Is Stock Picking for Everyone?

選股適合每個人嗎？

by Charles Cheng, CFA

 

 

Stock picking is a time-honored investment strategy. Famous investors like Warren Buffett and Peter Lynch made their fortunes almost exclusively through investing in individual publicly traded companies. Yet both of these legends have suggested that most investors would be better off investing in the broad market. How do you know then if you should focus on picking companies and when you should not?

選股是一項需要時間證明的投資策略。沃倫·巴菲特（Warren Buffett）和彼得·林奇（Peter Lynch）等著名投資者幾乎都是通過投資於個股來發家致富。然而，這兩人的傳奇都表明，大多數投資者最好還是投資於大範圍的市場。但您怎麼知道您是否應該專注於挑選公司，何時不應該呢？

 

 

First, investors need to understand the challenges behind trying to outperform the broad market through security selection. The price of each individual stock throughout a day is set by thousands to millions of investors and traders actively making the decision to buy or sell at different moments, supported by professional market makers. Therefore, any publicly available information is rapidly incorporated into the price, making profiting from trading rather than investing extremely difficult. From an investment point of view, that also means that seemingly compelling stories about why a company has good prospects all already well known by anyone buying or selling the stock on a given day, so the information is already built into its valuation.

首先，投資者需要了解試圖通過選股來跑贏大盤的挑戰性。每一天每隻股票的價格在專業做市商的支持下，由成千上萬的投資者和交易員在不同時刻作出買入或賣出的決定而確定。因此，任何公開可得的信息都會迅速反應在股票的價格中，因此想從交易而不是從投資中獲利就變得極為困難。從投資的角度來看，這也意味著有關一家公司為什麼擁有良好前景的故事對當天買賣股票的任何人來說都已是公開的資訊了，因此該信息應該已經被反映在其市價中了。

 

 

Also, within the broad market’s performance, returns are not distributed anywhere near uniformly. As noted in an earlier notes, only small minority of stocks drive most of the performance of the overall market. A study by Professor Hendrick Bessembinder found that 61% of global stocks underperformed treasury bills over the previous three decades and only 1 percent of stocks accounted for the majority of stock market wealth creation.

而且，在大盤表現中，收益不會平均分佈在任何地方。如之前的文章所述，只有少數股票驅動著整個市場的大部分表現。 Hendrick Bessembinder教授進行的一項研究發現，在過去的三十年中，有61％的全球股票的表現不及國庫券，而只有1％的股票構成了股市財富增值的絕大部分。

 

Figure 1:

Source: Do Global Stocks Outperform US Treasury Bills?, July 2019, Bessembinder, Hendrik (Hank) and Chen, Te-Feng and Choi, Goeun and Wei, Kuo-Chiang (John)

 

Counterintuitively, this implies that a more concentrated stock portfolio significantly increases the chances of underperforming the market. While it’s true that a more diversified portfolio decreases the possibility of massive outperformance, the possibility of hitting a home run is also very slight.

與直覺相反，這意味著更集中的股票投資組合顯著增加了總體收益不佳的機會。但是，更多元化的投資組合也會降低了大幅超越大盤的可能性，其實現全壘打的機率也更小。

 

 

A final major consideration is opportunity cost. Sometimes, specialized knowledge, perhaps about a company or industry will help someone gain an above average chance to find an outperforming company. But the advantage perhaps is limited to one or a few companies and requires a lot of research and analysis. For someone who is not doing this full time and or does not have the resources to continually find these advantages, they are not going to find enough of these investments to fill their portfolios or commit the majority of their assets. The cash they have on the sidelines waiting for these ideas could have been generating returns, and even if their individual investments outperforms their entire portfolio would underperform, especially in a bull market like we’ve had over the past decade.

最後一個主要的考慮因素是機會成本。有時，有關某些公司或行業的專業知識將幫助某人獲得高於平均水平的機會來找到一家表現出色的公司。但是優勢可能僅限於一個或幾個公司，並且需要大量的研究和分析。對於沒有全職工作或沒有資源持續尋找這些優勢的人，他們將不會找到足夠的可投資的公司來組成他們的投資組合或投入大部分資產。他們在等待這些想法時閒置的現金本來是可以帶來回報的。即使他們的個股跑贏大盤，然而其整個投資組合也會跑輸，尤其是在像過去十年的牛市中。

 

 

Taken together, the above means that investors without the means and time to construct an entire portfolio of individual stocks would be better served leaving the stock selection to someone else. Buying stocks solely based on the recommendation of a broker, private banker, or acquaintance for the purpose of making a winning bet is much more likely to cause you to underperform. Instead, one should keep in mind that being consistently invested in return generating assets long term is the ultimate objective.

綜上所述，沒有能力和時間來構建個股投資組合的投資者，最好將股票的選擇留給其他人。但僅僅根據經紀人、私人銀行家或熟人的推薦來購買股票，很可能導致投資表現不佳。相對的，投資人是應該牢記長期持續地投資於能產生收益的資產才是最終目標。

 

 

Mr. Cheng is a managing partner at a Hong Kong based independent private investment office. This article reflects his personal views and not his firm’s and should not be viewed as an investment recommendation.

鄭先生為可承資本，一家總部設於香港的獨立投資辦公室之董事合夥人。這篇文章反映了他的個人而非公司觀點。該文章不應被視為投資建議。

 

 

 

 

---