高手投资，不会总盯着股价

投资者很容易陷入两种截然相反但同样严重的恐慌：一是牛市时担心错失良机，二是市场波动时担心亏损。这两种恐慌与理性决策是零和关系。你的情绪越被这两种恐慌主导，你就越不理性。

那么作为投资者，我们怎样才能达到最高程度的理性？这里有一条建议：不要老是盯着你的股价。

下次当你注意到你买的股票出现了涨跌时，要想想哪些因素可能影响了这一走势。不同的股市投资者对于时间的概念是不同的。比如有些共同基金和对冲基金的客户，他们的耐心跟5岁孩子差不多，他们买进卖出股票，只着眼于他们对未来一到六个月的预期。然而对于一家寿命达几十年的公司来说，这点时间几乎可以忽略不计。

有些买家和卖家甚至不是人类，而是计算机算法，它们会根据一些变量做出反应，然而这些变量可能跟你投资的公司的基本面没有任何关系。这些玩家的时间概念是毫秒级的。

还有一些人主要根据图表走势买卖股票。他们并非不知道这家公司是干什么的，但他们告诉你，他们根本不在乎这家公司做什么。在他们眼里，这些公司只是一张张图表，是穿过一条曲线的另一条曲线。

还有一些投资者，他们研究明天看哪部电影的时间都比研究应该买哪只股票的时间多。有些股民在网上看了一篇文章，心血来潮就买了一只股票。还有很多股民买什么股票取决于朋友的推荐。

被动投资的风险

我们讲，不要老是盯着你的股票看，这并不完全等同于最近正火的一个概念——被动投资。这个问题需要我们展开解释一下。

利率是折现率（又称必要收益率）的基础。折现率是指投资者将未来的现金流转化成当前价值的比率。我们可以认为折现率由两个层面构成：一是基础层，或者说无风险利率（比如10年期国债的利率）；二是风险层，它可以补偿额外的特定资产风险。

在经济大萧条期间，各国央行通过购买数万亿美元的政府债券和企业债券，人为地改变了货币价格。相比之下，前苏联的那一套计划经济简直就是小孩子的把戏。在好几十个所谓“自由市场国家”里，央行没有像前苏联央行那样干预鞋子和糖果的价格，而是干预了最重要的商品——无风险利率的价格，而它是大多数经济决策的核心，也决定了所有资产的估值。

有些公司未来需要等很久才能获得收益，利率下降对于它们的估值十分有利。对于增长得不那么快、而且收益相对集中于中近期的公司，它们的估值就享受不到这种好处了。

债券市场的动态也是类似的。短期债券（类似于价值型股票）受利率下降的影响比长期债券（类似于增长型股票）要小得多。

随着利率受抑制的影响在市场上扩散，那些在选股上哪怕稍有节制的主动型经理人，都会发现自己的业绩落后于基准，甚至有可能被炒了鱿鱼。而客户资金则流向那些不加选择地买入指数中的股票的指数基金。

你可能会问，指数里都有什么？如今最受欢迎的指数都是基于公司的市值构建的。因此，近期表现越好的公司（比如Facebook、苹果、Netflix、谷歌等）就越容易获得更多的新资本——实际上，这四家公司已经占了标普500指数的10%左右。因此，所谓“高存续期”的公司既享受了低利率的好处，又从指数中“闷声发大财”了。

2018年持有长期债券的投资者可能已经发现，利率上升有时会带来负面影响。我们现在还不知道下步的利率走向。但是现如今，美国经济增长率达到了近5%（通胀调整前），美国政府却背了上万亿美元的财政赤字。那么，到经济衰退时，一旦经济增长放缓或出现负增长，赤字又会变成多少？更糟糕的是，美国已经背了21万亿美元的债务，过去10年间，美国债务规模翻了一番，而政府利率支出却没有变化（这要感谢低利率）。未来，利率提高甚至大幅提高也并非没有可能。

如果你持有的是标普500指数基金（或者长期债券），那么你潜意识里八成认可以下几条中的某一条：一、利率上升的可能性为零或为极小；二、我能及时脱身；三、我家里供着基金大亨约翰·博格尔的塑像，而且我的时间概念是非常非常长的。

记住：你是股东

再来说说影响了你投资决策的那些人。如果你是一个基本面投资者，那么你买的不仅仅是股票，而是这家企业的一部分所有权。

你可能会花几百个小时做研究，比如看看这家公司的财报，访问一下它的管理层、竞争对手、客户和供应商。你也可能会建立一个财务模型，看看它未来几年的走势，再做个估值，并且预测一下哪些因素可能扼杀这家企业。

如果你把这些都做了，还每天坐在电脑前盯着股价走势一天几涨几落，这就表明，你还是觉得一家公司的价值应该由计算机算法决定，由那个只会看图表却连你的公司名字都不写的家伙决定，由隔壁老王决定，由一个智商约等于万圣节大南瓜的ETF基金决定。（此处我并不想针对所有的南瓜。）

简而言之，你花在看股价走势上的时间越少，你就会越理性。（财富中文网）

本文作者维塔利·凯瑟尼尔森是投资管理协会有限公司（Investment Management Associates, Inc.）的首席执行官、注册金融分析师。他经常在ContrarianEdge.com网站上撰写有关股市的文章。他也是Wiley出版社出版的《横向市场小手册》(The Little Book of Sideways Markets)一书的作者。

译者：朴成奎

Investors are prone to two opposing but equally debilitating fears: the fear of missing out when times are good, and the fear of loss when markets are volatile. These two fears have a zero-sum relationship with rational decisions. The more you are dominated by these fears, the less rational you are.

So what can we do, as investors, to move toward maximum rationality? Here’s one piece of advice: Don’t constantly watch your portfolio.

Next time you notice the price of a stock you own moving up or down, think about the factors that may be influencing that move. Stocks are owned by people who have very different time horizons. You’ll have mutual funds and hedge funds whose clients often have the patience of five-year-olds. They are getting in and out of stocks based solely on what they expect them to do in the next month or six months – a rounding error of a time period in the life of a company that lasts decades.

Some buyers and sellers are not even humans but computer algorithms that are reacting to variables that have little or nothing to do with fundamentals of the company you invested in – these players have a time horizon of milliseconds.

You will also have folks who are buying and selling a stock based on the pattern of its chart. Not that they don’t know what the company does; they will tell you they don’t care what it does. For them it’s just a chart with one squiggly line crossing another squiggly line.

Then there are folks who spend more time researching the next movie they are going to see than the stock they’re about to buy. Some of them buy a stock after reading a single article on the internet, while many others buy on the advice of their brilliant neighbor Joe, the orthodontist.

The active dangers of passive investing

Deciding not to constantly look at your portfolio is not necessarily the same thing as embracing the latest craze – passive investing. This one is a bit personal and requires a small detour.

Interest rates are the foundation of the discount rate (also known as the required rate of return) that investors use to convert future cash flows into today’s dollars. Think of the discount rate as being composed of two layers: the foundational layer, or the risk-free rate (the interest rate, let’s say, on the 10-year Treasury); and a risky layer that should compensate you for additional, asset-specific risks.

During the great recession, when central banks artificially changed the price of money by buying trillions in government and corporate bonds, they made the Soviet planned economy look like child’s play. Instead of messing with kiddie stuff like setting prices on shoes and sugar like Soviet central planners did, a few dozen “free market” central bankers set the price of the single most important commodity, the risk-free rate, which is at the core of most economic decisions and the valuation of all assets.

Valuation of companies whose earnings lie far, far in the future benefits dramatically from falling interest rates, while the valuation of companies whose earnings are not growing as much and are concentrated in the present and near future doesn’t enjoy that benefit.

A similar dynamic happens in the bond market: Bonds with short maturities (similar to value stocks) are impacted a lot less by declining interest rates than long-term bonds (similar to growth stocks).

As the impact of suppressed interest rates rippled through the markets, active managers that had even a modicum of discipline in their stock selection found themselves trailing their benchmarks and even getting fired, while customer money flowed into index funds that indiscriminately buy what is in the index.

What is in the index, you may ask? Most popular indices today are constructed based on companies’ capitalization. Thus, companies that have done well lately (for example, the tech giant “FANGs”–Facebook, Apple, Netflix and Alphabet’s Google), get a much greater portion of new capital – in fact the FANGs account for about 10% of the S&P 500 Index. So “high-duration” companies are benefiting from both low interest rates and the “dumbness” of the indices.

However, as investors who hold long-term bonds in 2018 are discovering, rising interest rates can hurt. We don’t know what interest rates will do in the future. But today the U.S. government is running a trillion-dollar budget deficit at a time when the economy is growing at a rate of almost 5%, before adjusting for inflation. What do you think the deficit is going to be when growth slows down or turns negative during a recession (yes, those things do happen)? To make things worse, these deficits add to the $21 trillion of U.S. debt, which doubled over the last 10 years while the government’s interest payments didn’t change (thanks to low interest rates). Higher, maybe even much higher, interest rates are not unlikely going forward.

If you own the S&P 500 (or long-term bonds), you implicitly think one of several things is true: (1) Interest have a zero or insignificant probability of going up; (2) I’ll be able to get out in time; or (3) I have a life-sized statue of John Bogle in my living room, and I have a very, very, very long time horizon.

Remember: You’re an owner

Back to various actors who are responsible for daily ticks of your favorite stocks. If you are a fundamental investor, you are not just buying stocks, you are buying fractional ownership in businesses.

You spend hundreds of hours on research, you read company financial reports; you talk to management, competitors, customers, suppliers. You build a financial model that looks years into the future to value a business, and also to predict what could kill it.

If after you’ve done all that, you still find yourself glued to the computer screen watching the price change tick by tick, you are basically giving credence to the idea that what a company is worth should be decided by algorithmic funds, the guy who reads charts but cannot even spell the name of your company, Joe the neighbor, and an ETF with the IQ of a Halloween pumpkin. (I don’t want to insult everyday pumpkins here.)

In short, the less time you spend looking at your portfolio, the more rational you are going to be.

Vitaliy Katsenelson, CFA, is the CEO at Investment Management Associates, Inc. He writes about the markets at ContrarianEdge.com, and is the author of The Little Book of Sideways Markets (Wiley).