Introduction to Part I
THE ESSENTIAL LESSONSBY ROGER LOWENSTEIN
If the modern reader were asked, what did the junk bonds of the 1980s, the dot-com stocks of the late 1990s, and, more recently, the various subprime mortgage portfolios of the 2000s all have in common, the first correct answer is that each of them took a nosedive from a highly inflated price to one rather closer to zero. You can throw in, for good measure, the net asset value and reputation of the world’s most intelligent hedge fund, Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM). The second right answer is that each was an investment disaster whose perils could have been avoided by a patient reading of Security Analysis. Graham and Dodd wrote the first edition in 1934 and first revised it in 1940—some four decades before Michael Milken became a household name and three score years in advance of the frenzy for no-documentation, adjustable-rate mortgages. The authors advocated more than a merely generalized skepticism. They prescribed (as we will see) a series of specific injunctions, each of which would have served as a prophylactic against one or more of the above-named fiascos and their associated investment fads.
While the book was received by serious investors as an instant classic, I cannot say it elevated Wall Street or the public above their tendency to speculate. If I can venture a guess as to why, it is that even the experienced investor is too often like the teenage driver first taking over the wheel. He hears the advice about being careful, avoiding icy patches and so forth, and consigns it to the remote part of his brain reserved for archived parental instructions. He surely does not want to wreck the family car, but avoiding an accident is a low priority because he does not think it will happen to him. Thus with our investor: he is focused on making money, not with averting the myriad potential wrecks in the investment landscape. And I suspect that Graham and Dodd have been ignored by those who suffer from the misconception that trying to make serious money requires that one take serious risks. In fact, the converse is true. Avoiding serious loss is a precondition for sustaining a high compound rate of growth.
In 25 years as a financial journalist, virtually all of the investors of this writer’s acquaintance who have consistently earned superior profits have been Graham-and-Dodders. The most famous, of course, is Warren Buffett, and he is also the most illustrative. Buffett became Graham’s pupil and disciple in 1950, when as a scrawny 20-year-old, he confided to a friend that he would be studying under a pair of “hotshots” (meaning Benjamin Graham and his assistant David Dodd) at the Columbia Business School. 1 And he was also, years later, the first to admit that he had moved beyond the stocks that lay within his master’s ken. Buffett was an adapter; he did not imitate his mentor stroke for stroke. He began with Ben Graham types of stocks such as Berkshire Hathaway, which was then a struggling textile maker, and he moved on to Walt Disney and American Express, which possessed less in the way of tangible assets but more in economic value. Yet his approach remained consistent (even if the choice of securities it yielded did not).
It is this approach, successfully applied by a devoted minority of other professional and individual investors, that makes Security Analysis an enduring roadmap. It is still the bible for avoiding those icy patches—perhaps that much seems obvious—but it is also an instruction manual for identifying investments that are superior as well as safe.
This was known without a doubt to the working investors who enrolled in Graham’s classes, some of whom would bolt from the lecture hall to call their brokers with the names of the stocks that Professor Graham had used as examples. One later successful broker maintained that Graham’s tips had been so valuable that the class actually paid for his degree. Whatever the literal truth, Graham was the rare academic who was both theoretician and working practitioner. Some brief knowledge of the man will elucidate his approach. 2 At a personal level, Graham was a caricature of the absent-minded professor, a devotee of the classics, a student of Latin and Greek, and a translator of Spanish poetry who could dress for work in mismatched shoes and who evidenced little interest in money. But intellectually, his curiosity was unrivaled. When he graduated from Columbia in 1914, he was offered positions in English, mathematics, and philosophy. Taking the advice of a college dean, he went to Wall Street, which he treated rather like another branch of academia—that is, as a discipline that was subject to logical and testable principles (albeit ones that had yet to be discovered). He gravitated to money management, in which he excelled, eventually combining it with writing and teaching. It took Graham 20 years—which is to say, a complete cycle from the bull market of the Roaring Twenties through the dark, nearly ruinous days of the early 1930s—to refine his investment philosophy into a discipline that was as rigorous as the Euclidean theorems he had studied in college.
导读 必不可少的教诲
罗杰·洛温斯坦
美国顶级财经记者,畅销书《巴菲特传》作者
如果问现在的读者,20 世纪 80 年代的垃圾债券、20世纪 90 年代末的科网股和 21 世纪的各种次级按揭贷款组合有什么共同点?第一个正确的答案是,它们的价格都经历了从高位暴跌至接近零的过程。世界上最“睿智”的对冲基金,长期资本管理公司(Long-Term Capital Management, LTCM)的声誉和资产净值也经历了同样过程的例子。第二个正确的答案是,这些投资灾难都可能通过耐心阅读《证券分析》得以避免。格雷厄姆和多德于 1934 年合写了本书的第一版,在 1940 年进行了第一次修订,这个时间比迈克尔·米尔肯(Michael Milken,被誉为“垃圾债券之王”)成为一个家喻户晓的名字早了约四十年;比不需审查贷款申请人收入就为其提供的贷款(no-documentation mortgages),及浮动利率抵押贷款(adjustable rate mortgages)的热潮早了六十多年。作者倡导的不只是一般意义上的怀疑论,他们提出的是一系列具体训诫,其中每条训诫都可以防止一个到多个上述投资灾难和相关狂潮的出现。
虽然这本书被严谨的投资者奉为经典,但我不认为它能够改变华尔街机构或公众的投机倾向。我认为即使是经验丰富的投资者,也可能表现得像初次驾车的年轻人一样。他听到了如“小心驾驶”、“避开结冰路面”这样的忠告,却置若罔闻,权当是父母的唠叨。
他肯定不希望撞坏家里的车,但避免意外并不是他优先考虑的事,因为他不认为意外会发生在自己身上。与此相似,投资者常常只将注意力集中于赚钱,却对投资环境中无数潜在的风险置之不理。我怀疑那些误认为“高收益必定来自高风险”的人一直将格雷厄姆和多德的话当作耳边风。但事实上,避免严重的损失,是维持高复利增长的一个先决条件。
在我 25 年的财经记者生涯中,我所知晓的能够一直获得丰厚利润的投资者,几乎都是格雷厄姆和多德的信徒。其中最有名的,当属沃伦·巴菲特,他也是最具说服力的实例。1950 年,巴菲特成为格雷厄姆的学生,那时他还是个年仅 20 岁,瘦弱的年轻人。他曾向朋友透露过,他在哥伦比亚商学院两位“能人”(指的是本杰明·格雷厄姆及其助手戴维·多德)的指导下学习 ① 。而几年后,他也是第一个承认涉足超出导师所熟知的股票领域的人。巴菲特是一个相机行事者,没有依葫芦画瓢地模仿他的恩师。他从格雷厄姆青睐的股票类型开始,如伯克希尔·哈撒韦公司——一个当时还苦苦挣扎在破产边缘的纺织品制造商。随后,他转向沃尔特·迪士尼(Walt Disney)和美国运通(American Express)等拥有较少的有形资产,但更具经济价值的公司。但他的投资理念始终坚持不变(即使因之选择的证券在变)。
后来,少数忠实的专业投资者和个人投资者坚持用这种投资方法取得了成功,也让《证券分析》成为投资者手中一张历久弥新的路线图。至今,本书仍可谓是投资者不可或缺的圣经,它提醒着投资者避开那些显而易见但十分危险的“结冰道路”。同时,它也是投资者不可多得的一部投资宝典,引领着投资者寻觅一些出众而安全的投资项目。
那些一边参加格雷厄姆所授课程,一边工作的投资者对此深信不疑。他们中的一些人曾中途溜出讲堂给经纪人打电话,交易格雷厄姆教授在课堂上举例子时提到的股票。一个后来取得成功的经纪人坚称,格雷厄姆的提示非常有价值,听他的课能赚足学费,可谓“课超所值”。无论这些记载是否属实,格雷厄姆确实是不可多得的集理论家和实践家于一身的学者。为了能更好地了解他的投资方法,我们先简要地介绍一下他的特点。在个人层面上,格雷厄姆是一个十分健忘的教授,他一心记挂着工作,以至于意识不到自己穿着不成对的鞋子。同时,他也是古典文学的忠实爱好者,拉丁文和希腊文的研究者,西班牙语诗歌的翻译家。他对金钱没什么兴趣,但在学术上,他的好奇心无人能及。1914 年从哥伦比亚大学毕业时,他同时得到了英语、数学和哲学的任教机会。但他听从了一名院长的建议,来到了华尔街。在这里工作时,他更像是面对学术界的一个分支,一门涉及逻辑学和久经检验的原则(尽管这些原则尚未被发现)的学科。他被资金管理深深吸引,并在该领域表现出色,最终将实践的成果融合到了他的写作和教学中。格雷厄姆花了二十多年的时间把他的投资理念凝练成一门如欧式定理般严谨的学科。在这么长的时间里,市场经历了一个完整的经济周期——从 20 世纪 20 年代兴旺的大牛市,到 20 世纪 30 年代初黑暗的、接近毁灭的萧条。
……
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