編者按：本文來自微信公眾號易則投資（ID：yizefund）翻譯，原文作者：James Anderson，創業邦經授權轉載
引言詹姆斯•安德森(James Anderson)是Baillie Gifford的合夥人之一，也是該公司的旗艦基金蘇格蘭抵押貸款信託(Scottish Mortgage Investment Trust，下稱SMT)的基金經理。
安德森出生於1959年，本科畢業於牛津大學歷史系，後赴意大利和加拿大讀研，1982年獲得國際事務碩士學位。安德森於1983年加入Baillie Gifford，1987年成為合夥人，2000年開始管理SMT，20年間為股東帶來了約1500%的回報。
安德森將於2022年4月30日從BG退休，所以這封信是安德森在BG的最後一封致投資人的信。
寫了這麼多年四平八穩的信之後，請允許我在這第22封也是最後一封信中直率一些。過去的20多年裏我犯了很多錯、做了很多誤判，但是我越來越相信，我最大的失誤是不夠激進。坦率的説，傳統投資管理的世界已不可挽回的破碎了。它需要新的思想，遠遠超過愛麗絲在夢遊仙境中所説的“在早餐之前先想六件不可能發生的事情”。
一些信念讓我開頭先講一講我所相信的理念。無需多言，我的繼任者應該對未來的幾十年中一直相信這些信念持懷疑態度。世界在變，我們也要變。現在確實是一個告別的合適的時點。投資的世界在20世紀80年代中期發生了深刻的變化。由價值投資教父本傑明•格雷厄姆（Ben Graham）所開創的、沃倫•巴菲特（Warren Buffett）所尊崇的和媒體所擁抱的價值投資理論，一點也不像愛麗絲的兔子洞(Alice 's rabbit hole)，能夠描述19世紀末的情況。為了説明格雷厄姆所定義的十年利潤翻倍的成長股的世界發生了什麼變化，讓我們看一看最近的一些數據：
我相信你們很多人能夠認出來，這是亞馬遜（Amazon）的年度收入數字。這些數字還低估了亞馬遜的成績，因為第三方會計準則比較保守。亞馬遜20多年的年複合增速高達41%。格雷厄姆等人更喜歡的自由現金流指標，在2020年也高達310億美元。自從數字科技的出現，這種可持續的高速增長模式和規模效應越來越明顯，最早的典型案例是微軟（Microsoft），它在上市35年後仍然保持高增長。
投資的道理就存在於這些極端情況。CFA灌輸給年輕人的是，沿着經典的鐘形曲線（正態分佈）你可以選擇一個風險與收益的點來符合你的投資組合，但這並不現實，因為CFA既沒有接受當今世界的高度不確定性，也不承認回報的極端分佈意味着尋找具有極端和可持續增長特徵的公司對於投資的核心意義。分心在平庸公司中尋找短期的微小機會是始終的誘惑。這種誘惑需要抵制。這需要強大信念。股價回撤是經常的和嚴重的，回撤40%是常態。股價走勢圖看起來就是從左下到右上的平滑上升，但是當你買入之後情況就不是如此了。
那我們如何識別這些有傑出潛力的股票呢？我們如何獲得信念以使得複利魔法能夠發揮作用呢？剛好貝索斯（Jeff Bezos）卸任亞馬遜CEO，我們來回顧一下我們注意到什麼、如何忍受波動、哪些地方沒做好。
偉大的投資，通常具備以下特徵：公司具有無限的增長機會，從不自我設限；由創始人來領導公司；具有鮮明的經營哲學，通常是從第一性原理出發而獨創出來的。我認為這些特點在早期的亞馬遜身上都是可以看得到的。讀了貝索斯1997年致股東的信，就能知道他是兼具野心和耐心的具有獨特思維的人。坦率的説，我們當初之所以沒有認識到，不是因為沒有線索，而是因為我們自身的侷限性。我們對市場波動太熟了，太過於追求短期業績，太過於看重回撤控制，很難成為堅定的持有者。直到2005-06年左右，我們的投資才沒那麼糟糕，能夠認識到亞馬遜的潛力，並且能夠忍受各種波動與噪音的干擾。干擾是非常多的，例如：亞馬遜股價在2006年從最高峯迴撤46%；我漸漸習慣了，同行們在電話會議上宣稱亞馬遜是他們最喜歡做空的股票；他們特別不喜歡亞馬遜Prime會員計劃和服務計費兩項業務的成本，服務計費後來變成了AWS雲服務業務。我們逐漸學習和理解亞馬遜，但是當亞馬遜頭寸超過我們的10%持倉限制時，我們多次被迫減倉。這一點我要道歉，我認為這種做法是有問題的。最近幾個月我們對亞馬遜的熱情才稍微減了一點，亞馬遜被認為是安全、可接受的價值投資標的，創始人也不再擔任CEO了，雖然前路依然光明，但是我們擔心，創業第一天的那種激情沒有了。
時間框架，可能性，極度不確定性着迷於長期投資決策的原因數不勝數，這裏就不一一描述。但是有一個看起來似乎異常重要的推論被忽視了。有效市場理論認為，所有可得信息都包含在股價中了，只有新的信息才起作用。這被用來證明對企業盈利公告、宏觀經濟新聞等消息的追逐是合理的。反過來，追逐短期回報的力量又加強了這一點。
到目前為止，這是一個標準的批評。我們分享它，然後問題就來了。如果你相信所有信息都體現在股價中，同時又認為短期投資業績至關重要，這就留下了一個思考的空白。沒有明顯的根據來解讀未來。這聽起來很抽象但其實不是。讓我們以特斯拉為例來説明一下這個謎題。當我們7 年前第一次投資特斯拉時，我們認為，更確切地説是觀察到，電池性能改進和電動汽車製造學習的規律和速度，在現實中很清楚了，在學術研究中也很好闡述了。從那時起，改進的速度和對數據的信心一直在上升。這使得在投資允許的情況下，必然在某一天，電動汽車將比內燃機具有更高性能和更便宜，更不用説更環保。當15%以上的進步速度面對2-3%的蝸牛速度時，超越就會發生。
既然特斯拉是西方世界唯一的大玩家，我們的投資決策就很簡單明瞭。我們只需要聆聽專家意見，然後等待。大部分投資者並不去聽專家意見，而是聽經紀人和媒體的話，被恐慌買賣和很多做空者所迷惑。新聞頭條告訴他們，下季度特斯拉的日子將不好過，馬斯克（Elon Musk）又口無遮攔。對我們而言，這是一種明顯的市場失效，為有耐心的投資人提供了極高可能性的高回報。太多的投資決策是基於邊際判斷。電動汽車將勝出的可能性是越來越大的。我們不需要洞見，不需要聰明的模型來發現它，只需要耐心和對專家、對公司的信任。不確定性在別處，地理上的別處。考慮到中國市場的高度競爭，我們對蔚來汽車的投資能否大獲成功或者能否存活，是完全不確定的。特斯拉的投資回報也要考慮中國市場，尤其是現在，尤其對於特斯拉的自動駕駛雄心。這將改變特斯拉的經濟狀況。儘管我們盡力去做，我們也不大可能預估出特斯拉在一個全新行業中勝出的可能性，也無法預估一旦勝出後現金流的精確結果。離奇的是，經紀商、對沖基金專家和評論人士都聲稱能夠解讀特斯拉的未來，並能給出一個精確的目標價。也許他們都是天才吧。我們不是。我們要尊重和接受不確定性，努力找出極端上行可能出現的地方，然後耐心的觀察。
這不是增長VS價值特斯拉只是當今時代投資的核心問題的一個例子，一個至關重要的例子。投資的核心問題，不是增長還是價值的取捨，不是市場估值水平的高低，也不是2021年的經濟增速或新冠疫情的進展，而是理解變化、變化怎麼發生的、發生了多少以及他們的影響。拒絕接受這一點，反映了對安全的超級渴望，也象徵着被數學均衡所佔據的經濟思想出現了廣泛的危機。如果我們把注意力轉移去研究深刻的變化，那麼就沒那麼會相信投資有永恆的真理讓我們默認為規則。危險的呼聲不是“這次不同了”，而是拒絕承認這個世界，以及作為其反映的投資，和以前不一樣了。唯一還有效的規律是，股票的長期價值取決於其長期產生的自由現金流。但是對於這些現金流將會是多少，我們只有最少的和最模糊的線索。在一個深刻變化的年代，還拿着短期PE倍數來判斷估值的人，將難免吃灰。
未來未來的10年，將肯定出現比我們所見過的更加激盪、更鼓舞人心、更巨大的變化。我很羨慕我的繼任者們所享有的機會和經歷。即使在新冠疫情悲劇蔓延的2020年，已經有很多跡象顯示新事物的到來。我指的不是為了克服疫情限制所出現的大量數字平台，而是更激動人心、更加重要的新生力量。讓我們的社會變得更好的可再生能源取得非凡成就，逐漸成為主流；合成生物學出現了可喜的成績，使得醫療創新成為一系列有益人類的成果，而不是複雜的和令人沮喪的資源消耗。未來無限美好，對舊帝國的威脅迫在眉睫。如果不是參與了風險投資（VC），我們很難在這些領域培養巨大的熱情。我們永遠感激我們找到了在一級市場與那些具有非凡思想和能量的人互動。坦率的説，五年前我會對如今習以為常的接觸和機會感到驚訝。我們很幸運。這是一種榮幸。我們的前董事會成員，約翰•凱（John Kay），教給我們很多東西，但其中最有價值的是迂迴的作用。通過與富有遠見的企業家和他們的公司打交道，我們尋求對於未來的洞察。通常我們是不知所措的、困惑的，而不是理解的。這就是我們的計劃。投資的結果只是思想和努力過程的最終結果。
我們需要保持古怪。事實上我們需要變得更加古怪，更加激進。我們一直聲稱，在管理SMT時，我們要向有幸遇到的傑出的領導者們學習。如果可以的話，我想引用其中的兩位作為結尾。第一位是旗艦醫療投資公司創始人、Moderna董事長的Noubar Afeyan。一年前的此時此刻，我可能需要詳細説明Moderna的使命，但如今這是多餘的了。我想引用的評價遠遠超出了Moderna和疫苗的範圍：
“讓我説一些直白的話……為了取得非凡的發現，我們必須願意擁抱不合理的建議和不合理的人，因為完全合理的人做完全合理的事能夠產生巨大的突破我是不相信的”。
沒有哪個行業比資產管理行業更加質疑非傳統想法。我們需要從第一性原理出發重新構建新理念。我們需要幫助創建擁抱非凡的偉大公司。顯然，沒有任何其他人比貝索斯能更好的展示和闡釋這一點。他在最近的、很遺憾也是最後的一封CEO信的結尾寫道：
“我們都知道獨特性--獨創性，是寶貴的。我真正要求你做的是接受並現實的看待保持獨特性有多難！這個世界希望你是普通平常的，它有一千種方式驅使你這麼做。不要讓它發生”。
我不認為湯姆（Tom）和勞倫斯（Laurence）需要這個建議，也不認為他們倆會忽略貝索斯先生的觀點。但是請幫助SMT變得更不合常規、更加獨特，因為投資界的壓力持續的拉扯着我們。
詹姆斯•安德森
2021年5月12日
Managers' Review
After many years of anodyne reviews perhaps some bluntness is permissible in this final and twenty second version. There’s much that I have misunderstood and misjudged over the two decades but my ever-growing convictionis that my greatest failing has been to be insufficiently radical. To be blunt:the world of conventional investment management is irretrievably broken. It demands far in excess of the canonical ‘six impossible things before breakfast’ that Alice in Wonderland propounds.
Some Contentions
But let me start by trying to set out what I do believe. Hopefully it doesn’t need saying that my successors should be suspicious of continuing to believe in these contentions for the next decades. As the world changes so should we. Indeed this is an appropriate point of departure. The investment world changed profoundly in the mid 1980’s. It resembles that most famously described by Ben Graham, the apostle of value investing, paid homage to by Warren Buffett and perpetually embraced by the media, as little as Alice’s rabbit hole described the reality of the late 19th century. To illustrate the change from the world in which a growth stock was defined by Graham as one able to double earnings in a single decade let’s look at some more recent figures:
I’m sure that many of you will recognise these numbers as the annual revenues of Amazon. They rather understate progress as the accounting for third-party fulfilment is conservative. But we still have a compound growth rate of 41% per annum for over two decades. For those, like Graham, who prefer the-bottom line then 2020 produced $31bn in free cash flow. This pattern of sustained growth at extreme pace and with increasing returns to scale has become more and more evident since the emergence of digital technologies as first exemplified by Microsoft (still growing after 35 years as a public company).
It is in these extremes that investing resides. Despite what the CFA foists on the young and innocent you cannot choose a level of risk and return along a classic bell-curve to suit your portfolio because that is neither accepting the deep uncertainty of the world nor acknowledging that the skew of returns is so extreme that it is the search for companies with the characteristics that might enable extreme and compounding success that is central to investing. But distraction through seeking minor opportunities in banal companies over short periods is the perennial temptation. It must be resisted. This requires conviction. The share price drawdowns will be regular and severe. 40% is common. The stock charts that look like remorseless bottom left to top right graphs are never as smooth and easy as they subsequently appear.
So how do we identify these stocks with extraordinary potential? How do we acquire the conviction to allow the compounding to work its magic? As Jeff Bezos steps down as CEO let’s look back at what we spotted, how we endured and what we failed to do for shareholders. The common factors that are most likely to recur in the narratives of great investments are that the company should have open-ended growth opportunities that they should work hard never to define or time, that it has initial leadership that thinks like a founder (and almost always is one)and that has a distinctive philosophy of business – almost always from independently thought through first principles. Now, I think that all these traits were identifiable in Amazon from the start. To read the initial shareholder letter of 1997 was to know that this was the ambitious, patient creation of a very special mind. To be frank our failure to recognise this was because of our own limitations not an absence of clues. We were simply too aware of market movements and too preoccupied with the terrible combination of short-term performance and fear of downside to be able to be committed owners.By 2005–6 we were less bad investors and could recognise some of the potential and endure more of the slings and arrows. Of those there were plenty: the share price fell 46% from peak to trough in 2006. I became used to peers at client conferences declaring Amazon their favourite short. They particularly disliked the costs of two projects – Prime and Amazon Elastic Compute. The latter became AWS. Gradually we learnt and understood. But we should apologise for our willingness to trim Amazon back repeatedly when our holding size approached 10% of assets.That was misguided. Only in recent months has our enthusiasm waned. Amazon is now seen as good value, safe and acceptable. It no longer has a founder CEO. We fear that in his inimitable terms it is no longer Day 1 in Seattle though the road ahead is still long and profitable.
TimeFrames, Likelihoods and Radical Uncertainty
The litany of reasons to be obsessed with long-term decision making is too long to describe here. But there’s an offshoot of it that seems unusually important yet neglected. It is inherent to the notion of efficient markets that all available information is incorporated in share prices. Only new information matters. This is used to justify the near pornographic allure of news such as earnings announcements and macroeconomic headlines. In turn this is reinforced by the power of near-term financial incentives.
So far this is a standard critique. We share it but there is a twist to come. If you believe that all information is built into the share price and simultaneously that it is near term investment outcomes that matter this leaves a vacuum of thought. There is no apparent rationale for deciphering the future.If this sounds abstract it’s not so. Let’s take a look at Tesla to illustrate the puzzle. When we first invested in the company seven years ago we thought,or rather observed, that the regularity and pace of improvement in battery performance and of learning in building electric vehicles was already clear in practice and well-elucidated in academic study. Since then both the pace of improvement and the level of confidence surrounding the data has risen consistently. This made it as close to inevitable as investing allows that at some point electric vehicles were going to be better and cheaper than the internal combustion engine – quite aside from environmental issues. That’s simply what happens when a 15% plus improvement rate meets a 2–3% snail.
Since Tesla was the only substantial Western player our investment decision was hardly demanding. We just had to listen to experts and wait. But most investors do not listen to experts. Instead they listen to brokers and the media, besotted as it is by fear mongering and the many short sellers. The headlines tell them that next quarter will be hard for Tesla and that Elon Musk is outspoken. To us this was a blatant market inefficiency offering an extraordinarily high likelihood of high returns to the patient. All too many investment decisions are marginal judgments. That electric vehicles would win had become intensely likely. We needed no insight, no clever model to spot it –only patience and trust in experts and the company. The uncertainty was elsewhere. It was elsewhere geographically – given the levels of competition in China it was profoundly uncertain that our investment in NIO would flourish or even survive. It was elsewhere in return calculations for Tesla itself. This particularly applies now and to Tesla’s autonomous driving ambitions. This could transform the economics of the company. But try though we do it seems implausible that we can estimate either the likelihood of success in a radically new endeavour nor the precise outcomes in cashflows should success emerge. To us it is bizarre that brokers, hedge fund mavens and commentators can claim to be able to decipher the future and assign a precise numerical target to the value of Tesla. Perhaps they are all geniuses. We are not. We should respect and endure uncertainty, try to identify where extreme upside might occur and observe patiently.
It’s Not Growth versus Value
Tesla is but an example, if a crucial one, of the central issue for investing in our times. It isn’t growth versus value, it isn’t the level of markets, it isn’t the economic growth rate in 2021 or the progress of the pandemic but it is understanding change, how it happens, how much happens and its implications. The refusal to embrace this is probably a reflection of the doomed desire for security but it is also emblematic of abroader crisis in economic thought that is preoccupied with the mathematics of equilibrium. But If we switch our attention to studying deep change then there is less temptation to believe that investing has eternal verities that we can default to as a rule book. It’s not ‘this time it’s different’ that is the cry of danger but the refusal to admit that the world, and its reflection that is investing, is ever the same. The only rhyme is that in the long run the value of stocks is the long-run free cash flows they generate but we have but the barest and most nebulous clues as to what these cash flows will turn out to be.But woe betide those who think that a near term price to earnings ratio defines value in an era of deep change.
The Future
There will almost certainly be more wrenching, inspiring and dramatic change in the next decade than we have ever seen. I’m very envious of the opportunities and experiences that my successors will enjoy. Even in the last year, amidst the tragedies of the pandemic, there have been hints of what is to come. I don’t mean the surge in digital platforms that helped to navigate the constraints of the pandemic but still more dramatic and important rising forces. From the extraordinary revolution that will transform our societies for the better in renewable energy becoming mainstream to the emerging wonders of synthetic biology to the possibility that healthcare innovation becomes a regular series of beneficial revolutions rather than a complex and frustrating drain of resources the potential is wonderful and the threat to old empires looms. It would have been hard for us to have educated ourselves in these areas of unashamed excitement without our involvement in venture capital. We are forever grateful that we have found our way to interact with the extraordinary minds and energies in the unquoted world. Frankly, five years ago I would have been amazed at the access and opportunities that we have come to take as normal. We are very fortunate. It’s a privilege. Our former Board member, John Kay, taught us many things but one of the most valuable was the role of obliquity. By engaging with visionary minds and their companies we are simply seeking insight into the world of tomorrow. Often we are overwhelmed and puzzled more than comprehending. That’s the plan. The investment outcomes are but the eventual outcomes of the mentality and process.
We need to remain eccentric. In fact we need to become more so and more prepared to be radical. We’ve always claimed to learn from the remarkable leaders we are lucky enough to meet in managing Scottish Mortgage. If I may I’d like to end by quoting two of them. The first is Noubar Afeyan, founder of Flagship health investors but also Chair of Moderna. A year ago I would at this point have needed to detail the purpose of Moderna but that is now delightfully redundant. But the comment I want to quote applies far beyond Moderna and vaccines:
“Let me say maybe something stark…which is that we have to be willing to embrace unreasonable propositions and unreasonable people in order to make extraordinary findings because the notion that utterly reasonable people doing utterly reasonable things will produce massive breakthroughs doesn’t compute to me”.
There is no industry more suspicious of the unconventional than fund management. We need to reinvent from first principles. We need to help create great companies that embrace the extraordinary. Plainly no one has been better at demonstrating and articulating this than Jeff Bezos. His recent, and sadly last, CEO letter concluded with a plea:
“We all know that distinctiveness – originality – is valuable…What I’m really asking you to do is to embrace and be realistic about how much energy it takes to maintain that distinctiveness. The world wants you to be typical – in a thousand ways, it pulls at you. Don’t let it happen”.
I don’t think Tom and Lawrence need this advice, or would neglect the views of Mr Bezos. But please help Scottish Mortgage become more unreasonable and more distinctive as the pressures of the investment world continue to pull at us.
James Anderson
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