制是有代价的，但也有一些补偿措施。其中一种补偿是，如果你购买了一栋楼房，它是非流动性的，但如果你拥有整栋楼的所有权，你可以决定何时出售，而如果你持有一家公司的一百股或一百万股股票，公司管理层可能会做出一些你不会做的非常愚蠢的决定。
And so there are puts and takes and so I want to make sure I get paid for giving up the right to change my mind but just because an asset is in an illiquid form doesn't mean it's purely a liquid buildings get sold all the time whole companies get sold all the time whereas 9.9% of the shares of a four hundred million dollar company might be a very illiquid block and so liquidity may not be what everybody seems to think.
因此，有利有弊，我希望确保在放弃改变主意的权利时能够得到相应的报酬。尽管一项资产是不流动的，并不意味着它完全不能变现。比如，房产经常被出售，整家公司也经常被出售，而拥有一个市值四亿美元公司的9.9%股份可能是一个非常不流动的股份。因此，流动性可能并不像大家想象的那样。
There's been I think a great misunderstanding in recent years among some people who run money that illiquidity itself delivers degree of return that if you take the liquidity you automatically get the return I don't think anything could be weirder than that idea that the reason you make money from liquidity is when you have people on the other side of the trade who have an illiquid asset and they suddenly need to monetize it they wanted off the books that may cause it to trade at a discounted price.
近年来，一些管理资金的人中出现了一个很大的误解，他们认为流动性差本身就能带来一定的收益率，也就是说只要接受流动性差就能自动获得回报。我觉得这种想法再奇怪不过了。实际上，你从流动性中获利的原因是，当交易对手持有一个流动性差的资产，并突然需要将其变现或从账面上移除时，可能会导致该资产以折扣价交易。
And the discounted price provides the higher return the liquidity itself doesn't generally when clients ask this I say you want to make several hundred basis points I don't know if that's two hundred or five hundred basis points but giving up the liquidity the right to change your mind is worth a lot on the other hand just as a thought experiment let's take the most liquid of all instruments and let's say I found a five year treasury bonds at a time when treasuries yield 4% and I had a way that you could create that at a 10% yield but you couldn't trade it for five years there's a price on liquidity would anybody do that well I would argue that anybody that's going to buy treasury bonds and would likely keep holding them for five years ought to be first in line to do that trade and that exists I can't describe all the ways it exists but we are trading off things like that all the time maybe the cash is in a liquidating trust and we'll only get paid out slowly maybe there's something cash like or treasury bill like where the cash is held and so it's not exactly a treasury bill but it's like a treasury bill and yet the yield is way way disproportionately more than you'd ever get on a treasury
折扣价格提供了更高的收益，而流动性本身通常不会产生这样的收益。当客户问我们这个问题时，我会说："你想要赚取几个百分点的收益，我不知道是200还是500个基点差，但放弃流动性、放弃改变主意的权利是非常有价值的。"另一方面，作为一个思考实验，我们来看一个最具流动性的工具——假设我发现了一种五年期国债，当时的国债收益率是4%，但我有办法让你以10%的收益率买入，但在五年内你不能交易它。流动性是有价格的，有人愿意这么做吗？我会说，任何打算购买国债并可能持有五年的人，都应该第一个去做这样的交易。而这确实存在，我不能描述它存在的所有方式，但我们一直在进行类似的权衡。也许现金在一个清算信托中，只能慢慢支付出来，也许有类似现金或国库券的东西持有，这并不完全是国库券，但它像国库券一样，而收益率比你在国库券上得到的高得多。
So we're on the eternal hunt for things like that and sometimes we actually find them what have you found about differential risk premium and international markets compared to the us we invest internationally we have stocks in europe we have debt in europe that we sometimes buy we own real estate globally although mostly it's us and western europe our mandate is broad and flexible which lets us move where the opportunity is we talk to our clients not that long ago about a few Chinese stocks we were finding we had never owned anything in china for decades it was in favor everybody was lining up to go there i knew that they have a pretty authoritarian system of governance and didn't want to be on the wrong side of that we stay away from most markets like that as a pretty regular rule yet the stocks were starting to discount such a significant degree of china risk that we felt like for the first time ever that you're actually getting well paid
我们一直在不停地寻找这样的机会，并且有时确实会找到。例如，我们研究了差异化风险溢价和国际市场与美国市场的比较。我们进行国际投资，持有欧洲的股票，有时也会购买欧洲的债务，同时在全球拥有不动产，尽管主要集中在美国和西欧。我们的投资任务广泛而灵活，这使得我们能够在机会出现时及时调整。
不久前，我们和客户讨论了一些我们发现的中国股票。几十年来，我们从未在中国投资过。之前中国市场很受欢迎，很多人都在关注这个市场。但我们知道中国的治理体系较为集权，因此我们不想冒这个风险，通常会规避这样的市场。然而，这些股票开始反映出非常显著的中国风险，以至于我们认为首次出现了能够获得良好回报的机会。
We found a company whose stock was beaten down 90% and thought that was attractive and so far so good but it's not a large percentage of her capital but it was very intrepid idea by one of our analysts i don't have a view about emergent markets about the frontier markets we're humble enough and cautious enough to know that if you don't live in a country if you don't have people that are active in that country you're at a real disadvantage and so i have no idea what the premium should be for buying equities in africa equities in asia but when i find a stock trading at twenty five cents on the dollar i know that those things tend to work out so that's how we've applied it but the vast majority of our investments are us in western europe and i don't know that western europe needs particularly significant risk premium over the us
我们发现了一家公司的股票下跌了90%，认为这是一个有吸引力的投资机会。到目前为止，一切进展顺利，不过这家公司的股票只占她资本的一小部分。这个想法来自我们的一名分析师，非常有探索精神。关于新兴市场和前沿市场，我没有明确的看法。我们足够谦逊和谨慎，知道如果你不住在某个国家，或者没有在那个国家活跃的人脉，就会处于真正的劣势。因此，我不确定在非洲或亚洲购买股票时应支付多少溢价。但是，当我发现一只股票以25美分的价格交易时，我知道这种机会往往会有不错的结果。所以我们是这样进行投资的。然而，我们绝大多数的投资仍在美国和西欧。我不认为西欧需要比美国有显著更高的风险溢价。
Obviously if for clients who live in the us or with exchange rate risk you may have some considerations there that wouldn't be a big discount from our perspective we just take each individual investment as it is try to understand what the risks and opportunities are in it and make our determination that as the economic environment's been changing with rates rising and inflation particularly in the us over the last year and half two years where is your antenna up in that pattern recognition for the types of opportunities you suspect will come over the next few years
显然，对于居住在美国的客户或面临汇率风险的客户，可能会有一些考虑。从我们的角度来看，这不会是一个很大的折扣。我们只是逐项评估每一个投资，努力了解其中的风险和机会，并做出我们的判断。在过去一年半到两年中，由于经济环境的变化，尤其是在美国，利率上升和通胀问题突出。基于这种识别模式，你认为在未来几年里会出现哪种类型的机会？
This is to me one of the weirdest times since i've been in the investment business for over 40 years that you had a bubble it was really a credit bubble that became an everything bubble super low interest rates at times your rates made capital easily available and incredibly cheap and that led to startup manias and spacks and meme stocks and crypto all kinds of speculative activity i'm not convinced that we've even begun to sort out that bubble now that bubble did a pretty good job of collapsing in 2022 but the market is rallied back so much this year we're now in a bull market no longer in a bear market by that at least arbitrary definition of 20 percent
在我从事投资业务超过40年的历程中，这段时间对我来说是最为奇怪的时期之一。曾经，我们经历了一个巨大泡沫，实际上这是一个信贷泡沫，随后演变成了一个席卷一切的泡沫。在某些时期，极低的利率让资金变得极其充裕和便宜，这导致了一系列的创业热潮、特殊目的收购公司（SPACs）、迷因股票和加密货币等各类投机活动。我并不认为我们已经开始解决这个泡沫。虽然这个泡沫在2022年有所破裂，但今年市场又强劲反弹，现在我们已经进入了牛市，按至少20%的标准定义来看，已经不再是熊市。
I think that the damage that was done over a 12 year bond bubble and of course don't forget it's been a 35 year bond bull market up till 2022 that what were financial institutions supposed to do during that time frame they couldn't get paid by taking credit risk it still wasn't much they couldn't get paid by going out in duration the yield curve was decently flat at least part of the time and so we've seen some financial institutions do what like silicon valley bank did and end up with significant mismatches of assets to deposits but I'm not convinced we know where all the bodies are buried.
我认为，在过去的12年里，债券市场经历了泡沫，而这实际上是从2022年为止长达35年的牛市的一部分。在这段时间里，金融机构该怎么做呢？如果承担信用风险，他们所得收益并不多；如果延长期限，收益曲线大部分时间也是相对平坦的。因此，我们看到了有些金融机构，比如硅谷银行，出现了资产和存款之间的重大不匹配。但我还不相信我们完全知道所有潜在问题所在。
I think here and there you read an article that says this bank has a hundred billion dollars of bonds below market or whatever but I'm just not convinced I'm not saying there's anything more I don't know anything but I'd be nervous because markets cause behaviors and when people have to put money to work have to run a matchbook have to run a large balance sheet they're going to do something with the money. We haven't seen a lot of bodies float up I don't know what that means but I'd be worried.
我觉得你隔三差五就会看到一些文章，说某某银行持有价值一千亿美元、低于市场价的债券之类的新闻，但我对此并不十分确信。我并不是说我知道得更多，实际上我并不了解什么内幕，只不过市场会影响行为，当人们需要投资，需要管理一个撮合交易本或者大型资产负债表时，他们总会用钱做些什么。我们目前还没有看到很多问题浮出水面，我不知道这意味着什么，但我对此有些担心。
I think that we've become incredibly dependent on the government rescuing everything the irony of this moment is that well you had a green span put in a burn enke put in a yellow input now pal is breaking it I don't know if he can break it and provide the put right afterwards on the other hand with svb we did we changed all the rules around deposit insurance in order to not let them splatter and so these are really complicated questions I don't feel like I know the answer for sure but I think the moral hazard is very high.
我认为我们已经变得非常依赖政府来解决一切。讽刺的是，过去有格林斯潘（绿灯）、伯南克（黄灯），现在鲍威尔在踩刹车（红灯）。我不知道他是否能在踩刹车后立即提供保护。另一方面，面对硅谷银行（SVB）的情况，我们为了不让他们溃散，改变了所有关于存款保险的规则。这些都是非常复杂的问题，我不确定答案，但我认为道德风险非常高。
I think people's memories are short I think people would be really wise to pay attention to history to think back to an era where everything didn't get rescued to try to imagine a bear market that didn't immediately just lead to a buying opportunity you don't have to look that far back people could look back to seventy four five seventy three four many many stocks trading at single digit earnings multiples that weren't going out of business but people needed to sell stocks to pay the bills and to meet their commitments.
我觉得人们的记忆很短暂，人们应该多关注历史，回想一下不是所有事情都能被拯救的年代。试着想象一个熊市不会立刻变成入市良机，你不需要回到太久以前，就可以看到1973到1974年的情况。那时许多股票的市盈率只有个位数，但公司并没有破产，只不过人们需要卖掉股票来支付账单和履行承诺。
You had a genuine liquidation you really haven't had much of that for a really long time you had a lot of hiccups around between ninety eight and a one and then the great financial crisis was a really ugly twelve months or so I'm just not sure why you couldn't have more trouble especially because you had enormous capital flows and you had entire build up a private credit industry and disintermediation from banks maybe that'll all go smoothly maybe it won't it's not been tested.
你经历了一次真正的清算，而这样的情况你已经很久没有遇到了。在1998到2001年间，你经历过不少波折，而之后的全球金融危机则是非常艰难的十二个月。我不确定为什么你不能遇到更多的问题，特别是考虑到你经历了巨大的资本流动，并且私人信贷行业也有了全面的发展，同时银行的中介作用有所减弱。也许这一切会顺利进行，也许不会，因为这还没有经过考验。
The nature of most wall street innovation is it's never stress tested for a rainy day because that wouldn't be any fun it's fun to sell a lot of bonds sell a lot of stocks sell a lot of partnerships and rake in the investment banking fees but when the rainy day comes mortgage back securities can blow up and wouldn't surprise me to see pockets of private credit blow up private equity funds has been rescued historically.
华尔街的大多数创新并没有经过"雨天"压力测试，因为那样就没意思了。卖出大量债券、股票和合作项目并赚取投资银行费用是很有趣的事情，但当"雨天"来临时，抵押贷款支持证券可能会崩盘，而我也不会对私人信贷领域出现问题感到意外。在历史上，私募股权基金常常得到救助。
So in the oh eight or nine period I always thought there should be an asterisk on private equity because those guys got rescued by the fed rushing in cutting rates and congresses stimulus plans as well which a lot of private equity debt was trading down to fifty cents on the dollar and yet all those deals ended up working out had that rescue not happen when it did you might see very very different numbers at a private equity now there might be an argument that private equity is always going to be on the beneficiary side of that that might be true but it also might not get rescued in some further period especially with the imbalances in our society and with moms and pops wondering why they're rescuing wealthy wall street financiers.
在2008到2009年期间，我一直认为应该给私募股权加上一个星号，因为这些人得到了美联储通过降息进行的拯救，以及国会的刺激计划的帮助。当时，许多私募股权的债务交易价格跌到了面值的一半左右，但在这些救助措施的作用下，这些交易最终都取得了成功。如果当时没有发生这种拯救行动，现在的私募股权数据可能会非常不同。现在，有人可能会争辩说，私募股权总是站在受益的一方，这可能是真的，但在某些未来的时期，它也可能得不到拯救，尤其是在我们社会存在失衡的情况下，人们会质疑为什么要拯救这些富有的华尔街金融家。
So there's just a lot of uncertainty in my mind about that I just think in general you know if I had to give one piece of advice to people I'd just remind them study financial history that Jim Grant likes to say science progresses securely but finance progresses cyclically and that most ideas have been around before and we repeat the same mistakes and there's a lot to learn from studying past periods.
这里有很多不确定性在我心中，如果要我给大家提供一个建议的话，那就是提醒大家学习金融历史。正如Jim Grant所说，科学是稳步进步的，而金融则是周而复始的。大多数观点和想法以前都出现过，我们总是在重复相同的错误。因此，通过研究过去的时期，我们可以学到很多东西。
Obviously I didn't live in the great depression but I feel like even studying that has prepared me for bad markets it's prepared me to make really tough decisions it's in for me of how bad things could get and yet also emboldened me to understand that if it's not the great depression maybe down 40 or 50 percent is actually a pretty steep decline.
显然，我并没有亲身经历过大萧条，但我觉得研究那段时期让我为不景气的市场做好了准备，这让我能够做出非常艰难的决定。通过学习我了解到事情可能会有多糟糕，同时也让我更有信心地认识到，如果情况不像大萧条那样严重，那么市场下跌40%或50%其实已经是一个相当大的降幅了。
So I think the history helps center us on what a reasonable range of outcomes might be while we never lose sight of what the extremes of history might dictate. When you combine that study of history and this very uncertain and in some ways unprecedented time, how does that translate into how you're positioning the portfolio relative to how you have in the past? We've been yield-starved like everybody else for the last 12 years until the rate started to move up a year ago. We like credit. Credit often is misunderstood, lends itself to inefficiencies. When a bond gets downgraded below investment grade, there can be a natural constituency of holders who want to churn out of that, and that can lead to pricing inefficiencies as well. So we like to look at credit. We like distressed credit. We like bankrupt debt. We're not rooting for it to happen, but it's a playground we can hunt through when those markets exist. When there's hardly distressed credit, that post has to look elsewhere.
我认为历史可以帮助我们明确一个合理的结果范围，同时我们也要不忘历史极端情况可能带来的影响。当你将历史研究和当前这个非常不确定、在某些方面前所未有的时期结合起来时，这对你过去是如何定位投资组合产生了什么影响？我们和其他人一样，在过去12年里一直缺乏收益，直到利率在一年前开始上升。我们喜欢信用债券。这种债券常常被误解，容易出现市场效率不高的情况。当一个债券的评级被降到低于投资级别时，自然会有一部分持有者想要出售，这可能导致定价效率低下。因此，我们喜欢研究信用债券，特别是困境债券和破产债务。我们并不希望这些情况发生，但当这些市场存在时，它们为我们提供了一个可以挖掘的领域。当几乎没有困境债券的时候，我们就需要寻找其他机会。
So in the 2010 to 2012 to 2021 period, we focused more on some private markets and private inefficiencies—real estate for one, private equity for another. But it doesn't look a lot like other people's private equity. It looks like more one-off, hairy deals of some sort that are mispriced for a particular reason. Now we've rebalanced into credit. Everything we do is bottom-up; it's not top-down asset allocation. But we found enough debt to make that about 15% of our portfolio, and that's been pretty steadily growing. This is not anything like peak opportunity, but I think it could continue to increase depending on what happens with inflation and what happens with the economy. You could even have an economy where interest rates go down, inflation gets tamed, but that's accompanied by an economic downturn, and that could lead to more financial distress. A lot of companies have taken on way more debt than probably would be prudent, so that's probably the biggest change in the portfolio.
在2010到2012再到2021年这一段时间里，我们更关注于一些私人市场和私人效率问题，房地产是一方面，私募股权是另一方面。但我们的私募股权与别人的不太一样，更像是一种出于特定原因被错误定价的独立、复杂的交易。现在我们已经重新平衡到信贷领域。我们所做的一切都是自下而上的分析，而不是自上而下的资产配置。但我们找到足够的债务，使其大约占我们投资组合的15%，并且这一比例在持续增长。这并不像巨大的机会，但我认为这比例有可能继续增加，具体取决于通货膨胀和经济的变化。甚至有可能出现一种情况，即利率下降，通货膨胀得到控制，但伴随经济衰退，而这可能导致更多的财务困境。许多公司承担了比明智水平高得多的债务，所以这是投资组合中最大的变化。
We are pretty well hedged. We don't try to hedge every ounce of risk; we never have. We're not a zero beta fund or anything like that, but we're protected meaningfully against some pretty extreme scenarios. It wouldn't surprise us to encounter those. We don't really understand the degree of exuberance in the market. There were certainly individual stocks that were oversold in the downdraft of '22, but the overall market did not really reach bargain levels; maybe it reached fairly priced levels, and now is rebounded again to overpriced levels. So I'm not making a market prediction, but I do think there's vulnerability. So while our credit exposures have gone up, our equity exposures have gone down somewhat, and we're trying to focus a greater percentage of the equity book on positions with catalysts.
我们进行了相当不错的对冲。我们不尝试对每一盎司的风险进行对冲，以前也从来没有过。我们不是一个零贝塔基金或类似的基金，但我们针对一些极端情况有了相当有意义的保护。遇到这些情况也不会让我们感到惊讶。我们并不完全理解市场中的高涨情绪。的确，某些个股在2022年的下跌中被过度抛售，但整个市场并没有真正达到极具吸引力的低价，也许是达到了合理定价的水平，现在又反弹到了过高价格的水平。所以我不是在做市场预测，但我确实认为市场存在脆弱性。因此，虽然我们的信贷风险敞口有所增加，但我们的股票风险敞口则稍有减少，并且我们正在努力将股票投资组合的更大比例集中在具有催化因素的头寸上。
I'd love to take a step back and talk a little bit about the business of BALPOST. For a long time in the early years, you didn't have any clients except for the family, and then I guess I don't know, 15, 20 years ago now you did bring some institutions. Been very careful about who was an investor. What's your perspective on the importance of that alignment between what you're trying to do and who your investors are? We took families by word of mouth in the early years of BALPOST, so maybe we'd add a family or two a year. Even with that, our assets were still in the couple of hundred million dollar range 10 years in. We took our first institutions in '98, so we're probably coming up to our 25th anniversary of that, and they've been great partners because they're aligned. Every type of client has its solidity.
我很想退一步，聊聊关于BALPOST公司的业务。在早期的很长一段时间里，除了家族成员外，你们并没有其他客户。大约在15到20年前，我记得你们开始引入一些机构投资者，并且对选择投资者一直都很慎重。你们如何看待你们的目标和投资者之间的这种一致性的重要性呢？
在BALPOST的早期，我们通过口碑效应吸引了一些家族客户，所以每年可能只增加一两个。但即使如此，十年后我们的资产规模也仅在几亿美元的范围。我们在1998年接受了第一批机构投资者，现在快到合作25周年了。他们是一群非常优秀的合作伙伴，因为他们与我们的目标高度一致。每种类型的客户都有其稳定性。
We love individuals because we can explain what we do. Our founders were individuals. Individuals tend to think about protecting on the downside at least as much, if not more, than institutions who maybe can take a longer-term view, who are in competition with each other in a way that individuals aren't necessarily. But both types have made fantastic clients. We've been very careful to avoid hot money-type clients, short-term thinking-type clients. The alignment is one of the most important success factors for any investor. If you don't have long-term oriented clients, you can't make long-term investments, and since I have no idea how to make short-term investments, I don't know how people without long-term money can invest. So it's very important to have a courtship period where you meet with clients.
我们喜欢个人客户，因为我们可以清楚地解释我们的工作。我们的创始人也是从个人开始的。个人往往更加关注如何保护下行风险，甚至可能比那些有长期视角的机构还要重视，后者往往因为彼此竞争而有不同的考量。尽管如此，这两种类型的客户对我们来说都非常优秀。我们非常谨慎地避免那些追求短期利润的"热钱"客户，因为保持一致性是任何投资成功的重要因素之一。如果客户没有长期投资的意向，我们就无法进行长期投资。而且我也不擅长短期投资，我不明白那些没有长期资金的人如何进行投资。所以，与客户见面并进行一段磨合期是非常重要的。
Literally, I've had people offer us money, and I've said I won't take your money until you read this annual letter and you read the last five years and you understand what we do and you really appreciate it because we don't want to be out of alignment where we think we had a pretty darn good year and you don't. So let's talk about what we are trying to achieve, what's attainable and what's not. I think those kinds of things have served us a really good stead because it has led to a much greater overall alignment.
从字面上来说，有人曾愿意给我们提供资金，但我告诉他们，在你们阅读这封年度信件、了解过去五年的情况、理解我们的工作内容并真正欣赏之后，我才会接受你们的钱。因为我们不希望出现意见不一致的情况，比如我们认为这一年表现相当不错，而你们却不这么认为。因此，让我们来讨论一下我们的目标是什么，哪些是可以实现的，哪些是无法实现的。我认为这些做法对我们非常有帮助，因为它促使了更大的整体一致性。
I think the endowment world especially matches well for us, the endowment world following year and my mentor's wisdom, Dave Swenson. Over a lot of years has worked hard to form long term partnerships with managers and those long term partnerships are ones of trust and trust being concretized for actions and performance teams getting to know each other not top person to top person but deeply and mesh throughout organizations.
我认为捐赠基金领域非常适合我们，尤其是在未来一年以及我导师戴夫·斯文森的智慧指导下。多年来，我们一直努力与管理者建立长期合作关系，这种长期合作关系是建立在信任之上的。信任通过行动和业绩具体化，而团队之间的了解不仅限于高层，而是深层次地贯穿整个组织。
I think from the institution's perspective the ability to follow a manager through thick and thin that you can read a brochure you can talk to somebody for an hour you don't really know how they're going to handle adversity you don't know character and so it takes a long time to see that play out and the same thing from the manager perspective that it helps to see how the client behaves and will they be a good long term partner will the cap it'll be there when you need it the most and so I think that alignment is perhaps one of the biggest keys to investment success over a long period of time.
我认为，从机构的角度来看，能够在任何情况下支持一个经理是很重要的。虽然你可以阅读宣传册，或者与某人交谈一个小时，但实际上你并不了解他们在逆境中的表现以及他们的品格。这些需要时间来观察。同样，从经理的角度来看，了解客户的行为也很重要，他们是否会成为一个好的长期合作伙伴，资本是否会在你最需要的时候出现。因此，我认为这种互相的配合可能是长期投资成功的关键之一。
How have you thought about the legacy of bow post? Let's say you do this another 40 years but at some point in time you may not be doing this I'm very cognizant that I can't and shouldn't be doing this forever. I think Warren Charlie or great exemplars that you can still be doing this into your 90s but I don't think I should be running bow post more than another 15 or so years maybe I'll still be involved in some capacity.
你是如何看待Bow Post的传承的？假设你再做40年，但某个时间点你可能就不再做这件事了。我非常清楚自己不能也不应该永远做这件事情。我认为沃伦和查理是很好的榜样，证明你可以一直做到90多岁，但我不认为自己应该在15年后还继续负责Bow Post的运营。也许我以后会以某种方式继续参与其中。
People have done a good job in some cases of stepping back still playing a role and I'd like to think as long as I'm sharp that the investment skill set actually is cumulative additive thing where you may be not familiar with the latest change in technology in the world but you have a large amount of perspective on what are good entry points and exit points and where risks might lie. So I'd like to think bow post will succeed past my tenure the reason I think it is we've been a great thing for our clients the clients have made a lot of money with very little drawdown in the bad years.
有时候，人们在退后一步的同时仍然扮演着重要角色，这方面做得很好。我相信，只要我头脑清晰，投资技巧实际上是一种积累和增加的东西。即使我可能对世界上最新的技术变化不太了解，但我有大量的经验可以看出好的进入点和退出点，以及潜在的风险所在。因此，我希望在我不在职之后，Bow Post仍能成功延续。我之所以这样认为，是因为我们一直对客户很有帮助。我们的客户在糟糕的年份里，能够赚到很多钱，并且损失很少。
The team at bow post has prospered and we've got a 250 plus person firm and a lot of people have made their entire careers here we're very proud to say we have people that have been here not just five or 10 years but many people 20 25 30 year anniversary's which we enthusiastically celebrate a good thing that serves the interest of employees and clients ought to be around.
Bow Post团队取得了很大的成功，如今我们公司已经有250多人。许多人在这里度过了整个职业生涯。我们非常自豪地表示，有许多员工不仅在这里工作了5年或10年，而且还有许多员工达到了20年、25年甚至30年的工作周年纪念，我们对此表示热烈庆祝。为员工和客户利益服务的好公司应该一直存在下去。
I will need to pull back I'll need to continue to delegate like I've been doing and find more things to delegate and I continue to do that I continue to push people to take on more responsibility give people promotion opportunities and truly I think right now we not only have a deeper partner group than we've ever had and as talented as ever but we also have a very very deep middle of people that are joined the firm in the past three five seven ten years who have tremendous potential already contributing at a high level so I'm really excited at what the future can bring but I know a lot rests on my willingness to give up responsibility and my ability to do it cleverly so that it takes hold.
我需要收回一些工作，并且继续像过去那样分配任务。我要找到更多可以委托的任务，继续推动大家承担更多责任，并为他们提供晋升机会。老实说，我觉得我们现在的团队不仅比以往任何时候都更强化，而且非常有才华。同时，我们还有一批在过去三、五、七、十年间加入公司的中层人才，他们潜力巨大，已经在高水平的岗位上做出贡献。我对未来充满期待，但我也知道很多事情取决于我愿意放手责任，并且聪明地去做，以确保这些安排真正落实。
So the impetus for you're doing this was you're editing of the seventh edition of Graham and Dodd security analysis. I'd love to hear any reflections you have on value investing of some of the contributors that you brought in to the book to write new chapters on different for an investment disciplines. I was a co-editor of the six edition and we had the idea in that edition that none of us were going to take the fifth edition or an earlier edition and strip it down and provide fresh examples it would have taken five or ten years nobody is certainly nobody with a day job like mine could do that.
所以，您进行此项工作的动机是您正在编辑《格雷厄姆和多德证券分析》第七版。我非常想听听您对价值投资的一些反思，特别是您邀请的一些贡献者，他们为书中的不同投资学科撰写了新章节。我曾是第六版的联合编辑，我们在那一版中有个想法，就是不去剥离第五版或更早的版本，从而提供新的例子，因为那样做可能需要五到十年，像我这样有全职工作的人肯定无法完成。
So we wrote covers over each of the important sections so we wrote about a historical perspective Jim Grant provided that Jim such a brilliant historian Roger Lowenstein provided a perspective on what the market had been up to since the prior edition and so they both did a reprise of that for this edition. Jim's piece is fabulous I didn't think he could top himself but he wrote again about what the world was like in Graham's day and how an investor ought to think about that today the importance of financial history as I emphasize.
所以我们为每个重要章节写了导读，其中我们撰写了由杰出历史学家吉姆·格兰特提供的历史视角，罗杰·洛文斯坦则提供了自上一个版本以来市场动态的观点，他们两位都为这一版重新演绎了这些内容。吉姆的文章非常出色，我原以为他已经无法再超越自己，但他再次撰写了关于格雷厄姆时代的世界以及今天的投资者应该如何思考这些问题，强调了金融历史的重要性。
Roger wrote about the last 15 years and frankly it was very helpful for me because living through it still isn't the same as like a play by play in your ear but remembering all of the fads and bubbly aspects of the last 15 years and how long and painful that's been for value investors because money has tended to flow into growth and out of value some of which by the way justifiably because disruption and a lot of businesses have had their long-term prospects damaged but nevertheless I think in many ways a big overshoot as people have become less patient and less willing to hold any investment through thick and thin.
罗杰写了关于过去15年的事情，坦率地说，这对我很有帮助。虽然亲身经历与耳边不断的解说不同，但回忆起过去15年的潮流和泡沫现象，以及对于价值投资者来说那段长期而痛苦的时期，依然历历在目。因为资金往往流向增长型投资而非价值型投资，有些资金这样做是有理由的，因为很多企业的长期前景因颠覆性变化而受到损害。不过，我认为很多时候人们的行为过于极端，因为大家变得不再耐心，对任何投资都缺乏坚持到底的信心。
The most important thing I think we realized is that Graham and Dodd wrote about equities they wrote about credit they did not write about international and so we have a section on international investing and what's different about it they didn't write about private asset classes which are really important they're really important about post I think they're really important in general as a way to think about where value is the David Abrams section on the lessons of investing in both public and private assets and how they hand in hand can make you better at each which is what Warren Buffett says that I'm a better businessman because I'm an investor and I'm a better investor because I'm a businessman.
我认为我们意识到的最重要的一点是，格雷厄姆和多德撰写的内容涉及股票和信贷，但他们没有涉及国际市场。因此，我们专门增加了一部分关于国际投资的内容，以探讨其独特之处。此外，他们没有讨论私人资产类别，而这些类别非常重要。我认为，在总体上，它们是理解价值的关键。大卫·艾布拉姆斯的章节讲述了投资于公共和私人资产的经验教训，以及如何利用这两者相辅相成地提升你的能力。正如沃伦·巴菲特所说，我因为是投资者而成为更好的商人，因为是商人而成为更好的投资者。
Then Seth Alexander who's another wonderful protege of Dave Swenson and somebody you and I both know and appreciate wrote about endowment management and I wanted that because I wanted the perspective not just of somebody who's picking stocks or bonds but somebody who's actually in the business of giving out money to money managers somebody who's thinking about stewarding a large pile of assets over a very long term period and doing it in a unique way that is differentiated from what everybody else in the field is doing and I know I got the best example of that out of current endowment management what a great thinker's set is and a wonderful guy and he jumped on the chance to do this which I was unsure I'd be able to get him.
然后，赛斯·亚历山大（Seth Alexander），他是戴夫·斯文森（Dave Swenson）的又一位优秀门徒，也是你我都认识并欣赏的人，写了一篇关于捐赠基金管理的文章。我之所以想要这篇文章，是因为我不仅仅希望了解一个挑选股票或债券的人的视角，而是希望了解一个实际上负责将资金分配给资金经理的人，一个思考如何在长期内管理大量资产，并以一种与行业其他人不同且独特的方式进行管理的人。我知道从当前的捐赠基金管理中得到了最好的例子。赛斯是一个很出色的思想家，也是一个很棒的人，对于这个邀请，他毫不犹豫地接受了，这一点让我非常高兴，因为我原本还不确定能否说服他参与。
But truly it's a broad group of contributors I mean we have Todd Combs who is one of the right-hand men of Warren Buffett he doesn't talk much in public but he has a great section about bottom-up fundamental analysis and how important that is to him and his approach we have somebody who's not been heard from that much Dominique Miel but she wrote a beautiful book about her investing called Damsel in Distressed she was focused on Distressed at when she was at Canyon Partners she's funny and a wonderful writer Dominique has a great section.
这实际上是一个广泛的贡献者群体。我是说，我们有托德·康姆斯，他是沃伦·巴菲特的心腹之一，虽然他在公开场合说得不多，但他有一个非常精彩的章节，讲述了自下而上的基本面分析及其对他的重要性以及他的投资方法。我们还有一个不常被提及的人，名叫多米尼克·米尔，她写了一本关于她投资经历的精彩书籍，名叫《Damsel in Distressed》。她在坎宁合伙公司时专注于困境资产投资，她风趣幽默，文字出色，多米尼克有一个很棒的章节。
Nancy Zimmerman has a really important section on arbitrage in investing and in how to think about that in terms of market inefficiency and value investing but I could go on and on it's a really strong group of a variety of different approaches and I think it holds together really well I didn't say it but I wrote the preface that was meant to be as good as I know how what has changed in the last 15 years and what has changed in the last 89 years so when you take Graham and Dodd and you say this is the Bible this is what they wrote what part of it still applies what's the intel inside where's the beef and what has changed.
Nancy Zimmerman 对于套利在投资中的重要性有一个非常重要的部分，她讨论了如何从市场无效性和价值投资的角度来思考这个问题。我可以不断地讨论，因为这是一个多种不同方法的很强的组合，我认为它结合得非常好。我虽然没有说过，但我为这本书写了序言，尽我所能地去表达在过去15年和89年间发生了什么变化。当我们看 Graham 和 Dodd 的作品时，我们称之为圣经，他们所写的内容中哪些部分仍然适用，有哪些核心理念，以及有哪些变化。
And to do both of those when then attempt to have this be that if nobody updated this for the next 50 or 100 years there'd still be a lot of beef here for future readers which I think we've accomplished but we'll find out. So that's somehow we've gone an hour and a half without mentioning the phrase margin of safety so I feel like I have to ask you about the one book that you wrote and whether you have any reflections on margin of safety that you wrote 30 years ago now and whether you're thinking about an update to that high priced scarce book only available on eBay.
如果在接下来的50或100年里，没有人更新这本书，它依然会为未来的读者提供丰富的内容，我认为我们已经达成了这个目标，不过最终还需要时间来验证。这也就是说，我们已经谈了一小时半，却没有提到“安全边际”这个词，所以我想问您，您30年前写的那本书有没有让您产生什么反思？您是否考虑过更新那本价格高昂且只有在eBay上才能买到的稀有书籍？
It truly has gone out of print maybe at some point I'll bring it back I have an idea in my head of what might be a companion edition that could make sense of bringing it back in some way when this project came up I knew that I could only do one or at least one at a time so I thought this thing deserved to be updated a lot of change in the world in 15 years I thought I knew a good group of contributors and when I called them to see if they'd be willing and they all said yes I felt like now I had to go forward.
它确实已经绝版了，也许某个时候我会重新出版。我心中有一个想法，可以做一个伴随版本，这样重新出版可能会有意义。当这个项目出现时，我知道我只能同时做一个或至少一个，所以我觉得这件作品值得更新。世界在过去的15年中发生了很多变化，我觉得我认识一群优秀的贡献者。当我联系他们询问是否愿意参与时，他们都答应了，这让我觉得现在必须继续前进。
But I got a great team there's some ample reason that I could redo or new edition of margin of safety I would talk more about process I talk about culture and investment firm I talk about the flexibility of approach in that you don't need it to look exactly the same as it looked last year or five years ago that the markets evolve the kinds of securities that exist evolve I would talk much more about private investments and the applicability of Graham and Dodd principles to private investments I did some of that in my preface but I would greatly elaborate on that and look the other thing about margin of safety is it's 30 years old and I think part of it was meant to be just an intellectual continuation of intelligent investor and I think I achieved some of that there's some things in it I wouldn't write today some things I think are just wrong I didn't really do a good job on understanding the value of intangible assets for example the world of distress debt still applies and it's still really interesting but there'd be a whole new sections on that because the game has changed and for the worst probably so there's a lot to be said there's an old saying somebody told me after I wrote that book the saying is it's good to have written a book and it is good to have written a book it's not good to be writing a book and especially when you've got a day job it was hard enough when I wrote that book that I had two small kids so my hands are full but it's not impossible that I would bring it back in some way I still love that I stole the title blatantly from intelligent investor because it's such a great expression and it really captures what a value investor tries to do you need to leave room because you might be wrong markets might go against you but if you're patient you can find a margin of safety and having one means you're likely not to be in tears when a lot of other investors are.
我有一个很棒的团队，所以我有足够的理由去重写或出新版的《安全边际》。在新版中，我会更多地谈论投资过程、企业文化以及投资公司的灵活性。我会提到，投资方法不需要和去年或五年前完全一样，因为市场在变化，证券的种类也在变化。我会更加详细地讨论私人投资，以及格雷厄姆和多德的投资原则在私人投资中的应用。在我的前言中已经提到了一些，但我会大大补充这些内容。
《安全边际》已经有30年的历史，我认为它部分是《聪明的投资者》的智力延续，而我也在其中实现了一些目标。不过，其中有些内容今天我不会再写，有些我现在认为是错误的。比如，我当时没有很好地理解无形资产的价值。尽管困境债务的世界仍然适用且非常有趣，但鉴于市场变化，这部分需要全新章节。
有一句老话，有人在我写完那本书后告诉我，那就是“写过一本书是好事”。确实如此，但写作的过程并不是件容易的事，尤其是当你还有全职工作时。我写那本书时有两个小孩，所以手头事情很多。不过，我也不排除可能会以某种形式重新推出这本书。我仍然很喜欢《聪明的投资者》这个标题，我直接借用了这个表达，因为它很好地体现了价值投资者的目标。你需要给自己留有余地，因为你可能会犯错，市场也可能会对你不利。但如果你有耐心，就能找到一条安全边际，确保在市场不好的时候你不会像其他投资者那样难过。
I'd love to circle all the way back to the beginning with your studying of baseball stats and I want to ask you about two personal investments which may not at all sit into your value investing framework so one which you've been involved with for a long time the Boston Red Sox how did you think about that as an investment when your day job is so focused on the analytics of value investing. So as a lifelong baseball fan as a money ball fan as a Red Sox fan after I transplanted up here the story behind it is somebody to approach me to buy into the Celtics when that franchise changed hands something like 20 years ago and I thought about it I thought hard but I passed because I felt like my true love was baseball and I said to the sports agent who was marketing it look I'm gonna pass but if you ever see a slice of the Red Sox give me a call and four or five years later he called he was a former patriot actually he was a wide receiver for the Patriots Randy Vitaha and he called and I bought somebody else's state I didn't know if it would be a good investment it was probably 30 times current cash flow what I thought was it would be fun and I said to my wife I said this might be crazy it's not money we absolutely have to have and it might be a good investment but it's bound to be fun it tried to be a way better investment than I would have thought as good as any investment one could have made it was a fractal interest in the team and those were trading probably relatively inexpensive compared to where the team would have traded and the team has done a brilliant job under the operational leadership of Sam Kennedy who's the best COO of anything in the whole sports world which I think most people would actually agree with and they've grown the value of the business enormously John Henry and Tom Warner have also built a huge amount of value in their activities and their leadership so it's been great and it turned out to be a value investment I didn't know it was but the real return has still been the fun it's just been enormously fun to be part of it to go to meetings and express a few thoughts here in there and my wife and I go more that we ever did and that also has been fun not only for me but for her as well.
我很想回到你学习棒球统计的起点，并想问你两个可能不符合你价值投资框架的个人投资。其中一个是你参与很久的波士顿红袜队。当你的日常工作主要集中在价值投资分析时，你是如何看待这一投资的？作为一个终生的棒球迷、"点球成金"的影迷，以及在我搬到这里后成为红袜队球迷的人，其背后有个故事：大约20年前有人找我买凯尔特人队的一部分，因为那个时候那支球队易手。我认真考虑过，但最终放弃，因为我觉得我真正热爱的还是棒球。我对负责卖这笔交易的经纪人说，我不买了，但如果你看到红袜队有份额出售，请通知我。四五年后，他给我打电话，他是前爱国者队的接球手Randy Vitaha，他打电话来我就买了别人的股份。我不确定这会不会是个好投资，因为估值是当前现金流的30倍。我只觉得这会很有趣。我对我的妻子说，这可能有点疯狂，但反正用不着这些钱。它能否成为好投资不确定，但肯定会很好玩。结果证明，这成为我能想到的最好的投资之一。它是球队的一部分股份，当时这些股份交易价格相对便宜，而球队在Sam Kennedy的领导下做得非常出色，他是整个体育界最优秀的首席运营官，他们极大地提高了这个商业的价值。John Henry和Tom Warner在他们的操作和领导中也创造了大量的价值。所以这个投资非常棒，尽管我一开始不知道它会是价值投资，但实际回报一直是那份乐趣。参与其中、参加会议、偶尔表达一些想法真的非常有趣。我和妻子去得比以前更多，这也不仅我觉得有趣，她也很喜欢。
So the other one circling back to stats and sports and maybe even Baltimore you've been involved in horses yep and I think twice had a horse win the pre-knus at Pomeco yep we'd love to have you share a little bit about that experience and horse handicapping as it relates to investing. So when I was a kid we used to go to the races after school literally junior high school we'd run home throw our books down head up to the track they'd let you in free ten minutes before the eighth race and you'd bum a program and a racing for a month some old guy was leaving and you'd handicapped quickly and put down a few dollars and or sometimes you get an old guy to bet for you as well since you were too young legally to do it then I'd go home and do my homework so I just love the analytical experience of handicapping it's not the same as investing but it has commonality you take an enormous amounts of information it's highly disparate you need to factor in so many different considerations of the horse and the trainer and the jockey and the track condition and the distance and the who else is in the race and likely pace scenario the race you need to factor in a lot and I love that analysis that's some point a friend from childhood said why don't we buy a horse together which probably happens a lot and it's always a terrible idea it was a terrible idea in terms of making money it was a fun idea and that led me to stay involved and so I have horses and have been incredibly fortunate in the last couple of decades to win the pre-kneast twice it's a race that for me it's as good as winning the Derby it's the middle jewel of the triple crown well it's not the Kentucky Derby it's really special and to do it on my home field three blocks where I grew up is very special so that's been a lot of fun.
所以，回到统计和体育，甚至是巴尔的摩的话题，你参与到了赛马中，是的，我想你有两匹马在皮姆利克赢得了两次普里克尼斯赛，是的。我们很想听你分享一下那段经历，以及赛马预测与投资之间的关系。
在我还是个小孩子的时候，我们放学后常常去看赛马，真的是初中的时候。我们会跑回家，丢下书包，然后去赛马场。他们在第八场比赛前十分钟会让你免费进去，你可以问一些老人拿节目单和比赛信息，然后快速进行赛马预测，下注几美元。有时你也可以让那些老家伙替你下注，因为你当时年龄太小，不能合法下注。然后，我回到家后就做作业。我非常喜欢那种分析的体验。虽然赛马预测和投资不一样，但两者有共通之处。你需要处理大量的信息，信息差异很大，你要考虑很多因素，比如马匹、训练师、骑师、赛道状况、比赛距离、比赛对手和可能的比赛节奏。你需要考虑很多，我很喜欢这种分析。
有一次，童年的一个朋友说，为什么我们不一起买匹马呢？这可能是个常见的想法，但从赚钱的角度来说，这是个糟糕的主意。不过，这非常有趣，这让我继续参与其中。数十年来，我真的很幸运，在普里克尼斯赛上赢了两次。对我来说，这场比赛就像赢得德比一样好。这是三冠王赛事中的第二场。虽然它不是肯塔基德比，但非常特别，而且是在我长大的地方，只隔三个街区，这种体验非常特别。这段经历真的很有趣。
I know that you don't often do this when it's not tied to philanthropy so I wanted to make sure I had a chance to take the opportunity to get your thoughts on philanthropy just to touch on this one thought about philanthropy relates to this book because I pledged all the proceeds and royalties from this book and as well as a master class I recently did to increase diversity in the investment field so I'm giving all of the money to three organizations SEO something called lighted pathways and girls who invest all of whom are bringing people that are underrepresented in the investment business into the business this summer girls who invest for example has 207 scholars who are rising college juniors who have found out about the program applied to it it's selective and are going to be scattered out at different investment firms and endowment offices and other related types of enterprises and getting exposure they get trained at Wharton for five or six weeks and then they do their summer job for the next six weeks not everybody will love it but a lot of people have their eyes opened this summer bell post will have three girls who invest but about it doesn't in turns total spread out across the organization from IT and HR and communications we have interns pretty much up and down the organization and we feel great about it it's good for our team to be doing that we actually have long been convinced that having a more diverse team makes us better as a firm diversity of thought diversity of experiences challenging existing thinking it just has to make us better and so we want to always be part of that this was an example of philanthropy to further an end my wife and I formed a foundation over 30 years ago when I first started to make real money are we joined the giving pledge a number of years ago we've already given away over half and continue to make that a priority it's a lot of fun it's a challenge philanthropy focuses on the world's problems and they're called problems for reason if they had easy solutions they wouldn't be called problems we work on some things in biomedicine and health care we are doing some really interesting things in Israel both in medical research but also with the our population trying to bring people into the 21st century in terms of diversifying their workforce and creating opportunity for kids of all backgrounds in Israel to get a great science education and then to have career opportunities and working with companies to be more welcoming to people to end up with more diverse workforces and it's actually taking off it's actually starting to work and we feel like that's one of the really important things we're doing.
我知道您平常不太会参与这种活动，除非是出于慈善目的。因此，我特别想借机会请您分享一下对慈善事业的看法。关于慈善，我想提到这本书，因为我承诺将书籍和我最近进行的一堂大师课的所有收益和版税捐赠出来，以促进投资领域的多样性。我会把所有资金捐给三个组织：SEO、Lighted Pathways，以及Girls Who Invest。所有这些组织都致力于帮助那些在投资行业中代表性不足的人进入这个领域。例如，Girls Who Invest今年夏天就有207名学者，他们都是大三的学生，通过申请和筛选，最终被分配到不同的投资公司、捐赠办公室及其他相关企业工作，并获得实践机会。他们会在沃顿商学院接受五到六周的培训，然后在接下来的六周中完成他们的暑期实习。虽然并不是所有人都会爱上这份工作，但很多人会因此开阔眼界。今年夏天，Bell Post公司将迎来三位Girls Who Invest的学员，我们总共迎来了十几位实习生，他们将分布在公司各个部门，比如IT、人力资源和沟通部门。我们为此感到非常自豪，因为我们一直相信，多样化的团队会让我们公司更好。不同的思维和经历能挑战现有的想法，使我们进步。因此，我们一直希望能参与其中。这是我们为了一个目标而进行慈善活动的例子。
我和我的妻子在三十多年前，我开始赚取较多收入时就成立了一个基金会。我们在几年前加入了捐赠誓言，已经捐出了超过一半的收入，并将其继续作为优先事项。这件事既有趣又具挑战性。慈善事业关注世界性的问题，而这些问题之所以被称为问题，是因为它们并没有简单的解决方案。我们在生物医学和医疗保健领域进行了一些工作，并在以色列进行一些非常有趣的项目，既包括医学研究，也包括帮助阿拉伯族群融入21世纪，通过多样化其劳动力并为各背景的以色列孩子创造出色的科学教育和职业机会，并与公司合作，使它们更欢迎不同背景的人，从而实现更多样化的劳动力。这项工作实际上已经初见成效，我们认为这是我们正在做的非常重要的事情之一。
We do a lot of the local Boston community and beyond the Massachusetts community probably the single biggest area right now is democracy funding because you know about how threatened American democracy is in terms of what happened in 2020 but also in terms of kicking people off the voter rolls and jerry mandering and making voting harder in general this is not what a healthy democracy does and of all the things I want for my kids obviously I want good health but I also want them and their kids and their grandkids to live in a democracy democracy has been the most important thing in my life that I can imagine what my life would have been like if I didn't grow up in the United States or Britain or Canada or somewhere I don't want that for them and a lot of the trends are disturbing and we're in a very difficult froth time for America I obviously want the country to come back together but I especially need it to come back as a democracy.
我们在本地的波士顿社区及马萨诸塞州以外的社区做了很多事情，目前最大的一项工作就是民主资金的支持。因为大家知道，美国的民主面临威胁，这不仅体现在2020年的事件上，还包括将人们从选民名单中剔除、不公正的选区划分以及整体上让投票变得更加困难。这些都不是一个健康民主应该有的表现。在我希望孩子们拥有的一切中，除了健康，我还希望他们，以及他们的孩子和孙辈，都能生活在一个民主的环境中。民主在我生命中占据了重要地位，我难以想象如果没有在美国、英国或加拿大这些国家长大，我的生活会是什么样。我不希望我的孩子面临那样的情况。目前很多趋势令人不安，美国正处于一个非常困难的过渡时期。我希望国家重新团结起来，尤其是能够重新作为一个民主国家。
So that's become a very large area of funding we're focused on organizations that protect the vote organizations that defend against litigation organizations that are fighting jerry mandering that are innovating in types of election structures that might lead to better outcomes maybe more centrist candidates well Seth I don't want to go with that asking a couple of fun closing questions so what's your favorite hobby or activity outside of work and family I'm a red sucks fan I love going to the red sucks I love thinking about their next move and imagining what the GM job might be like because it's I think not that different from a PM job only much harder.
这已经成为我们一个非常重要的资助领域。我们专注于支持那些保护投票权的组织，那些对抗诉讼的组织，那些打击选区划分不公的组织，以及那些创新选举结构的组织，希望这些努力可以带来更好的结果，也许甚至能推动更中立的候选人出现。那么，塞斯，最后我想问几个轻松的问题。除了工作和家庭之外，你最喜欢的爱好或活动是什么？我是一名红袜队的粉丝。我喜欢去看红袜队的比赛，也喜欢思考他们的下一步动作，想象一下做总经理的感觉，因为我觉得这和做产品经理的工作很相似，只是更难。
What's your biggest pet peeve I think as an individual I don't like people who take each other for granted I think that it's easy to get busy it's easy to go on autopilot but I think it's really important to stop and ask the extra question especially care about the people that you care about and live that way in investing I get frustrated at the short term orientation I think it's so pernicious it's easy to fall into that trap and to have investment success you have to fight that successfully.
你最大的烦恼是什么？我个人最无法忍受的是那些彼此不珍惜对方的人。我觉得在生活中，人们很容易变得忙碌，很容易不假思索地过日子，但我认为停下来多想想、关心你在乎的人是非常重要的。在投资方面，我对短期导向感到非常不满，这种倾向很具危害性，很容易让人陷入其中。如果想要在投资中取得成功，就必须努力避免这种倾向。
I also get stuck on the idea that stocks can be valued to the penny that I believe in the concept of a range of value that there's no exact price for a business when you read Wall Street reports they see our price target is 5250 why don't we say between 50 and 60 but if you buy it at a 35 you're okay I think that would be for the best what an investment mistake have you made that you'll never make again this isn't a profound one but it's my first one and I don't know that anybody knows about it I've never talked about it but in the earliest days of BAL post we had this great idea there was a closed-end publicly traded mutual fund that had omitted some dividends and it was in arrears and as you know they have to clean those up before they can pay common dividends.
我也始终纠结于股票可以精确到每分钱这个想法。我更相信价值是有一个范围的，而不是可以给公司定一个确切的价格。当你阅读华尔街的报告时，他们会说我们的目标价格是52.50美元，为什么我们不能说价格在50到60美元之间呢？但如果你以35美元买进，那么就没问题。我认为这样就最好不过了。
谈到投资时，我犯过的一个错误是再也不想重蹈覆辙的。这虽然不是什么深刻的教训，但这是我第一个教训，我想没有人知道这件事，因为我从来没谈起过。在BAL post的最初阶段，我们有个好主意：有一个封闭式公开交易的共同基金，它漏掉了一些股息，而且还有拖欠。正如你所知，他们必须先清理这些问题，然后才能支付普通股息。
This company had announced that they were going to be cleaning them up and paying a giant dividend and the stock went up a lot to what I thought was full value so I sold it and then I realized I was two weeks away from going long-term so giant mistake just from sloppiness now I have an operations team that would never let that happen back then I didn't I knew it but I didn't stop and check so it just made me realize again I have to check every detail which two people have had the biggest impact on your professional life I think there are three but they're in different categories the two are Max Hina and Michael Price from mutual shares from Max I learned to be kind to people and from Mike I learned to never stop pulling threats but the third is my wife who's been so supportive that without her and everything she did to organize our family and take care of the kids when I was unavailable writing my book or working or on a business trip I couldn't have done it so it'll be those three.
这家公司曾宣布他们将进行清理，并支付大量股息，致使股票大幅上涨，达到我认为的完全价值，因此我卖掉了。然而，我意识到自己两周后就可以变成长线投资，这实在是因为疏忽而犯下的巨大错误。现在，我有一个运营团队，绝不会让这种事情发生，但当时我并没有停下来检查。我知道这个问题，却没采取行动，这让我再次意识到，必须检查每一个细节。
在我的职业生涯中，对我影响最大的是哪两个人？我认为有三位，但他们属于不同的类别：两位是来自共同基金的马克斯·希纳和迈克尔·普莱斯。马克斯教会了我对人友善，而迈克则教会了我不断追求细节。但第三位是我的妻子，她给予了我极大的支持；如果没有她，以及她所做的一切，如组织家庭事务和在我写书、工作或出差时照顾孩子，我就无法取得现在的成就。所以，这三位对我影响最大。
What's the best advice you ever received and what context did it come to you Max Hina told me that I ought to take a Dale Carnegie course on public speaking and I didn't know what was behind that but when I reflect back being able to communicate your ideas being good public speaker being comfortable with that are just so important Max saw in me that was an area that wasn't as strong as it could be and so almost 40 years ago I give him enormous credit I'm glad that I took his advice it was so spot on with teaching from your parents is most stayed with you Phil Anthropy mom and dad got divorced when I was young but each of them wrote checks to their colleges were checks to various organizations that were on their near and dear list.
我收到过最好的建议是在将近40年前，当时Max Hina建议我去参加戴尔·卡耐基的公众演讲课程。虽然我当时不太明白他为什么这么建议，但现在回想起来，能够有效沟通你的想法，成为一个好的公众演讲者，并在这种场合中感到自如，是非常重要的。Max看出了我这方面的不足，我很感激当时听取了他的建议，这个建议对我非常有帮助。
至于父母对我最深远的影响是慈善事业。虽然我很小的时候他们就离婚了，但他们各自依然定期给他们的母校和一些他们关心的机构捐款。
I found that motivational and inspiring that I realized that it's also important to me the same way to get back to repay organizations that have benefited you in your life my self last one what life lesson have you learned that you wish you knew a lot earlier in life something a famous investor said to me once which is to never be afraid to bet on yourself obviously my career path was a bet on myself but I also probably would have done even better if I had had more confidence about the uniqueness of the kinds of opportunities I was finding earlier in my career.
我发现这个观念很有激励和启发作用，我意识到回馈那些在生活中帮助过你的组织同样对我来说很重要。最后一个问题：你在生活中学到的哪个人生经验是你希望自己早点知道的？一位著名投资者曾对我说，不要害怕投资自己。显然，我的职业道路就是自我投资，但如果我在职业生涯早期对我发现的独特机会更有信心的话，我可能会做得更好。
I never want to look back I never want to win and complain about could have what a shudder maybe I could have made a few more dollars but I think the advice that don't be afraid to bet on yourself is really important it's advice I give to young people all the time I don't tell them to go start a fund but once you're out there once you feel ready don't sell your business apply yourself make your business as good as it can be so that applies to me too we each bring whatever qualities we have and whatever dreams we have to everything we do.
我从不想回头看，也不想在成功后抱怨“本可以做到更多”的想法。也许我能赚到更多钱，但我认为“不要害怕投资自己”这个建议非常重要。这是我经常给年轻人的建议。我并不是让他们去创办基金，而是告诉他们，一旦你做好准备，走出去后，不要轻易放弃，把自己全部的精力投入其中，把你的事业做到最好。这同样适用于我。我们每个人都带着自己的特质和梦想去做每一件事情。
I was just fortunate that I had the opportunities I did and I think part of that advice essentially is make the most of the opportunities that are made available to you Seth thanks so much for this we are opportunity to take so much time and share your great wisdom and experience thank you it was a lot of fun as you predict it thanks for listening to the show if you like what you heard hop on our website at capitalislecators.com where you can access past shows join our mailing list and sign up for premium content have a good one and see you next time bye.
我很幸运能够得到那些机会，我认为其中一个建议就是要充分利用你获得的机会。Seth，非常感谢你花这么多时间来分享你的智慧和经验。正如你所预料的，这次交流很有趣。感谢你收听我们的节目。如果你喜欢你听到的内容，可以访问我们的网站 capitalislecators.com，在那里你可以访问往期节目，加入我们的邮件列表，并注册获取优质内容。祝一切顺利，下次再见！再见。