Perfeksionis

Kesempurnaan merupakan suatu harapan yang begitu tinggi sehingga hampir mustahil untuk dicapai. Dalam berinvestasi saham, menuntut kesempurnaan bisa menjadi hal yang sia-sia. Pasar saham adalah sistem yang kompleks di mana jumlah variabel yang hampir tak terbatas dapat mempengaruhi harga saham dalam berbagai cara. Informasi sering kali bersifat ambigu, partisipan pasar sering kali tidak rasional, dan variabel-variabel tersebut selalu berubah-ubah. Dalam lingkungan ini Anda tidak mungkin berharap mengetahui semua informasi yang akan berdampak pada perusahaan atau harga sahamnya.

“Complex systems are full of interdependencies—hard to detect—and nonlinear responses. In such an environment, simple causal associations are misplaced; it is hard to see how things work by looking at single parts. Man-made complex systems tend to develop cascades and runaway chains of reactions that decrease, even eliminate, predictability and cause outsized events.” Nassim Nicholas Taleb

"The stock market, at least in the short run, responds to many factors besides profits and dividends. Inflation and interest rates, the supply of new stock underwritings, the money supply, investor confidence, government actions, and international events are all factors that interact with one another in subtle, changing and unpredictable ways. What we have, really, is a complex system with lags and multiple feedback loops. All such systems share certain characteristics that hinder predictive accuracy." Ralph Wanger

Sebagai seorang investor yang bijak, kita harus menerima bahwa kita tidak dapat mengetahui segalanya, dan itu merupakan pola pikir psikologis yang penting untuk investasi saham yang sukses. Kita harus sadar akan informasi yang kurang lengkap, sebesar apapun usaha research yang kita kerjakan. Dengan demikian, Kita harus mampu membuat kesimpulan yang bersifat probabilistik, karena apa yang terjadi di masa depan tidak dapat diketahui secara pasti. Seorang CEO perusahaan pun tidak dapat mengetahui atau memastikan segala sesuatu yang akan terjadi di sebuah perusahaan.

"First, no matter how much research is performed, some information always remains elusive: investors have to live with less than complete information. Second, even if an investor could know all the facts about an investment, he or she would not necessarily profit.” Seth Klarman

Dalam medan pertempuran ini Anda tetap bisa meraih kemenangan meskipun beberapa kali melakukan kesalahan. Percayalah, investing is not a ‘perfect’ game. Silahkan dicermati bagaimana pandangan para investment master tentang seeking perfection:

“Perfection doesn’t exist in this world. All of my choices involve various degrees of compromise and tradeoffs” Thomas Gayner

"This is not a perfect game." Steve Cohen
"There is never perfect knowledge about the world. Simply put, we don't know what we don't know." Leon Levy

"Trying to be right 100% of the time leads to paralysis." Sam Zell

“You can’t be 100% certain but try to look for weaknesses in your thinking.” Walter Schloss

"I’ve never been 100% certain and I’m never seeking to be stubborn. There are many possible outcomes, and there’s a large range of profitable outcomes." Bruce Berkowitz

“Investing is about predicting the future, and the future is inherently unpredictable. Therefore the only way you can do better is to assess all the facts and truly know what you know and know what you don’t know. That’s your probability edge. Nothing is 100%, but if you always swing when you have an overwhelming better edge, then over time, you will do very well.” Li Lu

“I am always searching for the underlying truth, based on insufficient information.. it’s simply not possible to have a complete understanding of anything. We’re never truly going to get to the bottom of what’s going on inside a company, so we have to make probabilistic inferences.” Guy Spier

“One of the things I do very well in investing is, I gather a lot of information but I never know the whole picture. I have a lot of inputs but never everything and I have to make a decision on incomplete information." James Dinan

“I don't know any certain way of arriving at the 'correct' value of any asset. What I do know though is that I've been asking the right questions about the attraction of any equity asset.” Nick Train

“The more you know, you start to realise there is a lot more than you don’t. That’s an enlightened place to be. You can study and study companies but you’re never going to know everything you’d like to know. You’re going to know a fraction of what an insider knows and they don’t know everything either. You have to be careful because you’re never going to know everything. So for us it’s a never ending quest for knowledge on our companies. Everyday you have to try to keep finding more and more about the companies you want to know more about.” Jeff Mueller

“Any time you’re investing, pretty much any style of investing, there is no such thing as a 100% sure bet. You can always have the asteroid come and take everything out – everything is probabilities.” Mohnish Pabrai

“I’ve always thought it was important to remember that there is no absolute truth. Everything is a working hypothesis, and from there it’s about reacting to data points.” Rajiv Jain

“My conclusions are the result of my reasoning, applied with the benefit of my experience, but I never consider them 100% likely to be correct, or even 80%. I think they’re right, of course, but I always make my recommendations with trepidation.” Howard Marks

Sebagai penganut metode quality investing, saya menetapkan standar tinggi bagi perusahaan yang akan mengisi portofolio. Saya berminat membeli saham perusahaan berkualitas tinggi yang dikelola oleh manajemen yang andal. Namun, saya juga menyadari bahwa tidak ada perusahaan yang sempurna yang bisa memenuhi semua kriteria yang saya inginkan. Untuk itu, saya tidak perlu mencari data dan informasi se-detail mungkin untuk menemukan saham pemenang dalam jangka panjang. Saya hanya fokus mempelajari beberapa faktor yang saya anggap penting yang bisa mempengaruhi prospek perusahaan ke depan.

"In my early years, I ended up too much in the weeds. I had to know everything about a company and its industry. I’ve since learned that knowing less is okay as long as you have identified the one to three things that will drive the company. We believe exactness offers little so we prefer to establish a potential range of outcomes instead. We’d rather be directionally right rather than precisely wrong." Steven Romick

"I believe that there's no need to know every detail, rather there's a need to understand the three, four or five factors affecting the company." Charles De Vaulx

"If you are an investment analyst or investment manager, to be successful and to do well, a couple of things have to happen. Number one, in most businesses, the results are driven by three or four factors that control let’s say 80 percent of the outcome and most entrepreneurs are honed in on those three or four factors. They understand those factors and they focus on those factors. If the factors you focus on do not match the factors that the guy running the business is focused on, you’ve not understood the business and there’s a problem over there." Mohnish Pabrai

“Every company has 100 things about them you could study and learn. But you have to understand the differences between data and knowledge, and between knowledge and wisdom. Warren Buffett is remarkable in his ability to cut right through. He sees very clearly the three or four or five critical factors that determine whether a company succeeds or fails. It’s not about encyclopedic knowledge, it’s about zeroing in on what truly matters and assessing that. There’s no substitute for that in this business." Howard Marks

Dengan berfokus pada hal-hal yang penting dibandingkan mencari setiap detail, maka kita dapat terhindar dari confirmation bias dan sikap over-confidence.

“Investment experts continue to be convinced that their major problems could have been handled if only those extra few necessary facts had been available. They thus tend to overload themselves with information, which usually does not improve their decisions but only makes them more confident and more vulnerable to serious errors.” Dave Dreman

"Conventional wisdom suggests that, for investors, more information these days is a blessing and more competition is a curse. I'd say the opposite is true. Coping with so much information runs the risk of distracting attention from the few variables that really matter." John Neff

"When forecasters have too much information, they often become even more inaccurate than when there is too little." Bennett Goodspeed

"Once an experienced analyst has the minimum information necessary to make an informed judgement, obtaining additional information generally does not improve the accuracy of his or her forecasts. Additional information does, however, lead the analyst to become more confident in the judgement, to the point of over-confidence." Richards Heuer

Setiap investor pasti pernah melakukan kesalahan, bahkan mereka yang sudah senior pun tak luput dari hal ini. Saat kita melakukan kesalahan, yang terpenting adalah jangan terus memikirkan dan meratapinya. Belajarlah dari mereka dan lanjutkan petualangan kita.

“To others, being wrong is a source of shame; to me, recognizing my mistakes is a source of pride. Once we realize that imperfect understanding is the human condition there is no shame in being wrong, only in failing to correct our mistakes.” George Soros

“Since actual perfection and 100% satisfaction with a position are impossible, we must learn from results and not dwell on past outcomes, either good or bad. Moving forward, even from large errors, is required.” Paul Singer

“I may try to minimise my errors, but I'm not one to dwell on them.  It isn't worth it. You have to put mistakes behind you and not look back. Tomorrow is another day. Just go on to the next thing and strive to do your best." Warren Buffett

Dengan tetap berpikiran terbuka, belajar dari kesalahan serta menerapkan prinsip rendah hati dengan mengakui bahwa kita tidak dapat mengetahui segalanya, maka itu akan sangat membantu kita untuk memperoleh return investasi yang memuaskan dalam jangka panjang.

“The humility required for good judgment is not self-doubt—the sense that you are untalented, unintelligent, or unworthy. It is intellectual humility. It is a recognition that reality is profoundly complex, that seeing things clearly is a constant struggle, when it can be done at all, and that human judgment must therefore be riddled with mistakes.” Philip Tetlock

"The more you learn, the more you will realize how little you know - and armed with this humility, you will never lose sight of the distance that separates self-confidence and self-importance." Jim Rogers

Saudara-saudara, Anda tidak harus selalu benar 100% untuk menjadi pemenang dalam investasi saham. Meskipun Anda pernah beberapa kali membuat keputusan yang salah, meskipun dalam portofolio Anda terdapat satu atau beberapa saham yang berkinerja buruk, dan meskipun Anda tidak punya informasi selengkap yang dimiliki insider perusahaan, Anda sejatinya masih berpeluang mendapatkan hasil investasi yang solid. You don’t need a perfect batting average.

“I am a professional mistake maker. One third of my trades are probably wrong.” Ray Dalio

“If you’re terrific in this business, you’re right six out of 10.” Peter Lynch

“If an investor is right 2 out of 3 times in the investment decisions they make, they would hit the ball so far out of the park, it would be amazing.” Mohnish Pabrai

Kesalahan investasi pada suatu saham biasanya disebabkan oleh analisa yang salah atau kurang tepat. Untuk itu, Anda tidak perlu menghabiskan waktu untuk mengumpulkan semua data dan informasi yang tersedia secara detail. Lebih baik waktu yang ada difokuskan untuk proses berpikir dan menganalisa berdasarkan data dan informasi penting yang memang diperlukan. Selanjutnya, bayangkan juga skenario alternatif terhadap tesis kita serta lakukan pengujian terhadap ide kita secara berkala.

Perlu juga saya sampaikan, bahwa effort yang besar untuk melalukan analisis itu dilakukan diawal sebelum memutuskan membeli suatu saham, bukan di saat sudah masuk dalam posisi. Sering terjadi disaat harga saham malah turun setelah pembelian pertama, maka kebanyakan orang mendadak menjadi investigator dan mempelajari perusahaannya lebih dalam lagi. Sebaliknya, jika harga sahamnya naik setelah pembelian pertama maka kebanyakan orang merasa analisis mereka sudah benar dan tidak perlu dilakukan pengujian lebih lanjut hehe.

"There are only a few things you have to get right about a company for it to be successful investment. Our view is that if you can get 85% of the way there by answering the big questions, don't waste your time on the last 15% because the marginal utility isn't worth it." Steve Morrow

“The value of in-depth fundamental analysis is subject to diminishing marginal returns.” Seth Klarman

Semoga bermanfaat, jangan lupa bahagia dan selalu bersyukur.

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