复利的力量

冰河时代带给我们的重要启示是，创造巨大的成果并不需要巨大的力量。 如果事物具有复利效应——即一点点的增长能为未来的增长提供动力——那么一个小小的起点也能带来超乎想象的结果，这些结果看似有悖常理。

它们可能如此违背常理，以至于你会低估可能取得的成就、增长的来源以及它所能带来的影响。 财富增长亦是如此。 市面上有超过2000本书探讨沃伦·巴菲特是如何积累财富的。其中很多都很不错。但很少有书充分关注到一个最简单的事实：巴菲特的财富并非仅仅源于他是一名优秀的投资者，更在于他从孩童时期起就是一名优秀的投资者。 我写这段话时，沃伦·巴菲特的净资产为845亿美元。其中，842亿美元是他50岁之后积累的。815亿美元是他在65岁左右符合领取社会保障金条件之后获得的。 沃伦·巴菲特是一位杰出的投资者。但如果你将他的所有成功都归功于投资敏锐度，那就忽略了一个关键因素。他成功的真正关键在于，他作为一名杰出的投资者已经有75年之久。如果他30岁才开始投资，60岁就退休，那几乎没人会听说过他。我们来做个小小的思想实验。 巴菲特10岁时就开始认真投资。到他30岁时，他的净资产达到了100万美元，按通货膨胀调整后相当于930万美元。 要是他和普通人一样，十几岁和二十几岁时去探索世界、寻找自己的热爱，到30岁时，他的净资产假设只有2.5万美元呢？ 假设他仍然能够获得他实际取得的那种惊人的年投资回报率（每年22%），但60岁就停止投资，退休去打高尔夫球、陪孙子孙女。 那么粗略估算一下，他如今的净资产会是多少呢？ 不会是845亿美元。 而是1190万美元。 比他实际的净资产少了99.9%。 实际上，沃伦·巴菲特所有的财务成功都与他在青少年时期打下的财务基础以及他在老年时期持续的投资有关。 他的技能是投资，但他的秘诀是时间。 这就是复利的力量。 换个角度想。巴菲特是有史以来最富有的投资者。但他实际上并非最厉害的——至少从年均回报率来看并非如此。 对冲基金文艺复兴科技公司的掌门人吉姆·西蒙斯自1988年以来，资金的复利回报率达到了每年66%。无人能及这一纪录。如我们所知，巴菲特的年均复利回报率约为22%，只有西蒙斯的三分之一。 我写这段话时，西蒙斯的净资产为210亿美元。尽管考虑到我们讨论的这些数字，这么说听起来很荒谬，但他的财富比巴菲特少了75%。 如果西蒙斯是更优秀的投资者，为什么会有这样的差距呢？ 因为西蒙斯直到50岁才在投资领域崭露头角。他进行复利投资的时间还不到巴菲特的一半。如果吉姆·西蒙斯能像巴菲特积累财富的70年那样，以66%的年回报率进行投资，他的身家将达到——请屏住呼吸——63亿亿9000万亿781万亿7800亿7480160000美元。 这些数字大得离谱、不切实际。关键在于，对增长率假设的看似微小的改变，就能导致极其夸张、不切实际的数字。所以当我们研究某件事为何变得如此强大——比如冰河时代为何形成，或者沃伦·巴菲特为何如此富有——我们往往会忽略成功的关键驱动因素。 我听过很多人说，他们第一次看到复利计算表——或者读到那些关于20多岁开始储蓄和30多岁开始储蓄相比，退休时能多攒多少钱的故事——改变了他们的人生。但可能并非如此。这些故事很可能只是让他们感到惊讶，因为结果从直觉上看似乎不合理。线性思维远比指数思维更符合直觉。如果我让你在脑子里计算8 + 8 + 8 + 8 + 8 + 8 + 8 + 8 + 8，你几秒就能算出来（答案是72）。但如果我让你计算8×8×8×8×8×8×8×8×8，你可能就会头疼不已（答案是134217728）。 20世纪50年代，IBM制造出了3.5兆字节的硬盘。到了60年代，硬盘容量达到了几十兆字节。70年代，IBM的温彻斯特硬盘容量为70兆字节。此后，硬盘尺寸呈指数级缩小，而存储容量不断增大。20世纪90年代初，普通个人电脑的硬盘容量为200 - 500兆字节。 然后……砰！情况发生了爆炸式的变化。 1999年——苹果的iMac配备了6千兆字节的硬盘。 2003年——Power Mac的硬盘容量达到120千兆字节。 2006年——新款iMac的硬盘容量为250千兆字节。 2011年——第一款4太字节的硬盘问世。 2017年——出现了60太字节的硬盘。 2019年——100太字节的硬盘诞生。 把这些数据汇总一下：从1950年到1990年，硬盘容量增加了296兆字节。从1990年到现在，硬盘容量增加了1亿兆字节。 如果你在20世纪50年代是个科技乐观主义者，你可能会预测实际存储容量会增大1000倍。如果你野心更大，可能会预测增大10000倍。但很少有人会说“在我有生之年增大3000万倍”。但这确实发生了。 复利的反直觉特性让即使最聪明的人也会忽视它的力量。2004年，比尔·盖茨批评新款Gmail，质疑为什么有人需要1千兆字节的存储空间。作家史蒂文·利维写道：“尽管他对前沿技术了如指掌，但他的思维仍停留在旧的存储观念中，认为存储是一种必须节省使用的资源。”你永远无法习惯事物增长的速度。 这里的危险在于，当复利不那么直观时，我们往往会忽略它的潜力，转而寻求其他解决问题的方法。这并非因为我们想得太多，而是因为我们很少停下来思考复利的潜力。 在那2000本剖析巴菲特成功之道的书中，没有一本的书名是《这家伙持续投资了75年》。但我们知道，这才是他大部分成功的关键。只是这个数学原理很难理解，因为它不符合直觉。 市面上有关于经济周期、交易策略和行业投资的书籍。但最强大、最重要的书应该叫做《闭嘴，等待》。它只有一页，上面是一张经济增长的长期图表。 实际的启示是，复利的反直觉特性可能是导致大多数令人失望的交易、糟糕的策略以及看似成功实则不然的投资尝试的原因。 你不能责怪人们全力以赴——无论是在学习还是行动上——试图获得最高的投资回报率。从直觉上看，这似乎是致富的最佳途径。 但好的投资不一定意味着追求最高的回报率，因为最高的回报率往往是一次性的，难以复制。好的投资是追求相当不错的回报率，并且能够长期坚持、持续获得。只有这样，复利才能发挥出巨大的威力。 反之，获得无法持续的高额回报会导致一些悲剧性的故事。我们需要在下一章中讲述这些故事。

big takeaway from ice ages is that you don’t need tremendous force to create tremendous results. If something compounds—if a little growth serves as the fuel for future growth—a small starting base can lead to results so extraordinary they seem to defy logic.

It can be so logicdefying that you underestimate what’s possible, where growth comes from, and what it can lead to. And so it is with money. More than 2,000 books are dedicated to how Warren Buffett built his fortune. Many of them are wonderful. But few pay enough attention to the simplest fact: Buffett’s fortune isn’t due to just being a good investor, but being a good investor since he was literally a child. As I write this Warren Buffett’s net worth is $84.5 billion. Of that, $84.2 billion was accumulated after his 50th birthday. $81.5 billion came after he qualified for Social Security, in his mid-60s. Warren Buffett is a phenomenal investor. But you miss a key point if you attach all of his success to investing acumen. The real key to his success is that he’s been a phenomenal investor for three quarters of a century. Had he started investing in his 30s and retired in his 60s, few people would have ever heard of him. Consider a little thought experiment. Buffett began serious investing when he was 10 years old. By the time he was 30 he had a net worth of $1 million, or $9.3 million adjusted for inflation.¹⁶ What if he was a more normal person, spending his teens and 20s exploring the world and finding his passion, and by age 30 his net worth was, say, $25,000? And let’s say he still went on to earn the extraordinary annual investment returns he’s been able to generate (22% annually), but quit investing and retired at age 60 to play golf and spend time with his grandkids. What would a rough estimate of his net worth be today? Not $84.5 billion. $11.9 million. 99.9% less than his actual net worth. Effectively all of Warren Buffett’s financial success can be tied to the financial base he built in his pubescent years and the longevity he maintained in his geriatric years. His skill is investing, but his secret is time. That’s how compounding works. Think of this another way. Buffett is the richest investor of all time. But he’s not actually the greatest—at least not when measured by average annual returns. Jim Simons, head of the hedge fund Renaissance Technologies, has compounded money at 66% annually since 1988. No one comes close to this record. As we just saw, Buffett has compounded at roughly 22% annually, a third as much. Simons’ net worth, as I write, is $21 billion. He is—and I know how ridiculous this sounds given the numbers we’re dealing with—75% less rich than Buffett. Why the difference, if Simons is such a better investor? Because Simons did not find his investment stride until he was 50 years old. He’s had less than half as many years to compound as Buffett. If James Simons had earned his 66% annual returns for the 70-year span Buffett has built his wealth he would be worth—please hold your breath—sixtythree quintillion nine hundred quadrillion seven hundred eighty-one trillion seven hundred eighty billion seven hundred forty-eight million one hundred sixty thousand dollars. These are ridiculous, impractical numbers. The point is that what seem like small changes in growth assumptions can lead to ridiculous, impractical numbers. And so when we are studying why something got to become as powerful as it has —why an ice age formed, or why Warren Buffett is so rich— we often overlook the key drivers of success. I have heard many people say the first time they saw a compound interest table—or one of those stories about how much more you’d have for retirement if you began saving in your 20s versus your 30s—changed their life. But it probably didn’t. What it likely did was surprise them, because the results intuitively didn’t seem right. Linear thinking is so much more intuitive than exponential thinking. If I ask you to calculate 8+8+8+8+8+8+8+8+8 in your head, you can do it in a few seconds (it’s 72). If I ask you to calculate 8×8×8×8×8×8×8×8×8, your head will explode (it’s 134,217,728). IBM made a 3.5 megabyte hard drive in the 1950s. By the 1960s things were moving into a few dozen megabytes. By the 1970s, IBM’s Winchester drive held 70 megabytes. Then drives got exponentially smaller in size with more storage. A typical PC in the early 1990s held 200–500 megabytes. And then … wham. Things exploded. 1999—Apple’s iMac comes with a 6 gigabyte hard drive. 2003—120 gigs on the Power Mac. 2006—250 gigs on the new iMac. 2011—first 4 terabyte hard drive. 2017—60 terabyte hard drives. 2019—100 terabyte hard drives. Put that all together: From 1950 to 1990 we gained 296 megabytes. From 1990 through today we gained 100 million megabytes. If you were a technology optimist in the 1950s you may have predicted that practical storage would become 1,000 times larger. Maybe 10,000 times larger, if you were swinging for the fences. Few would have said “30 million times larger within my lifetime.” But that’s what happened. The counterintuitive nature of compounding leads even the smartest of us to overlook its power. In 2004 Bill Gates criticized the new Gmail, wondering why anyone would need a gigabyte of storage. Author Steven Levy wrote, “Despite his currency with cutting-edge technologies, his mentality was anchored in the old paradigm of storage being a commodity that must be conserved.” You never get accustomed to how quickly things can grow. The danger here is that when compounding isn’t intuitive we often ignore its potential and focus on solving problems through other means. Not because we’re overthinking, but because we rarely stop to consider compounding potential. None of the 2,000 books picking apart Buffett’s success are titled This Guy Has Been Investing Consistently for ThreeQuarters of a Century. But we know that’s the key to the majority of his success. It’s just hard to wrap your head around that math because it’s not intuitive. There are books on economic cycles, trading strategies, and sector bets. But the most powerful and important book should be called Shut Up And Wait. It’s just one page with a long-term chart of economic growth. The practical takeaway is that the counterintuitiveness of compounding may be responsible for the majority of disappointing trades, bad strategies, and successful investing attempts. You can’t blame people for devoting all their effort—effort in what they learn and what they do—to trying to earn the highest investment returns. It intuitively seems like the best way to get rich. But good investing isn’t necessarily about earning the highest returns, because the highest returns tend to be one�off hits that can’t be repeated. It’s about earning pretty good returns that you can stick with and which can be repeated for the longest period of time. That’s when compounding runs wild. The opposite of this—earning huge returns that can’t be held onto—leads to some tragic stories. We’ll need the next chapter to tell them

没有什么是免费的

everything has a price, and the key to a lot of things with money is just figuring out what that price is and being willing to pay it. The problem is that the price of a lot of things is not obvious until you’ve experienced them firsthand, when the bill is overdue. 没有什么是免费的 只有经历才能了解代价

General Electric was the largest company in the world in 2004, worth a third of a trillion dollars. It had either been first or second each year for the previous decade, capitalism’s shining example of corporate aristocracy. Then everything fell to pieces. The 2008 financial crisis sent GE’s financing division—which supplied more than half the company’s profits—into chaos. It was eventually sold for scrap. Subsequent bets in oil and energy were disasters, resulting in billions in writeoffs. GE stock fell from $40 in 2007 to $7 by 2018. Blame placed on CEO Jeff Immelt—who ran the company since 2001—was immediate and harsh. He was criticized for his leadership, his acquisitions, cutting the dividend, laying off workers and—of course—the plunging stock price. Rightly so: those rewarded with dynastic wealth when times are good hold the burden of responsibility when the tide goes out. He stepped down in 2017. But Immelt said something insightful on his way out. Responding to critics who said his actions were wrong and what he should have done was obvious, Immelt told his successor,“Every job looks easy when you’re not the one doing it.”  每个工作都是看起来更容易

Every job looks easy when you’re not the one doing it because the challenges faced by someone in the arena are often invisible to those in the crowd. Dealing with the conflicting demands of sprawling bloat, short-term investors, regulators, unions, and entrenched bureaucracy is not only hard to do, but it’s hard to even recognize the severity of the problems until you’re the one dealing with them.Immelt’s successor, who lasted 14 months, learned this as well. Most things are harder in practice than they are in theory. Sometimes this is because we’re overconfident. More often it’s because we’re not good at identifying what the price of success is, which prevents us from being able to pay it.

翻译Same with investing, where volatility is almost always a fee, not a fine. Market returns are never free and never will be. They demand you pay a price, like any other product. You’re not forced to pay this fee, just like you’re not forced to go to Disneyland. You can go to the local county fair where tickets might be $10, or stay home for free. You might still have a good time. But you’ll usually get what you pay for. Same with markets. The volatility/uncertainty fee—the price of returns—is the cost of admission to get returns greater than low-fee parks like cash and bonds. The trick is convincing yourself that the market’s fee is worth it. That’s the only way to properly deal with volatility and uncertainty—not just putting up with it, but realizing that it’s an admission fee worth paying. There’s no guarantee that it will be. Sometimes it rains at Disneyland. But if you view the admission fee as a fine, you’ll never enjoy the magic.Find the price, then pay it

市场不会免费 不会投机取巧

和大多数产品一样，回报越高，代价越大。2002 年至 2018 年，网飞（Netflix）股票回报率超过 35000%，但其股价在 94% 的时间里都低于此前的历史最高点。1995 年至 2018 年，怪物饮料（Monster Beverage）回报率高达 319000%—— 堪称史上最高回报率之一 —— 但在此期间，其股价 95% 的时间都低于此前高点。

接下来是关键部分。就像买车，你有几个选择：你可以付出这个代价，接受波动与起伏；或者你可以找一种不确定性较小、回报也较低的资产，类似一辆二手车；又或者你可以尝试类似偷车的做法：试图获取回报，同时避开随之而来的波动。

在投资领域，很多人选择了第三种。他们就像偷车贼 —— 尽管本意不坏且平时遵纪守法 —— 琢磨出各种技巧和策略，想不付出代价就获得回报。他们频繁买卖。试图在下次经济衰退前卖出，在下次繁荣前买入。大多数稍有经验的投资者都知道，波动真实且常见。然后，许多人就迈出了看似顺理成章的下一步：试图避开波动。

但是，财富之神可不待见那些想不劳而获的人。有些偷车贼可能会逃脱惩罚，但更多的会被抓住并受到惩处。

投资也是如此。