Thoughts

5월 7일부터 유럽 여행을 왔다.

런던부터 파리, 인터라켄, 밀라노, 오스트리아를 거쳐 부다페스트에서 out하는 3주가 넘는 일정이다.

런던에서 4일 정도만 머물렀는데,
사실 런던이 물가도 높기도 하고
다소 흐린 날씨가 마음에 안들기도 해서였는데

막상 런던을 다녀보니 생각보다 좋아서
다음에 기회가 되면 한달 살기를 해봐야겠다는 생각이 들 정도였다.

런던에서는 동아리 동기와 국민학교 동창을 각각 만났는데
단란한 가족을 이룬 그들을 보며 세월의 흐름을 많이 느꼈다.

런던, 파리에서는 새벽에 (=한국시간 오후) 입찰을 넣어야해서
잠을 많이 못자서 체력적으로 힘들었다.

파리는 혼밥이 너무 힘들어서
네이버 여행 카페를 통해 같이 식사할 사람을 찾아서 식사를 한두번 했는데
다양한 배경에 있는 사람들과 좋은 대화도 하고 유익했다.

내향적인 성격이라 원래 이런 것 좋아하지 않는데
얼마나 혼밥에 지쳤으면 그랬을까 나 스스로도 조금 안타깝기도 했다.

저녁에는 세느강을 걸었는데
파리 여러번 왔지만 아마도 거의 처음이지 않았을까 싶다.
참 좋았고, 역시 파리도 한달 살기를 해보면 좋겠다는 생각이 들었다.

내일은 인터라켄으로 가서 일주일을 머문다.
가벼운 트레킹을 위해서 등산화와 힙섹도 가지고 왔다.

5월 기부는 무엇을 해야하나 고민을 했다.

SK행복재단에서 3가지를 제안해왔다.
보육원에서 과자, 과일 등이 2건
그리고 보육원을 졸업하는 여자아이 2명이 성년의 날을 맞이하여 요청한 1건

고민을 하다가
후자를 선택했다.

요청한 물품은
나이키 슬리퍼와 후드티, 립글로우, 메이크업 쿠션들이었다.

사연을 읽어보았는데
이제 막 만 20세가 된 이들에게는 과하다 싶은
명품으로 분류되는 브랜드도 있어서 고민했으나
열심히 살겠다는 다짐을 하는 아이들의 목소리를 외면하기는 어려웠다.

4월30일자로 대표이사 사임을 했다.

여전히 100% 지분을 가진 주주이고,
아직 회사가 겨우 말을 조금하는 5살 아이 수준이어서 계속 회사를 돌봐주어야 하지만
계속 해서 대표이사로서 일을 하는 것은 바람직하지 않다 생각이 되어서
과감하게 결정했다.

날짜계산기로 계산해보니
정확히 1,932일이었다.

5년3개월이 넘는 기간 동안
많은 고통을 겪으며 회사를 이끌어왔다.

이제는 내려놓을 때라 생각한다.

“It’s the nature of things that a very intelligent man working hard maybe gets three, four, five really good long-term opportunities of buying great companies at a cheap price, it happens rarely.”

https://www.ft.com/content/da9f8230-2eb1-49c5-b63a-f1507936d01b

Charlie Munger: US banks are ‘full of’ bad commercial property loans
Berkshire Hathaway vice-chair foresees pain in FT interview — but it will not be as severe as 2008

Charlie Munger has warned of a brewing storm in the US commercial property market, with American banks “full of” what he said were “bad loans” as property prices fall.

The comments from the 99-year-old investor and sidekick to billionaire Warren Buffett come as turmoil ripples through the country’s financial system, which is reckoning with a potential commercial property crash following a handful of bank failures.

“It’s not nearly as bad as it was in 2008,” the Berkshire Hathaway vice-chair told the Financial Times in an interview. “But trouble happens to banking just like trouble happens everywhere else. In the good times you get into bad habits . . . When bad times come they lose too much.”

Munger was speaking on the veranda of his home in Greater Wilshire, a leafy neighbourhood of Los Angeles where he has lived for 60 years since he designed the property himself.

Dressed in a plaid shirt, Munger held court from his wheelchair as the travails of ailing California-based bank First Republic were playing out in real time on a television screen airing CNBC in the background.

Berkshire has a long history of supporting US banks through periods of financial instability. The sprawling industrials-to-insurance behemoth invested $5bn in Goldman Sachs during the 2007-08 financial crisis and a similar sum in Bank of America in 2011.

But the company has so far stayed on the sidelines of the current bout of turmoil, during which Silicon Valley Bank and Signature Bank collapsed. “Berkshire has made some bank investments that worked out very well for us,” said Munger. “We’ve had some disappointment in banks, too. It’s not that damned easy to run a bank intelligently, there are a lot of temptations to do the wrong thing.”

Their reticence stems in part from lurking risks in banks’ vast portfolios of commercial property loans. “A lot of real estate isn’t so good any more,” Munger said. “We have a lot of troubled office buildings, a lot of troubled shopping centres, a lot of troubled other properties. There’s a lot of agony out there.”

He noted that banks were already pulling back from lending to commercial developers. “Every bank in the country is way tighter on real estate loans today than they were six months ago,” he said. “They all seem [to be] too much trouble.”

Munger grew up in Omaha, Nebraska, a few hundred feet from where Buffett now lives. The two met in 1959, when Buffett was 28 and Munger 35. Munger, who at one point worked in a grocery store owned by Buffett’s grandfather, trained as a lawyer before being coaxed into investment by his soon-to-be partner.

Buffett has credited Munger with encouraging him to move on from the “cigar-butt strategy” espoused by his mentor Benjamin Graham, which involved buying cheap stocks akin to a discarded cigar where just a single puff of value remained.

In 2015, Buffett wrote in the conglomerate’s 50th annual letter: “The blueprint he [Munger] gave me was simple: Forget what you know about buying fair businesses at wonderful prices; instead, buy wonderful businesses at fair prices.”

This approach has served them well. Berkshire has generated compounded annual returns of nearly 20 per cent, twice the rate of the benchmark S&P 500 stock index, since 1965.

“We were a creature of a particular time and a perfect set of opportunities,” said Munger, adding he had lived during “a perfect period to be a common stock investor”.

He and Buffett had benefited “by and large [from] low interest rates, low equity values, ample opportunities”, he said.

I would like my legacy to be a more relentless determination to develop and use what I call an uncommon sense

Munger said he had made most of his money from just four investments: Berkshire, retailer Costco, his investment in a fund managed by Li Lu’s Himalaya Capital and Afton Properties, a real estate venture that owns apartment buildings in California and New Jersey. Forbes estimates his wealth at $2.4bn.

“It’s the nature of things that a very intelligent man working hard maybe gets three, four, five really good long-term opportunities of buying great companies at a cheap price,” he said. “It happens rarely.”

Ahead of the company’s annual meeting on Saturday, tens of thousands of Berkshire shareholders will descend on Omaha to hear from the two nonagenarian investors as they attend something akin to a festival of capitalism.

But Munger warned that the golden age for investing was over and investors would need to contend with a period of lower returns.

“It’s gotten very tough to have anything like the returns that were obtained in the past,” he said, pointing to higher interest rates and a crowded field of investors chasing bargains and looking for companies with inefficiencies.

“[At] the exact time that the game is getting tougher we’ve got more and more people trying to play it,” he said.

Berkshire has struggled to find worthwhile investments at times over the past decade, a fact epitomised by a cash balance that often sits in excess of $100bn and the choice by the company to buy back tens of billions of dollars of its own shares.

Munger also took aim at his own industry, hitting out at a “glut of investment managers that’s bad for the country”. Many of them are little more than “fortune tellers or astrologers who are dragging money out of their clients’ accounts, which [is] not being earned by any useful service”.

He had harsh words for buyout groups as well. “There’s too much private equity, too many buyers of all kinds . . it’s making it a very tough game for everybody.”

“The people getting the fees are still doing well,” he said of private equity fund managers. But he warned: “People that aren’t being served very well by paying all those fees may eventually be unwilling to pay them.”

Where Buffett has emphatically told Berkshire shareholders to “never bet against America”, Munger is more cautious. “I do not think that we can take it as a given that American democracy will prosper and flourish forever,” he said. “But I think we’ll stumble through pretty well for quite a while yet.”

On his own imprint on the world, Munger said: “I would like my legacy to be a more relentless determination to develop and use what I call an uncommon sense.”

예전에 로우로우(Rawrow) 라는 가방 브랜드가 런칭이 되어서 지켜보았던 적이 있다

무슨 혼을 담아서 가방을 만든다는 둥
나름의 철학을 얘기하는 것 같아서 그런가보다 했는데

이번에 노트북 대충 넣고 다닐 토트백을 찾다가
한번 사볼까 싶어서 주문했는데 깜짝 놀랐다.

너무 조악하고 형편없어서
이게 어찌하여 한국의 포터(Porter)인가?

마케팅의 승리구나.

아침 출근길에 문득 이 곡이 생각나서
버스타면서 들으며 사무실에 왔다.

밤에 어울리는 곡이지만
아침에 들으니 마음이 차분해진다.

저녁에 시간이 되면 부근에 코인노래방에 가볼 생각이다.

오늘도 할 일이 매우 많다.

예전에 대성홀딩스 주가 흐름을 보면서
신기하다고 생각했다.

어떻게 저렇게 굴곡 없이 예쁜 일직선 우상향이 그려질 수 있지? 하고
시장 참여자가 모두 같은 생각으로 가격을 계속 올렸다는 것인데
이게 가능한 일인가 싶었다.

그때는 그저 뭐 에너지가 워낙 강세이니 그런가보다 하고
역시 잘 알지못하는 것은 투자하지 않는다는 원칙하에 더 보지 않았는데

아니나 다를까
작전 세력이 3년여간 알뜰살뜰 작업한 결과물이었다.
(시장 교란행위임은 분명한데, 이정도 노력한 작전은 그 정성을 인정(?)해줘야하지 않나 하는 생각도 든다)

모든 것은 순리대로.

돈을 벌었다 이런 것 보다도

내가 생각한 투자의 이유 (investment thesis)가
실제로 맞았을 때의 지적 쾌감 때문이다.

아직 나에겐 금액 자체는 숫자에 불과해서
별 다른 의미로 와닿지는 않는다.

요즘 제일 화두는
삶에 있어 복잡성을 줄이는 것이다.

내 나름대로는 노력하고 있는데
생각보다는 잘 안된다.

아직도 해결해야하거나 쳐내야하는 군더더기가 너무 많다.

어제 밤 페이스북에서 정태영 현대카드 부회장의 글을 발견하고
많은 생각을 하게 되었다.

인생은 기차여행이라는 생각이 든다.
첫역의 텅빈 객실에 앉아서 여행을 시작하면 여러 사람들이 탔다가 내린다.
어떤 사람은 정답고 어떤 사람은 불편하다.
세상의 온갖 처음 보는 풍경들이 지나가며 가끔 지나간 역들을 세어본다.
종착역이 다가올수록 객실은 다시 비어가고 언젠가 기차는 멈춘다.