[BidClub_]
Yet Another Value Podcast · · 31 分钟

2026年9月随想杂谈

Andrew Walker

股票投资宏观
YouTube ↗
TL;DR
  • Andrew Walker 的核心市场判断是,股市并没有无视利率上行,但也远未完全适应新的利率水平。10年期收益率从年初的4.2%升至8月底的4.6%,并在9月24日达到5.1%,但标普500仍在历史高位附近。再融资滞后与投资组合再配置缓慢,可能推迟冲击显现,但“财务负担正在向你袭来”。

  • 再融资日程可能比当下看似健康的自由现金流更重要。企业在2015-22年拉长了债务期限,利率初次上行时因此隔离了对盈利的冲击;2021-23年前后发行的债务可能在2028-31年间滚动再融资。一家公司如果将3.5%的债务以8%-10%的利率进行再融资,可能会发现,当前的现金创造能力严重高估了未来的经济回报。

  • 即便投资者的直觉尚未跟上,利率上行也已经重置了特殊情形投资的算术。一年后确定拿到的100美元并购对价,在5%的利率下今天大约只值95美元;计入交易失败风险和流动性风险后,价值还要更低。在“资本是免费的,时间价值很低”的环境中形成经验的投资者,可能会误以为94美元的股价意味着异常宽的价差。

  • 长期熊市的消失,可能意味着防护机制更强,也可能意味着系统正在积累隐性脆弱性。熔断机制、美联储快速支持以及周期性更弱的商业模式,或许解释了全球金融危机、COVID调整和2025年关税恐慌为何都较快逆转。但Walker仍在思考:一个能够开盘下跌5%、随后在“一条条消息接踵而来”后于午盘前跌去约20%的市场,是否正是反复救援的结果。

  • 伟大的投资业绩或许更多属于幸存下来的过度自信者,而不能证明过度自信本身是最优策略。集中持仓和杠杆为过度自信的投资者提供了冲上顶端所需的波动性,而失败者则从视野中消失;Archegos正是累积成功最终接近归零的鲜明样本。自信还会吸引LP资金,进一步强化这种筛选效应。

  • 超越导师,是判断力不断积累后的自然结果,不一定意味着否定导师。Ian Cassell 讲述自己与 Skip 分开后,Walker 联想到Buffett超越Ben Graham,并警告说,确定感一开始很容易被误认为智慧:有些导师“经常犯错,却从不怀疑自己”。Walker的实际做法,是把自己对市场和投资组合的看法写进日志,以便比较今天的想法与多年前真实持有的观点。

摘要 · 为研究而整理的核心内容

1. 上行利率正在以长滞后期施加引力

  • Walker指出的首个错位是:10年期收益率从年初的4.2%升至8月底的4.6%,并在9月24日达到5.1%,但标普500仍在历史高位附近,主要指数上涨约12%-13%。“利率就是金融引力”(“Interest rates are financial gravity”),但苹果还没有显性落地。

  • 他对历史的参照来自2011年前后的估值研究。当时长端利率接近2%,企业可以以约4%的利率借款,而股票隐含收益率看起来约为10%,意味着股权风险溢价过高;此后的10年,盈利强劲增长,但随着市场适应廉价资本,估值倍数也大幅扩张。

  • 一个可能的滞后因素是行为惯性:债券收益率变得更有吸引力后,储蓄者不会立刻把新增资金转向债券。Walker承认,大部分资金由大型资产管理机构而非家庭掌控,因此消费者惯性或许不是完整解释;这只是一个假设,并非择时判断。

  • 更具体的滞后来自企业负债。企业在2015-22年延长了债务期限,但2021-23年前后发行的债务可能在2028-31年间再融资;将3.5%的票息替换为8%-10%的债务,会压低未来自由现金流并改变资本配置。市场本应立即对这一点进行折现,但Walker怀疑市场是否会“慢慢适应引力”。

2. 高位指数掩盖了底层不断扩大的压力

  • 表面仍然健康——经济增长和盈利都不错——但Walker看到,随着价格维持高位、利率继续上升,安全边际正在收窄。他刻意保持谨慎:并不是说崩盘即将发生,而是“前方有大量波动”,财务负担尚未完全到来。

  • 压力已经出现在对利率敏感的领域:高杠杆小盘股、Russell 2000和房地产都表现不佳;生物科技则先大幅下跌,随后强劲反弹。这种分化很重要,因为“当市场处于历史高位时,总有某个地方正在崩盘”。

  • 房地产是他最清晰的样本。聪明的投资者已经开始重新研究住宅建筑商,而Berkshire买入2亿股Lennar也引起了他的注意,当时该公司股价约为有形账面价值。Walker认为,这笔持仓对Berkshire而言规模不大,不能据此下结论,但低迷的房地产公司同时拥有多个潜在的经营和估值改善抓手。

3. 特殊情形投资如今必须明确计入时间成本

  • Walker对并购套利的算术表述得很直接:如果一笔交易在1年后支付100美元,而利率为5%,一项真正没有风险的债权今天应该交易在约95美元。由于没有交易真正能够保证完成,合理价格还应进一步下调,以补偿完成概率、企业流动性以及交易失败后的下行风险。

  • 这使得一项看似显而易见的94美元机会变得没那么显而易见。对100美元对价进行折现,并通过仓位管理和凯利公式式的盈亏分析计入交易失败风险后,当前报价可能已经隐含约90%-95%的完成概率,而不是意味着一笔异常高回报的交易。

  • 2015年的对比具有决定性意义:当时利率接近2%,一笔极其安全的100美元交易可能以98美元或99美元成交,因为“没有太多资金在衡量时间”。2010-20年间成长起来的综合型投资者,可能仍然带着“资本是免费的,时间价值很低”的内置假设;Walker认为,pod shops通常更擅长估算资本成本,因此这更多是综合型投资者与专业事件驱动投资者之间的差异。

  • Walker将这种制度记忆联系到Buffett创办合伙企业的经历:尽管父亲和Ben Graham警告他,道琼斯指数从未处于如此高位,Buffett仍然选择启动合伙企业。他们的谨慎反映了塑造他们的市场,而Buffett相信盈利和外部环境已经改变。更广泛的教训是,旧制度留下的假设,即使底层制度早已转向,也可能长期隐形存在。

4. 更短的熊市可能正在制造更脆弱的系统

  • Walker将现代市场的快速逆转,与黑色星期一、1929年股灾、大萧条以及1972-74年的惨烈下跌进行对比。他对1974年的代表性描述,来自Buffett那句“感觉自己像一个在后宫里欲望过盛的男人”:以5倍市盈率的股票换成4倍市盈率的替代品,因为到处都是便宜货。

  • 即便2000-02年也并非所有资产都处于熊市:昂贵的互联网股票崩盘之际,许多价值股表现良好,帮助一些投资者建立了延续数十年的声誉。谈到全球金融危机时,Walker说市场在2027年10月见顶,并将这段经历描述为从2000年7月持续到2009年3月——“约9个月”;这组前后不一致的日期,他没有解决。COVID下跌持续了约2个月,2025年关税恐慌则不到1个月。

  • 可能的解释包括熔断机制、市场对美联储流动性的预期、财政支持,以及企业构成不再由钢铁和汽车等深度周期行业主导。Walker没有给出确定答案:“也许我们只是生活在一个美好的世界里,只是运气好”,或者也可能是20世纪80年代初至2022年持续下行的利率不断支撑着估值。

  • 对反脆弱性的反例则令人不安。反复干预可能压制小规模失败,却让系统变得越来越脆弱;零日期权和其他市场结构特征,可能放大最终的断裂。Walker自称并非这方面的专家,但设想市场开盘下跌5%,随后一路级联至午盘前下跌约20%;他也在思考,如今利率上升是否让持续性熊市变得更有可能。

5. 自信制造传奇与牺牲者,也终将带来与导师的距离

  • 一位朋友将投资者分为两类:过度自信者和冒名顶替综合征患者。Walker把自己归入后者:即使完成了研究,他仍然必须提醒自己“你是专家”,因为“并不存在一个什么都懂、正等着揭示真正答案的秘密专家”。

  • 然而,他能轻易说出的那些伟大投资者,似乎都极其自信,有时甚至过度自信。读到20多岁和30多岁的Buffett,Walker对“谦逊的奥马哈圣人”这一形象有了更复杂的认识;GEICO和Salmon Brothers的经历也提醒他,很多岌岌可危的局面最终都朝有利方向发展。如果结果相反,相关人物可能会成为完全不同的传奇。

  • 他最主要的解释是幸存者偏差。过度自信的投资者会拥抱集中持仓、杠杆,或两者兼具,从而获得创造惊人成功、也创造惊人消失所需的波动性。Bill Hwang高度集中且不断加杠杆的Archegos押注就是清晰例子:成功不断累积,直到几乎在一夜之间崩塌。同样的自信也可能吸引成为行业名人的必需LP资金。

  • Ian Cassell的《Stock Picking》提供了导师关系中的对应版本。Cassell向Skip学习,随后发展出超越Skip固定风格的判断;同样,Buffett也超越了Graham。Walker说,Graham似乎在1970年代某个时间、去世前不久发表过一次演讲,偏好简单的全市场规则;如果这段记述准确,其思路与早期因子投资相似。导师起初拥有“汪洋大海般的知识”,但20比0的经验优势会变成20比5,导师的可错性开始显现,而“经常犯错,却从不怀疑自己”也不再像智慧。

  • Walker尚未解决的问题是:门徒不断前进,是因为导师停止了进化,是因为学生进化得更快,还是因为此前隐藏的风险最终浮出水面。他的实际防护措施是留下书面记忆:用博客和日志记录对市场及投资组合的思考,再用ChatGPT将今天的信念与自己多年前真实持有的观点进行比较。

完整逐字稿
Andrew Walker

You are about to listen to the end of a value podcast with your host, me, Andrew Walker. Today is my monthly random chatter. Before I get into it, if you watch the video, you'll see me holding the wire. Why am I holding the wire? Because this is the wire to my microphone, and I forgot to connect it before starting the recording. My laptop intercepted the microphone instead of using my actual audio, so the audio quality will probably be pretty bad. I'll try to fix it during the editing, but I wanted to warn you.

Speaking of disclaimers, there is no investment advice on this podcast. That's always true, but it's especially true today because I'm just winging it, and I'm a person who can't remember to plug in his microphone. I'm going to chat for 30 minutes about a bunch of things that have been on my mind, so we'll get to that in a second.

What am I talking about today? I'll start by talking about the market in general. Interest rates have been rising sharply for most of the past year, especially in the last few weeks, so I'll share some thoughts on interest rates, financial gravity, and why we don't really see gravity starting to pull things down.

Then we'll move on to a brief discussion of how crashes and bear markets seem to have disappeared over the last 25 or even 40 years. Where did they go? Why did they disappear? Are markets more fragile today because of this? Maybe I'm not going to discover anything new, but these are just some things that have been on my mind.

I'll also have a brief discussion of interest rates in special situations. I think a lot of investors who grew up in the 2010s were trained in one direction, and they may not have adapted to the interest-rate environment we're in today.

Then I'll discuss overconfident investors versus impostor investors. I'll explain that when we get there. Finally, I'll discuss mentoring, largely driven by Ian Cassell's book Stock Picking. There was some discussion about mentors, and it keeps going through my head. I love this book, and I've been thinking about it, so I wanted to write these thoughts down on paper.

1. Sponsor: Fiscal.ai

And first, a word from our sponsors. Today's podcast is sponsored by fiscal.ai. Fiscal.ai is a modern financial data provider for global stocks. Listen, this is what they're asking me to tell you, but let me tell you how I use fiscal.ai. And let me remind you, I am a customer. I paid with my own money to connect to the fiscal.ai API. There are two things I really find it useful for. First, it is something extremely unique. They have a huge database of fund letters, and fund letters are created and connected to the API. Whenever I'm researching a company, whether I'm researching a company because I'm interested in it, looking for information about an event, or preparing for a podcast, the first thing my AI does is say, "Hey, I'm preparing for a podcast about Hims." I go there, and the first thing it does is say, "Hey, here are all the latest emails on fiscal.ai where people are talking about Hims. And here is their thesis about birth," and so on. The second thing I do is use it to edit financial statements. I have my model, and then I say, "Hey, I'm looking at Hims. Go and build me a model." And it says, "Of course, I'll build you a model." Every line in this model has a reference, so I see, "Oh, they take this EBITDA figure. They take this segment indicator. They take this figure from three years ago." I click on it, and it takes me straight to fiscal.ai and says, "Hey, here are these key performance indicators (KPIs) for a specific company. Here are these coefficients." I can see exactly where they're getting it from. So this is an extremely reliable data provider that can connect to your AI. I find this extremely useful. I'm a big fan of this broadcast. If you want to try it out, you can use my link at fiscal.ai/yav to get 15% off their AI connector. It's fiscal.ai/yav, and the link will be in the broadcast notes.

2. Two stories: Muse and rates

Let's dive in and start by talking about markets. I think it's around noon on September 24 when I'm recording this. Over the last couple of weeks, there have been 2 stories that have generally dominated the markets.

The first is generative AI, specifically Muse, which is topping the charts and all that stuff. That's causing a lot of sell-offs because of consumer inertia and so on. I've blogged about it 3 times in the last week, so you know what? I know we live in a world where audio is changing rapidly, but you can just go read those posts, especially the article I published this morning about consumers, consumer inertia, selling out, and the differences between them.

3. Interest rates are financial gravity

The other dominant story in the markets right now, and what I'm going to discuss in this podcast, is interest rates. I don't want to say interest rates are outrageously high—we live in a hyperinflationary world or something—but they have been going up rapidly.

If you look at 10-year bonds, at the beginning of the year they were at 4.2%. At the end of August, they were at 4.6%, and now they're at 5.1%. They've risen rapidly in the last 3 weeks. That's another big story because interest rates are financial gravity.

I think Warren Buffett said that interest rates are to asset prices what gravity is to an apple. I think it was Warren Buffett, although you can correct me if I'm wrong. Interest rates serve as financial gravity.

I've written before about how, around 2011, when we were in the ZIRP era, long-term interest rates were around 2%. If you ran a DCF—and I worked at a valuation consulting firm—you looked at the stock price in the DCF and said, “Either there are huge questions about terminal value here, we're completely wrong in all our modeling, or the stock prices are wrong.”

These companies were borrowing at 4% and their stocks were yielding 10%, so you thought, “That's too much of a risk premium on stocks.” Or I guess you could say the equity risk premium had been destroyed.

What happened then is that over the next 10 years, stocks had a great run. Earnings were growing pretty well to a large extent, but there was also a lot of multiple expansion.

Right now, the S&P 500 is hitting all-time highs. The Russell and the S&P 500 are up 12% to 13%. The Russell has been a little weak over the last month, partly because of these interest rates. A lot of things in the S&P 500 and the Russell are more sensitive to interest rates, but the economy is doing well, stocks are pretty high, and interest rates just keep going up.

I wonder if interest rates are gravity, as Warren Buffett says, but in the same way that if you throw something really high in the air, it keeps going up and up and up, then it slows down, and eventually it falls. I'm not talking about a sharp drop, but I wonder if interest rates work with a little bit of a lag when it comes to the stock market and this long-term perspective.

I can imagine a few ways that could happen. It could take a little bit of time, just as it takes people time to think about things. Consumers aren't perfect. It's a kind of consumer-inertia trade: they don't look at things right away and say, “The S&P 500 dividend yield is 4%, bond yields are 3%, and I need to move more of my money into stocks.” It takes time for that shift to happen.

I wonder if, when yields go up, it also takes time for people to look around and say, “My extra money is going into bonds, not stocks.” I wonder if this is a long-term thing. I don't know, because it describes a lot of what consumers do, and most of the money is managed by really big asset managers. So maybe that's too much. This is my monthly time for random conversations; I'm just thinking about it.

4. Does gravity work on a lag? The coming debt refi wave

Another way this could work over the long term is that corporations were very good from 2015 to 2022. They really turned their debt into long-term debt. The banks weren't as good; that's what happened with Silicon Valley Bank, First Republic, and everything else. They had a lot of floating-rate exposure, and they blew up.

Most corporations actually increased their debt and moved from long-term to medium-term fixed rates. So when rates started changing, it didn't affect them.

But what happens when most corporate debt is on a 5- to 10-year horizon? What happens when all this debt issued from, say, 2021 to 2023 starts to mature from, say, 2028 to 2031? If they're paying 3.5% on this debt now, they roll it over, and interest rates have suddenly gone up to 8% or 10%.

I wonder if that's one of the reasons why the lag effects are kicking in. The free cash flow they're generating now is being amplified by this interest-rate differential. The market has to be very efficient; it must take this into account. All I'm talking about is the market slowly adapting to gravity.

It has to adapt immediately. When interest rates go up, it has to say, “Hey, interest rates went up from 4.9% to 5%. Well, every business costs—I don’t know how much it would be—then 3% less.” I wonder if it works more slowly. Likewise, I wonder if it includes something like, “Hey, the free cash flow that the company is generating today is actually going to be lower in 2 years because they’re going to refinance at a much higher interest rate.”

I wonder if it will take some time for that to happen. There’s also capital allocation; managers are valuable, too. I wonder if this is some kind of refinancing wave that’s happening.

5. Index highs, pain underneath: housing, small caps, biotech

With that in mind, I said stocks are still touching or close to all-time highs. Last month was pretty tough for biotech, for example, and for the Russell 2000. You can see that there’s always a pattern: when markets are at all-time highs, there’s always a crash somewhere.

Earlier this year, it was SaaS. Now, small-cap leveraged companies have really been hit, and the housing sector has really suffered. I have a lot of smart friends who tell me, “Look at the names of real estate companies.”

It just happened to me at my desk a few days ago. Berkshire bought 200 million shares in Lennar—maybe 3 days ago or something. Lennar, a large developer, is trading just above tangible book value, right at book value.

So, Berkshire sees problems in the housing sector. They’re huge, and $200 million is nothing to them. They have a lot of money to invest, but a lot of smart investors are saying, “Hey, a lot of housing companies are starting to look testy, and there are a lot of different levers that can help these companies.”

The housing sector and small-cap leveraged companies have a lot of challenges. Biotech has come back really strong, and if you’ve been following me for the last 18 months, you know I follow biotech a lot. Biotechnology fell very, very quickly. I think there were some serious problems with gross revenues and all sorts of other things, but even when it’s at a historically high level, there’s a lot of pain underneath it.

Consumer and energy names—there’s still some value in them. Well, it’s hard for me to say there’s still some value in the assets. I think there are possibilities if you think they won’t be appreciated.

My bottom line here would probably be this: I don’t think stocks are ignoring rates, but it doesn’t look like they’ve really adapted to current rates. Growth is good now. I think there’s a lot of volatility on the horizon, and I would say that overall, the margin of safety in stocks is getting narrower and narrower as prices remain elevated.

I see a lot of risks looming for stocks, and interest rates continue to rise. Even though the profits are still good, I think the financial burden is coming your way.

6. Rates and special situations: merger arb isn't free money anymore

Another quick note about interest rates. I’ve written about this before, but interest rates have an interesting effect on special situations. If you announce a merger and it’s guaranteed to happen, but you say, “Hey, it’s going to take a year to complete the deal,” and interest rates are 5%, then if the merger price is 100, you’re trading for about 95.

That’s assuming there’s a guarantee that it will happen. Nothing is ever guaranteed, so you’ll trade just below 95 to account for the fact that there’s only a 99% chance it will happen. And, by the way, why should we think that Company A would buy Company Y as if it were the U.S. government?

There will be some corporate liquidity risk, and all these discounts are right, but it will happen at 5%. I think it’s interesting. The environment you grow up in often influences the way we think about things.

I still see people announcing a deal. In 2015, when interest rates were at 2%, the deal would be announced and the stock would trade at 98 or 99 if the deal was at 100. Basically, it would trade all the way up to that deal, especially if it was a really safe deal, because interest rates were effectively zero. There wasn’t much money in measuring time.

I’m being approached today, especially by station wagons. I think they’re the generalists; a lot of them come to me. The deal is done for 100, and they’ll say, “Oh, the stock is trading at 94. Isn’t this an opportunity?”

I’ll say, “I don’t think that’s a possibility. There is a risk of the deal breaking, so you have to factor that into your Kelly criterion, your upside and downside potential, and all that.” Then you just have to discount that 100 back to the present. Once you do that, it looks like this deal is trading at 90% to 95% implied.

Again, I think it’s more of a generalist than a specialist event-investor issue. I think pod shops are pretty good at estimating the cost of capital because they’re shrinking, but it’s just ridiculous.

You come of age in 2015, and there are assumptions. The assumptions you make determine how you invest. If you came of age in the 2010–2020 regime, the assumption was, “Hey, capital is free and the time value is low.” That assumption changes when interest rates rise. It’s interesting to think about.

I think about mentors, and we’ll talk about them later, but when Warren Buffett launched his partnership, the 2 most important people in his life—his father and Ben Graham—both said, “Hey, this is probably not the best time. The Dow Jones has never exceeded that number.”

Buffett launched it anyway. First, who cares what the market does? He’s Warren Buffett. He’s going to win. Second, he thinks they live in a different world. It had been 20 years, profits had increased, and all that.

7. Where did the crashes and long bear markets go?

That’s an assumption they made and developed in the market, based on what they did, and interest rates are similar. Those are my 2 things. Let’s move on to something else I want to talk about—market-related stuff.

I was just thinking: crashes and long bear markets—where did they go? You read history and see these days of big crashes. You think of Black Monday, when the markets dropped about 25% in 1 day. You think of the crash of 1929 that led to the Great Depression, when, again, stocks were down about 33% or something in a day.

Those were such big crashes. When you read history books, you hear about these long bear markets that are just brutal—the Great Depression. The markets were in a bear market for 10 or 15 years during the Great Depression.

You read about the late 1960s to the early 1980s, when the markets were crashing to zero. There was this brutal bear market from about 1972 to 1974. You heard Buffett talk about how he was an oversexed man in a harem because everything was so cheap in 1974. He was selling stocks at 5 times earnings to buy stocks at 4 times earnings and all that.

These were long, long slumps. I was just thinking about this. There was a little bear market, let’s say, from 2000 to 2002 with the dot-com bubble, but a lot of that was due to the inflation of the dot-com multiples. In fact, a lot of things that were more value-oriented sold very well in 2000 to 2002.

I’ve talked about this before. A lot of the value-investing legends today built their track records in 2000 to 2005, when the market was doing nothing and all these value stocks were tearing it up. They’ve lived on this for over 20 years.

Let’s fast-forward. You have a global financial crisis, and the market peaks in October 2027. It gets a little bit depleted when Bear Stearns and all that happens, but the peak of the global financial crisis was, let’s say, from July 2000 to March 2009. That’s about 9 months.

Since then, you have COVID, but the COVID correction in 2020 lasted maybe 2 months. It was from the end of January to the end of March, when everything hit rock bottom. You had tariff hysteria in 2025, but that was less than a month.

I wonder if the crashes are over. Maybe it’s because the markets are better. We have circuit breakers and Fed liquidity. People know that the Fed will provide liquidity. Why don’t we see these long recessions and bear markets anymore?

I don’t have an answer. Maybe we just live in a wonderful world, we’ve been lucky, and the economy has generally been good. I know many people who, both during crashes and over the long term, would point out that the Fed over-indexed and over-engineered markets and provided too much support.

Maybe people can say, “Hey, the reason we don’t have prolonged bear markets anymore is because of structural changes.” If you think about the 1970s, you had a lot of cars and a lot of steel, and they were really cyclical. You’re going to have a long bear market when the economy suffers.

Whereas today, you have a lot of really capital-intensive businesses, whether it’s technology companies before they went through the hyperscaler boom or McDonald’s, which is completely franchised at the moment. Perhaps they’re a little more recession-resistant.

I’m sure there’s a little bit of all of that, but it’s interesting to feel like we have a whole generation, or multiple generations, of investors who haven’t experienced anything more than a quick drop for a few months. I don’t know why the bear markets have gone away, and I think about what happens if we ever get into a really big bear market.

8. Fed put, fragility, and one big break

I think he has everything I say. I think that’s really interesting to think about.

And, you know, I think the other side of the question is that if you read something like Antifragile—and I realize I’m starting to sound a little bit like a guru—the market was over-engineered by the Fed. The economy, at the point when a recession starts, gets fiscal support, Fed support, all that. The moment the market falls, you get support from the Fed.

So what happens in a fragile system is that when you have all this support, it actually becomes more and more fragile, and you can have bigger breakdowns, right? Something that becomes increasingly brittle will have a larger breakdown, whereas something that is antifragile will have lots of small breakdowns, but that actually makes it stronger over time.

I was wondering—and there are other things that contribute to this, like zero-day options and all that stuff—if the market is prone to waking up one day and opening down 5%, and by lunchtime, wire after wire goes off and you’re down about 20% or something. I don’t know. Listen, I don’t claim to be an expert on market structure. It’s just something I was thinking about, and it all has to do with the structure of the market, rising interest rates, and the lack of huge recessions.

Hey, maybe the reason we haven’t had a long bear market is because, if the last one ended in the early 1980s, since then we’ve had this whole market backdrop from the 1980s to 2022 where interest rates were going down, or remained very low. Interest rates are rising slightly now.

So maybe the answer is, “Hey, Andrew, the reason we haven’t had a sustained bear market is because interest rates are falling, and we’re about to have a lot of long-term bear markets.” Even if stocks go up in the long term, they can really sell off, and one of the reasons they sell off is because financial gravity is starting to take hold.

9. Overconfident investors vs imposter syndrome

Okay. That was a long conversation about markets. Let me move on to investing.

I was talking about general things for investors. I was having dinner, I meant to say beer, but I don't drink, so I was having dinner with a friend, and he said, “Listen, there are 2 types of investors, and every investor falls into 1 of these 2 camps. There are overconfident investors, and there are investors who have imposter syndrome.”

I can’t tell you how much I’ve thought about that phrase. Every time I meet a friend, I’m like, “Does this guy have imposter syndrome, or is he overconfident?”

Let me just clarify. When I talk about imposter syndrome, I don’t mean an imposter in the sense of, “Oh my God, he’s pretending to be someone else.” I just mean imposter syndrome in the sense that, when you think about what’s going on in your head, you’re like, “Oh my God, I’m not really that good.” You have a lot of self-doubt and so on.

So I was thinking about which camp investors fall into. I’ll tell you right now: I know I’m a very nice man on the podcast. You may think otherwise, but I firmly belong to the imposter camp.

I’m still an 18-year-old teenager reading an SEC document. Often, when I pull the trigger on a deal, I remind myself, “Hey, you worked hard on this. You are an expert.” There’s no secret expert who knows everything and can tell you, “These are the real tricks.”

I hope you have some self-confidence. I hope you’re on the front lines, you’ve worked hard, and you need to believe in yourself and keep doing it. But I have to constantly remind myself of this.

So I think I have imposter syndrome. If you think I’m overconfident, well, maybe I am, but I don’t think so. I think I have imposter syndrome.

I was thinking about great investors. I was just thinking about a list of great investors, and I’m having a hard time coming up with anyone who wasn’t overconfident, or at least overconfident about something. Maybe that doesn’t speak well of me, since I consider myself to be suffering from imposter syndrome.

But, you know, empirically, all investors with great track records are overconfident. And the one who always comes to mind first is Buffett. He’s the GOAT.

At first I thought, “Oh, Buffett, he’s homespun, he’s humble, he lives in Omaha. He must have impostor syndrome.” Go and read "Snow White". Read about Buffett in his 20s and 30s, what he does and what he tells companies. This person is overconfident and embodies overconfidence.

So I wondered, why are all the great people overconfident? I think one of the answers might be, “Hey, Andrew, they’re big. They’re not overconfident; they’re just really confident.” That’s probably the case with Buffett, isn’t it? He’s great, he knows it, and he’s confident.

But there are other people who are respected whom I would put more in the overconfident camp. Even in Buffett’s case, when you read "Snow White," it’s interesting how many times things change for the better. I mean, Salmon Brothers—you know, something is happening with GEICO, and he’s like, “I just wrote a check to GEICO. This could be the end of me.” How many times does something change for the better?

John Malone has a lot of those stories if you read Cable Cowboy and all those books. Something changes for the better, and instead of being legends with a huge track record, they’re going nowhere, right? He’s the main character, but I was thinking about overconfidence and why all the great players, I think, are overconfident or have traits of overconfidence.

10. Survivorship: Archegos and Situational Awareness

I think the obvious answer is survival, right? We are all flipping coins in some sense, and if you’re going to do something, the overconfident investor will seek concentration and leverage, or both, which means high variance.

All the big players who are overconfident end up on the list of big winners, but we don’t see all the overconfident people who have hit 0. You can even see some overconfident people losing their alpha because they’re overconfident, because they’re too focused.

I think you would point to Bill Hwang from Archegos, right? Concentrated, leveraged bets continue to grow, grow, grow. They continue to buy on the way up. I don’t know what the exit strategy was there, but he goes from killing it to basically 0 overnight, right?

Situational awareness during the summer. There’s a great example with a concentrated AI thesis, and they just keep betting, betting, pushing and pushing. In the end, it basically doesn’t fall to 0 because, as I understand it, they still have a good track record and all that, but it’s pretty close to falling to 0.

It’s staggering. It’s like a manic state of madness. I mean, the public record is practically destroyed. Generally, these are just 2 examples, but I think it speaks well to overconfidence.

There’s a gray area of people who are not overconfident but who aren’t impostors, either. The other thing I thought was that big people have to raise money at some point, and maybe overconfidence also helps a lot in fundraising. Investors and LPs and everybody else want to invest in people who are overconfident.

So maybe you can’t attract an incredible number of fans and become one of the greats without a decent amount of money, and maybe overconfidence helps with money, too. So, yeah, I don’t know.

And look, there are counterexamples and outliers. My friend just mentioned overconfidence versus impostor syndrome, and my first thought was, “I’m an impostor.” Then I started trying to imagine how many great people are impostors, and I thought, “Oh, this is not good.”

11. Mentors: Ian Cassel's Stock Picker and Skip

The last thing I was thinking about—and then I’ll wrap up, because I guess I’m almost out of my time limit—is that a couple of weeks ago I had Ian Cassell come over to talk about his book, Stock Picking. You could hear it on the podcast.

I’ve had people with books on the podcast. Some of them I really like. You can hear them on the podcast. I really, really like Dean's books, and they really made me think about a lot of things.

In 1 of the chapters, he talks about his mentor. I think his mentor’s name was Skip, and he talks about how Skip taught him a lot. Eventually, he and Skip drifted apart because, if I remember correctly, he says, “Hey, I was growing and developing as an investor, and Skip was kind of a guy who stayed the same, right?”

He doesn’t say it’s bad. He doesn’t say he doesn’t like Skip as a person. This Skip, if you’ve read the book, has his flaws. But he just says, “Look, Skip had a style. He stuck to his style, and I kind of developed into my own style, so they started to diverge a little bit.”

It made me think about the fact that if you have a mentor, your mentor is always going to be the most impressive person in the world to you at first, or at least very impressive. Over time, they’re always going to become less impressive as you get to know them. You realize that they’re human and they have their flaws.

When you’re a day-one analyst, you don’t have a lot of skills or knowledge, and they seem to have decades and oceans and oceans of knowledge and experience. Then you start to accumulate some of that yourself.

If they have 20 years of experience and you have 0, they literally have infinitely more experience. Then, 5 years later, they have 20 years and you have 5, so they have 5 times more experience. Some of that experience is in different markets.

The knowledge gap and the skills gap are narrowing. Everything is different.

12. Even Buffett outgrew Ben Graham

In any case, why? I mentioned Buffett and Ben Graham earlier. Graham was Buffett’s mentor, but Graham is literally a legend. He founded value investing, but Buffett eventually moved on from Graham. So if Buffett can move beyond the founder of value investing and find new things—not that he thinks Graham is ignorant—then Buffett will evolve from that, just like everyone evolves from their mentor.

By the way, one of the reasons Buffett went away from Graham is that Graham apparently gave a late speech sometime in the ’70s, right before he died, where he said, “I’m no longer a fan of complex securities analysis. I like simple rules that apply to the entire market.” If you think about it, that’s kind of factor investing and quantitative investing. He was always quantitative; he tried to buy things on the net-net. But simple rules that apply to the entire market are the beginning of factor investing. So not only did he follow value investing and investment styles, but he was also, if you believe this, at the beginning of the factor-investing scene. I think it’s really interesting.

13. Wrapping up

Anyway, why am I saying all this? Well, I suppose people naturally move on from their mentors. Again, if Buffett does it, everyone will do it at some point. Is it because the mentor is not developing? That's how Ian Frampton describes his method in his book "Skip", and in the end he evolves and finds new things. Is it because the mentor is not developing, or maybe because you’re developing faster? I’m just curious, and I’m thinking about it.

I’ll say one more thing about mentors: you turn to mentors mostly because you’re early in your career and they know more. I think with mentors, it’s easy to find a mentor who’s overconfident because they’re often wrong, never in doubt. That thing about never doubting can really draw you to someone and make you want to be like them, make you want them to be your mentor, or make you want to follow in their footsteps. Maybe when you get to know them, you realize that they never doubt, but they are often wrong, and maybe that’s why you start to grow.

There are a lot of people who have mentors who are often wrong, never in doubt, and overconfident. They’re doing great when they’re 40, but it’s just a few flips of a coin. Then, when they’re 45 or 50, the coin goes the other way, and you have huge failures and so on. Maybe that’s one of the reasons why the mentees start to develop, because they see, “Oh, this person took a lot of risks, and those risks haven’t happened yet, but they could be about to happen.”

14. Journaling as a way to keep evolving

I don’t have the answers to any of these questions. I’ll tell you one thing that I’m working on developing. It’s funny because a lot of mentors and a lot of people I talk to insist on this, and I often support it, but I’m trying to do better. The blog serves as a diary for me in many ways, but I’m trying to write down more things and journal a little bit more, especially thoughts about the market: “Here’s what I think about the markets. That’s where I’m at in my head right now, where I’m thinking about the portfolio, all that stuff.”

That’s one way I try to do it. That way, I can use ChatGPT, and I don’t have to look at my notes. I can just compare how I feel today to how I felt a few years ago. I think about journaling and continuing to develop and push myself.

So, with that, I conclude my monthly September reflections.

I have some really interesting podcasts planned. I can't wait to share them with you. As always, thank you for listening to me, just randomly chatting for about 30 minutes into the microphone. I can't wait to talk to you soon. I can't wait for these podcasts, and we'll definitely see you next month with new thoughts.

A small caveat: Nothing in this podcast should be considered investment advice. Guests or the host may have positions in any of the stocks mentioned in this podcast. Please do your own research and consult a financial advisor.