Muy interesante toda la última carta de Howard Marks:
https://www.oaktreecapital.com/docs/default-source/memos/this-time-its-different.pdf
Es muy larga, así que copiaré únicamente la sección en la que habla sobre value vs growth:
Profitless success – Historically, companies have been considered valuable primarily because they produce profits – if not immediately, then at least they were expected to do so in the foreseeable future. Then the view arose in the tech-media-telecom bubble of the late 1990s that companies could be great (and valuable) even in the absence of profits for years to come. Today, profitless companies are back in vogue and sometimes valued in the tens of billions of dollars.
Tech and venture investors have made a lot of money over the last ten years. Thus there’s great interest in tech companies (including ones like Uber and Lyft that are applying technology to enable new business models) and willingness to pay high prices today for the possibility of profits far down the road. There’s nothing wrong with this, as long as the possibility is real, not over-rated and not over-priced. The issue for me is that in a period when profitless-ness isn’t an impediment to investor affection – when projected tech-company profitability commencing years from now is valued as highly as, or higher than, the current profits of more mundane firms – investing in these companies can be a big mistake.
Today there are a lot of investors who weren’t around to see the 2000 bursting of the TMT bubble, in which large numbers of Internet and e-commerce companies were given the benefit of the doubt, only to end up worthless. Venture capital funds showed triple-digit annual returns in the late 1990s, but the ones started around 2000 performed very poorly (and people began to ask me if venture capital was a legitimate asset class).
Today, some tech and venture investments have again produced great results, and the doubts seem to be gone. In investing, however, the truth usually lies somewhere between the extremes of infinite value and worthlessness. Investor sentiment seems to be closer to the positive end of the pendulum’s arc these days, but it’s unlikely to stay there in perpetuity.
Growth investing preeminence forever – Since future-oriented “growth investing” has been so successful for so long, and has so seriously trounced “value investing,” people are asking me whether this will ever end. In particular, value investing is being likened to the out-of-favor “cigar-butt” school of investing, in which people buy assets regardless of their quality just because they’re low- priced. Critics of value investing argue that, since the technological leadership that’s often associated with growth stocks is so essential for success in today’s world, old-economy companies lacking it are unlikely to be top performers in the future.
My answer is simple: low price is very different from good value, and those who pursue low price above all else can easily fall into “value traps.” And certainly it’s true that old-economy companies
are less likely to be the fast growers of the future or benefit as much from the “moats” that protected them in the past.
It may also be true that given the ease today of searching the universe of securities, it may be harder than it used to be to find “value” companies with current assets or earning power that are broadly unrecognized and thus underpriced. Since the best returns come from buying things whose merits others aren’t aware of, it’s certainly possible that easy, widespread access to data is making it harder for value investors to excel.
On the other hand, companies that do have better technology, better earnings prospects and the ability to be disrupters rather than disrupted still aren’t worth infinity. Thus it’s possible for them to become overpriced and dangerous as investments, even as they succeed as businesses (this was often the case with the Nifty-Fifty in 1968-73). And I continue to believe that eventually, after the modern winners have been lauded (and bid up) to excess, there will come a time when companies lacking the same advantages will be so relatively cheap that they can represent better investments (see value versus growth in 2000-02).
Understandably, the stocks of companies with bright futures are likely to be outperformers in times of economic growth and optimism, when investors are happy to pay up for potential. But stocks of companies with tangible value in the here-and-now are likely to hold up better in less positive times because (a) they’ve previously been disrespected and valued lower and (b) the rationale underlying their prices is less a matter of conjecture and faith. Thus a swing in favor of value may have to await a period in which the “champions” lose some of their luster, perhaps in a market correction (see 4Q2018). But it’ll come.