In meinen bisherigen Artikeln zum Thema Asset Allocation hatte ich die Ansichten von Warren Buffett und Charlie Munger an der ein oder anderen Stelle bereits mit einfließen lassen. Allerdings haben sich die beiden Superinvestoren im Laufe der Zeit teilweise viel detaillierter und umfangreicher zu den einzelnen Themen geäußert (z.B. nachzulesen in den beiden Büchern Buffett & Munger Unscripted und The Essays of Warren Buffett (Affiliate Links)).
In diesem Artikel möchte ich daher einmal ausschließlich auf die Perspektive von Warren Buffett und Charlie Munger zu den Themenkomplexen Asset Allocation, Diversifikation, Risikominimierung etc. eingehen.
Kurzzusammenfassung: Buffett und Munger zum Thema Asset Allocation
Da der folgende Artikel zum größten Teil eine Zusammenstellung verschiedener Zitate von Warren Buffett und Charlie Munger beinhaltet, hier eine kurze Zusammenfassung der Kernpunkte (es geht darum, wie Buffett und Munger investieren, ob sie konzentrierte oder diversifizierte Portfolios bevorzugen, wie sie über das Thema Risikobegrenzung nachdenken, ob sie über die bekannten Public Equities hinaus auch andere Assetklassen für ein Investment in Betracht ziehen würden etc.).
„Know-Nothing“- versus „Know-Something“-Investor: Diversifikation versus Konzentration
- Ein “Know-Nothing”-Investor, also jemand, der Kapital zur Verfügung hat, sich aber selbst mit dem Thema gar nicht auskennt (und dies ggf. auch nicht ändern möchte), sollte in der Tat am besten in ein breit diversifiziertes Portfolio, z.B. einen ETF, investieren
- Ein “Know-Something”-Investor, also jemand, der sich etwas mit der Analyse von Unternehmen auskennt und weiß, wie man ein Investment bewertet, sollte im Gegensatz dazu eher ein konzentriertes Portfolio aufbauen. Wer eine gute Idee hat – eine Idee, die bessere Returns liefert als alle anderen zur Verfügung stehenden Opportunitäten (!) – sollte einen möglichst hohen Anteil seines Kapitals in diese Idee investieren
Keine „zufällig“ Allokation auf Assetklassen. Stattdessen Investieren unter Berücksichtigung der Opportunitätskosten
- Grundsätzlich sollte sich die Auswahl eines Investments immer an den zur Verfügung stehenden Alternativen orientieren (Was sind die Opportunitätskosten eines Investments? Heißt: Was entgeht einem an anderer Stelle, wenn man das Investment tätigt?)
- Hinter einer Allokation eines “zufälligen” und meist eher unbedeutenden Prozentsatzes des Kapitals auf andere Assetklassen (z.B. internationale Equities, Emerging Market Equities) sehen Buffett und Munger aufgrund des fehlenden relativen Vergleichs zu bestehenden Investments („Opportunitätskosten“) keine schlüssige Logik
- Das gilt auch für eine vorab definierte Allokation von Kapital auf andere Assetklassen:
- Cash ist für Buffett und Munger ein notwendiges Übel (das sich leider auf der Bilanz aufbaut, wenn es mal keine guten Anlagemöglichkeiten gibt)
- In Treasuries kann investiert werden, allerdings nur und insofern dadurch keine besseren zukünftigen Investitionsmöglichkeiten für einen zu langen Zeitraum ausgeschlossen werden
- Real Estate kann ein gutes Investment darstellen (Munger hat als Privatmann selbst verschiedene Real Estate-Deals getätigt), ist aber für Buffett aufgrund der Komplexitäten nach dem Kauf keine Option (zu viel persönliches “Involvement”)
- Private Equity ist tendenziell im Vergleich zu Public Equities aus verschiedenen Gründen unattraktiv (IRRs systematisch überschätzt, überhöhte Gebühren etc.)
- Gold hat in den vergangenen 100 Jahren nicht annähernd so gut performt, wie der S&P 500. Darüber hinaus ist Gold als Schutz gegen die Entwertung von Papiergeld ungeeignet (bzw. Investments in Dinge mit einem tatsächlichen Nutzen sind ebenso gut geeignet)
- Bitcoin und andere Kryptowährungen bewerten Buffett und Munger ähnlich wie Gold: Da Kryptos keine prognostizierbaren Cash Flows erzeugen – bzw. gar keine Cash Flows erzeugen -, kann man die Assetklasse nicht vernünftig bewerten. Daher ist ein Investment in ein günstig bewertetes und leicht zu verstehendes Qualitätsunternehmen ggü. einem Investment in Kryptowährungen immer vorzuziehen. Investments in Kryptowährungen sind aus Sicht von Buffett und Munger eher so etwas wie ein Glücksspiel oder ein kurzfristiger Zock
Risikominimierung durch Investition in gut kapitalisierte Unternehmen mit geringem inhärenten Geschäftsrisiko
- Um das Risiko eines permanenten Kapitalverlustes (aus Sicht von Buffett und Munger das einzig relevante Risiko) zu minimieren, sollte nur in Unternehmen mit einem sehr niedrigen inhärenten Geschäftsrisiko und einer sehr stabilen Bilanz (geringes Finanzrisiko) investiert werden
Volatilität im Markt kein Risikofaktor, sondern eine Opportunität
- Die typischen Preisschwankungen der Aktienkurse börsengelisteter Unternehmen („Volatilität“) sehen Buffett und Munger eher als Chance denn als Risiko: Eine höhere Volatilität bedeutet häufigere Fehlbewertungen und damit ggf. attraktive Kaufgelegenheiten
Historische Performance gibt Buffett und Munger Recht: Teilweise Allokation von 40% bis 75% des Kapitals auf eine einzige Idee
- Buffett und Munger selbst haben mit ihren Partnerships (1960er Jahre) auf die dargestellte Art und Weise investiert… waren stellenweise mit 40% oder sogar 75% in eine einzelne Idee investiert (heutzutage mit Berkshire Hathaway ist das aufgrund der Größe nicht mehr möglich). Charlie Mungers Familie hat selbst heute nur zwei bis drei substanzielle Investments
“Know-Nothing”-Investor versus “Know-Something”-Investor: Diversifikation versus Konzentration
If you don’t understand businesses, then you’re better off diversifying – and fairly widely diversifying. – Warren Buffett
The idea that very smart people with investment skills should have hugely diversified portfolios is madness. It’s a very conventional madness. It’s taught in all of the business schools. But they’re wrong. – Charlie Munger
Diversification is for the know-nothing investor; it’s not for the professional! There’s nothing wrong with the know-nothing investor practicing it. I’s exactly what they should practice. It’s exactly what a good professional investor should not practice. There’s no contradiction in that. A know-nothing investor will get decent results as long as they know they’re a know-nothing investor, diversify as to the time they purchase their equities, and as to the equities they purchase. That’s crazy for somebody who really knows what they’re doing. You will find opportunities that, if you put 20% of your net worth in it, you’ll have wasted the opportunity of a lifetime, in terms of not really loading up. – Warren Buffett
Diversification, as practiced generally, makes very little sense for anyone that knows what they’re doing. Diversification is protection against ignorance; if you want to make sure that nothing bad happens to you relative to the market, you own everything. There’s nothing wrong with that. That is a perfectly sound approach for somebody who does not feel they know how to analyze businesses. – Warren Buffett
But if you know to analyze and value businesses, it’s crazy to own thirty, forty, or fifty stocks, because there aren’t that many wonderful businesses that are understandable to a single human being in all likelihood. And to have some super wonderful business, and then put money in number thirty-five on your list of attractiveness and forego putting more money into number one, it just strikes us as madness. It’s conventional practice; if all you have to achieve is the average, it may preserve your job. But it’s a confession, in our view, that you don’t really understand the businesses that you own. – Warren Buffett
If you find three wonderful businesses in your life, you’ll get very rich. Bad things aren’t going to happen to those three. I mean, that’s the characteristic of it. – Warren Buffett
Asset Allocation: Auswahl unter Berücksichtigung der Opportunitätskosten
It [traditional asset allocation] has no utility. It will tell you how to do average, but anybody can figure out how to do average in fifth grade. It’s just not that difficult. It’s elaborate. – Warren Buffett
That’s why we think it’s slightly nuts when big institutions decide, because everybody else is doing it, to put 4% of their money in international equities or 3% in emerging growth countries; the only reason to put the money there is if they’ve measured against what they’re already doing. And if they measure it against what they’re already doing, and they think it’s a screamingly good idea to leave 97% in the other place and put 3% in, it just doesn’t make any sense. But it’s what committees are talked to about, and what keeps investment managers going to conferences and everything. – Warren Buffett
All Warren says is, when deciding whether to do something, compare it with the best opportunity you have. If that one is better and you’re not taking it, why would you do this just because somebody tells you that you need 2% in international equities? – Charlie Munger
Once you’re talking about an opportunity cost that’s personal to yourself, your own situation and your own abilities, you’ve departed from modern finance, totally. And that’s what we’ve done. We’re intelligently making these guesses, as best we can, based on our own circumstances and our own abilities. I think it’s crazy to do it based on somebody else’s circumstances and somebody else’s abilities. – Charlie Munger
For an ordinary individual, the best thing you have easily available is your measuring stick. If the new thing isn’t better than what you already know is available, it hasn’t met your threshold, then that screens out 99% of what you see, and it’s an enormous thought conserver. That is not taught in the business schools, by and large. – Charlie Munger
I think, in the last analysis, everything we do comes back to opportunity cost. But to some considerable extent we are guessing at our future opportunity cost. Warren is basically saying that he’s guessing that he’ll have opportunities in due course to put out money at pretty attractive rates of return, and, therefore, he’s not going to waste a lot of firepower now at lower returns. But that’s an opportunity cost calculation. And if interest rates were to more or less permanently settle at 1% or something like that, and Warren were to reappraise his notions of future opportunity cost, he would change the numbers. It’s like Keynes said, ‘When the facts change, I change my mind. What do you do, sir?’ But, so far at least, we have hurdles in our mind that involve, implicitly, future opportunity cost. – Charlie Munger
Perspektive auf bestimmte Assetklassen
Anteil von Cash bzw. Barmitteln am Portfolio
The question is, do we get into asset allocation by maintaining given cash levels, depending on some kind of outlook? We don’t really think that way. If we have cash, it’s because we haven’t found anything intelligent to do with it that day, in the way of buying the kind of businesses we like. When we can’t find anything for a while, the cash piles up. That’s not through choice; it’s because we’re failing at what we want to do, which is to find things to buy. – Warren Buffett
Cash at Berkshire is a residual; we would like to have no cash at all times.
If we have cash around, it’s simply because we haven’t found anything we like to do, and we hope to deploy it as soon as possible. We never think about whether the market’s going to go down or something of the sort, or whether we might buy something even cheaper. If we like something, we’ll buy it. And when you see cash on our balance sheet of any size, that’s an acknowledgment by Charlie and me that we have not found anything, in size anyway, attractive at that point. It’s never a policy of ours to hold a lot of cash.
I plead guilty to being a little more conservative with the cash than other people. But I think that’s all right. We could have put all the money into a lot of securities that would’ve done better than the S&P 500 with twenty-twenty hindsight. Remember, we had all that extra cash all that period, if something had come along in the way of opportunities and so on. I don’t think it’s a sin to be a little strong on cash when you’re as big of a company as we are. I watched Harvard use the last ounce of their cash, including all their prepaid tuition from the parents, and plunge it into the market at exactly the wrong moment and make a lot of forward commitments to private equity. They suffered two or three years of absolute agony. We don’t want to be like Harvard. We’re not going to change. – Charlie Munger
Investments in Treasuries und andere Staatsanleihen
Right now, with $16 billion getting 1.25% pre-tax, that’s $200 million a year. We could easily buy governments due in twenty years and get 5%, or $800 million a year of pre-tax income. We’re making a decision, as Charlie says, that it’s better to take $200 million for a while, on the theory that we’ll find something that gives us 10% or better, than to commit to the $800 million a year and then find that, in a year or so, when the better opportunities come along, that what we have committed to has a big principal loss in it. But that’s not terribly scientific. All I can tell you is, in practice, it seems to work pretty well. – Warren Buffett
Investments in Immobilien bzw. Real Estate
There’s just so much more opportunity’ in the stock market than in real estate. – Warren Buffett
I think if you’d asked him [Charlie Munger] to make a choice when he was 21 – either be in stocks exclusively for the rest of his life or real estate for the rest of his life – he would have chosen stocks. – Warren Buffett
When you walk down to the New York Stock Exchange, you can do billions of dollars worth of business, totally anonymous, and you can do it in five minutes. The trades are complete when they’re complete. In real estate, when you make a deal with a distressed lender, when you sign the deal, that’s just the beginning. Then people start negotiating more things, and it’s a whole different game with a different type of person who enjoys the game. – Warren Buffett
Nutzung von Private Equity als Portfoliobaustein
If you can raise $10 billion in a fund and get 1.5%, and lock people up for 10 years, you and your grandchildren will never have to do a thing – even if you were the dumbest investor in the world. – Warren Buffett
We have seen a number of proposals from private equity funds where the returns are really not calculated in a manner that I would regard as honest. – Warren Buffett
This man has this wonderful horse… but also occasionally it’s dangerous and causes enormous damage… So he goes to the vet and says, ‘What can I do?’ The vet says: ‘Next time your horse is behaving well – sell it.` Well think of how immoral that is. Haven’t I just described what Private Equity has to do? – Charlie Munger
Investments in Gold
I would say that gold would be weighed out on my list as a store of value I mean I would much prefer owning 100 acres of land near here in Nebraska or a an apartment house or an index fund. Gold was freed up 30 odd years ago but it adjusted to a market that still if you go back if you go back to 1900 you know we were talking twenty dollar gold well you take 20 to 400 in a hundred years the Dow went from 60 to what 12 or 13 000 and then 12 000 or whatever it might have been in that same period and paid you dividends during the time you owned it. – Warren Buffett
It really is not a store of value. I’m not arguing for paper money but if you’re worried about paper money – and I think it makes a lot of sense to worry about paper money over long periods of time – Gold is just about the last thing I would want to own under those circumstances. You know a farm has utility, an apartment house has utility, a business will produce earnings and to some businesses will produce them in real terms as they go along. – Warren Buffett
I just don’t see gold is a store of value and it’s the truth is it hasn’t worked very well and but forget about whether it’s worked well the last hundred years in the last 50 years or the last 10 years I see no reason why it would work well in the future. – Warren Buffett
You know we take it out of the ground in South Africa and we put it in the ground at Fort Knox or someplace in the New York Fed and it doesn’t do much along the way for anybody. – Warren Buffett
Investments in Kryptowährungen
You can’t value bitcoin because it’s not a value-producing asset. – Warren Buffett
In terms of cryptocurrencies, generally, I can say almost with certainty that they will come to a bad ending. – Warren Buffett
If I could buy a five year put on everyone of the cryptocurrencies I’d be glad to do it. […] I get into enough trouble with things I think I know something about, why in the world should I take a long or short position in something I don’t know anything about? – Warren Buffett
We don’t have to know what cocoa beans are going to do or cryptocurrencies, we just have to focus on 8 or 10 stocks, businesses basically that we think are decent businesses. – Warren Buffett
It’s bad people, crazy bubble, bad idea, luring people into the concept of easy wealth without much insight or work. – Charlie Munger
Believe me, man is capable of somehow creating more Bitcoin. – Charlie Munger
Buffett’s Strategie zur Risikominimierung
One investment rule at Berkshire has not and will not change: Never risk permanent loss of capital. – Warren Buffett
We think first in terms of business risk. The key to Ben Graham’s approach to investing is not to think of stocks as part of a stock market; stocks are part of a business. People in this room own a piece of a business. If the business does well, they’re going to do all right as long as they don’t pay way too much to join that business. So, we’re thinking about business risk. Now, business risk can arise in various ways. It can arise from a capital structure where somebody sticks a ton of debt on some business, so if there’s a hiccup in the business then the lenders can foreclose. It can come about by the nature of the business; certain businesses are just very risky. – Warren Buffett
We think the best way to minimize risk is to think. And the idea that you say, ‘T’ve got 60% in stocks and 40% in bonds, and then have a big announcement, ‘Now we’re moving to 65% in stocks and 35% in bonds, as some strategists or whatever they call them on Wall Street do, that is pure nonsense. What you ought to do is have your default position be short-term instruments, and whenever you see anything intelligent to do, you should do it … So much of what you see about asset allocation is just merchandising. It’s a way to make you think that if you don’t know how to determine whether it should be 60%/ 40% or 65%/35% that you need these people. You don’t need them at all in investing. – Warren Buffett
We tend to go into businesses that are inherently low risk, and are capitalized in a way such that the low risk of the business is transformed into a low risk to the enterprise. The risk beyond that is when you pay too much for them; that is usually a risk of time rather than loss of principal, unless you get into a really extravagant situation. Then the risk becomes the risk of you yourself, whether you can retain your belief in the real fundamentals of the business and not get too concerned about the stock market. – Warren Buffett
A really wonderful business is very well protected against the vicissitudes of the economy over time, and competition. We’re talking about businesses that are resistant to effective competition. Three of those will be better than a hundred average businesses. And they’ll be safer, incidentally. There is less risk in owning three easy-to-identify, wonderful businesses than there is in owning fifty well-known, big businesses. It’s amazing what has been taught, over the years, in finance classes about that. If I had to bet the fortunes of my family on the next thirty years, I would rather pick three businesses from those we own than own a diversified group of fifty. – Warren Buffett
Preisvolatilität: Risiko oder Opportunität?
It got to be the occasion in corporate finance departments of universities where they developed the notion of risk-adjusted returns. My best advice to all of you would be to totally ignore it. Risk had a very good colloquial meaning, meaning a substantial chance that something would go horribly wrong. The finance professors got volatility mixed up with a lot of foolish mathematics. To me, it’s less rational than what we do, and I don’t think we’re going to change. – Charlie Munger
Finance departments teach that volatility equals risk. They want to measure risk and they don’t know any other way. So, they say volatility measures risk. I’ve often used the example of The Washington Post: when we first bought in 1973 it had gone down almost 50%; the valuation of the whole company was $175 million, down to maybe $80 or $90 million. And because it happened very fast, the beta of the stock increased. A professor would have told you that the company was riskier if you bought it for $80 million than if you bought it for $170 million. I’ve thought about that ever since they told me that twenty-five years ago, and I still haven’t figured it out. – Warren Buffett
It doesn’t make any difference to us whether the volatility of the market averages 0.5% a day or 5% a day. In fact, we’d make a lot more money if volatility were higher, because it would create more mistakes in the market; volatility is a huge plus to the real investor. – Warren Buffett
And we won’t give up a lot in expectable return for smoothness. But if you give us a choice of having money come in every week, and the same present value of money coming in in very lumpy ways that we wouldn’t know about, we would choose the smooth. If you give us a choice of a higher present value for the lumpiness, we will take the lumpiness … Other people value smoothness so highly that we do get a spread for lumpy returns. – Charlie Munger
If you’re an investor, you love the idea of wild swings because it means more things get mispriced. – Warren Buffett
Buffett und Munger: Stark konzentrierte Portfolios outperformen
We like to put a lot of money in things we feel strongly about. – Warren Buffett
We are willing to put a lot of money into a single security. When I ran the partnership, the limit I got up to was about 40% in a single stock. I think Charlie, when you ran your partnership, you had more than 40%. – Warren Buffett
We like to go in heavy. If we want to invest in a business through the stock market, we want to put a lot of money in. We do not believe in a little of this and a little of that. So, at our present size, we’re limited primarily by the availability of the quantity we want, rather than restricting ourselves based on some percentage of a total portfolio. It’s very hard for me to think of a stock we quit on, in terms of buying, except because we were going to run into some 10% limit where we would get liable for short-swing profits or become insiders or that sort of thing. We almost never want to quit. – Warren Buffett
If Charlie and I were only running our own net worth over the past fifty years, I’m certain there would have been a significant number of times we would have put at least 75% of our net worth into an idea; we’ve seen all kinds of ideas we would’ve put 75% of our net worth in. – Warren Buffett
Several times I had 75% of my net worth in one situation … If you’re working with smaller sums, you will see things that it would be a mistake to not have half of your net worth in. Sometimes in securities, you really do see things that are lead-pipe cinches. You’re not going to see them often, and they’re not going to be talking about them on television or anything of the sort, but there will be some extraordinary things that happen in a lifetime where you can put 75% of your net worth in a given situation. – Warren Buffett
On a personal portfolio basis, I own one stock [Berkshire]. It’s a business I know and it leaves me very comfortable. Do I need to own twenty-eight stocks to have proper diversification? It’d be nonsense. Within Berkshire, I could pick out three businesses, and I would be very happy if they were the only businesses we owned and I had all my money in Berkshire. Three wonderful businesses is more than you need in this life to do very well … If you look at how the fortunes were built in this country, they weren’t built out of a portfolio of fifty companies. – Warren Buffett
Basically the Munger family is in two or three things only. Diversification is not something I have practically any interest in, except as it happens automatically in a big place like Berkshire Hathaway. I rejoiced the day I got rid of a stock-quoting machine. I like this buy-and-hold investing. It’s a lovely way to live a life; you deal with a better class of people and it’s worked pretty well for all of us. – Charlie Munger
I have always been willing to own just two or three stocks, and I have not minded that everybody who teaches finance in business school teaches that what I’m doing is wrong. It isn’t wrong. It’s worked beautifully. I don’t think you need a portfolio of fifty stocks if you know what you’re doing. I hope my heirs will just sit. – Charlie Munger
And assuming it were that much more attractive than the second, third, and fourth choices, we would put a big percentage of our net worth in it … It’s not crazy, if you understand the business well, and if the price is sufficiently attractive, to put a very significant percentage of your net worth in.
