比尔米勒在荒野中 - 爱它

有戏剧性的职业弧 - 然后有比尔米勒的。回到2000年代中期，米勒是投资上帝的价值。旗舰共同基金他设法为Legg Mason击败了标准差距500件股指，从1991年到2005年开始，赢得了他作为ERA最伟大的共同基金经理的声誉。他在大会和媒体面试电路上向上控制了700亿美元。

然后它都吹了起来。金融危机于2007年开始展开，并于2008年转移。米勒已经加载了财务股票 - 包括Bear Stearns，Citigroup和美国国际集团（AIG） - 结果是深感困扰。截至2008年底，米勒的签名基金，Legg Mason资本管理价值信托，失去了三分之二的价值。

The fund rebounded strongly throughout 2009 and 2010, but by then it was too late: Investors had jumped ship, and media coverage had turned sour. “The Stock Picker’s Defeat,” blared the headline of aWall Street Journal米勒概况于2008年12月。

Miller is no longer with Legg Mason, but he hasn’t retired. At his Baltimore firm, Miller Value Partners, he’s still managing money, but a lot less than he used to. He’s much further out of the limelight. And he’s a lot happier.

“It’s liberating,” Miller tells亚博赞助欧冠。

这也是有利可图的。米勒目前的基金,米勒Opportunity Trust, ranks in the top 1 percent of the midcap blend category for the three-year and ten-year periods that ended on January 17, according to mutual fund tracker Morningstar. It placed in the top 8 percent for one-year returns and in the top 19 percent for five years. Over the past decade the fund has outperformed the S&P 500 by 2.97 percentage points a year.

强劲的表现在去年的1.77亿美元中有助于机会信托率。“这是我37年管理资金的唯一时间，尽管市场更正，但米勒笔记。

12月被证明是沿着复出落后的重大凹凸：米勒机会信托在12月的整体市场进一步下降了很多。但它比1月份比市场更加反弹得多。这是因为该基金持有高β股，倾向于在市场波动期间倾向于超出大幅度 - 米勒不寻常的投资风格的标志。

米勒培养了他在约翰霍普金斯大学的研究生中思考的倾向，在那里他学习哲学（去年他给该部门7500万美元）。在盒子外面的思考后来导致他支付超过100万美元的原始歌词表，为鲍勃迪兰的经典“吹在风中”。

Miller says his investment philosophy hasn’t changed over the years, but his tactics and strategy have. The global financial crisis gave him more sensitivity to rare events that can inflict “permanent loss of capital,” as he puts it.

The amount of money Miller manages has also changed, in a big way. Miller Value Partners, which he owns with his two sons, manages $2 billion. Opportunity Trust has assets of $1.5 billion, according to Morningstar. The firm also runs a $185 million mutual fund, Miller Income, managed by son Bill Miller IV, and an $83 million hedge fund, MVP1, which Miller prefers to call an investment partnership.

Miller insists he loves his new, smaller profile. He and his team get to make all the personnel decisions and set their own risk parameters, and he outsources almost everything except the investment management — leaving him with less to worry about. Miller also turns down most speaking and interview requests.

“That’s part of working for myself,” he says, noting that at Legg Mason he had to put himself out there constantly to help bring in assets. “Here I spend time the way I want.”

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米勒有一个悠闲的成长，mostly in Florida, with his father’s jobs ranging from high school baseball and football coach to pharmaceuticals salesman. Playing sports was a major passion for Miller growing up.

He got interested in stocks at the age of nine, when he looked over his father’s shoulder as he read stock quotes in the newspaper. His takeaway from that experience was that investors could make money in stocks without doing any work. (Miller has since been disabused of that notion.)

In graduate school, Miller studied philosophy because he found it “intrinsically interesting.” But it turned out to be helpful for him professionally, too.

“It inculcated critical thinking and analysis that were essential for what I do in the investment business,” Miller says.

专业地，他最闻名于他在标准普尔500指数上获胜的胜利条纹 - 虽然他很快指出，但是还有一些其他人持续了15年，但在1月份没有开始。在任何情况下，米勒都说着名的奔跑综合技能和运气，如死者的杰出科学家斯蒂芬杰耶·杰伊特·杰伊·杰伊·杰伊·杰尔（Stephen Jay）暂时假定所有非凡的条纹。

On the luck side, Miller produced the streak while working at Legg Mason, which he says “gave me complete freedom to do what I wanted to do on the investment side.” That kind of freedom is virtually unheard of at any large investment firm now. And that means it will be difficult for anyone to match his streak, Miller notes.

在技​​能方面，米勒表示，他和他的同事不断考验他们的投资方法。“如果有些事情更好，我们采用它。我们注重投资策略的学术文献。“

These days he is sanguine about the stock market’s prospects, recent market chaos notwithstanding. Miller points out that since the bull market began in March 2009, there have been 23 corrections of 5 percent or greater, yet the market has quickly snapped back each time. He thinks the most recent downturn is unlikely to turn into a sustained rout.

现在的实际经济数据强劲,Federal Reserve has stressed, Miller adds. “Unemployment is low; inflation is low; valuations have compressed 15 to 20 percent this year because earnings are up and stock prices aren’t,” he says. And most important, he can still find a lot of good stocks to buy.

“I think this is a normal correction in an ongoing bull market,” Miller says. “Until something changes at the macro level and with valuations, we’re fully invested.”

One issue that doesn’t concern him now is the wave of investors fleeing actively managed investment strategies in favor of passive funds. The move is overdue, Miller maintains. It’s perhaps an unusual position for an active manager to take, but he’s sticking
to it.

“Active in the aggregate doesn’t add anything,” Miller insists. “Since the financial crisis, active management has been just as bad a deal, if not worse, because so many managers have become closet indexers” — meaning their positions hew close to their benchmark indexes. Miller has heard an estimate that about 70 percent of active managers are closet indexers.

“我认为积极的管理是世俗的下降，”他解释道。“生存的经理将是那些经营集中组合的人，不要担心波动率或您支付性能的价格，并不关心跟踪错误。”

Not surprisingly, that describes his own style. Among Miller’s favorite stocks at the moment are Amazon, Facebook, ADT, and Avon.

Miller invested in Amazon when it went public in 1997, and it is Miller Opportunity Trust’s biggest holding. The stock’s decline of more than 30 percent late last year “makes it very attractive here,” he says.

迈尔斯在1999年至2001年，亚马逊在历史期间减少了50％或更多的四次或更多的四次，包括95％的暴跌，米勒笔记。“仍然，自上市以来是最好的股票。”

米勒说，自去年夏天以来，Facebook的下降超过了40％以上的股票也是如此。“这是最讨厌的名称之一，交易到大多数消费者包装商品公司的折扣。”

Security company ADT should generate $500 million of free cash flow this year, meaning a free cash flow yield of 10 percent, Miller says. He expects strong growth for the next two years as well. “We think the stock is worth double today’s price [of about $7.50].”

Avon产品今年达到了70年的低位。但是，一支新的管理团队就到位，明年在新兴市场的经济复苏，一些公司的主要客户，米勒笔记。“这些股票可能是这里的一个简单的三倍。”当我们发言时，它的交易价格约为2美元。

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Ever the eclectic investor,Miller is about more than stocks — as his big moves in Bitcoin show.

At his hedge fund he established a 5 percent position in the digital currency at the beginning of 2017. When Bitcoin soared to account for more than 50 percent of the fund’s assets at the end of last year, Miller spun off 95 percent of it to shareholders. Now it makes up 2 percent of the fund.

“我不是比特币公牛，而是一个观察者，”米勒说。“这是一个迷人的技术实验可能会失败，值得零。但如果没有 - 到目前为止，它就没有 - 有正确的尾巴分布。“

In other words, there’s a chance Bitcoin could rebound big-time. As the Amazon experience proves, “you can’t gauge the long-term potential of something by how much it falls in one or two years,” Miller notes.

For most of his career, he has approached value differently than many of the strategy’s most ardent devotees. Miller explains that he looks for discounts to “intrinsic value,” which he defines as the present value of future free cash flow. Many value investors use accounting-based techniques to determine valuations.

“But that’s very dangerous, because [generally accepted accounting principles] are designed to capture the underlying economics of a business that’s consistent across all industries,” Miller argues. “That language changes slowly.”

It also means that GAAP-based research often doesn’t measure businesses well, he says.

“People missed Amazon because they said it doesn’t make money,” he explains. “GAAP isn’t divinely inspired.” Miller doesn’t ignore GAAP-based numbers — but he views them simply as inputs to figure out the true value of a business.

长期货币经理认为他也从分析优势中受益。“我没有关于亚马逊的信息。我的观点只是人们在不正确地看待它。“

Miller partly credits behavioral analysis for his success. “Social psychologists have shown how groups of people behave, weighing dramatic information more than non-dramatic, being too short-term-oriented, etc.,” he says. “We try to exploit all those things.”

Miller has expressed his gratitude for the institution that gave him such philosophical underpinnings. His $75 million gift to the philosophy department at Johns Hopkins reportedly is the largest by far to any philosophy department in the world. “I doubt I would have been as successful without going to graduate school in philosophy,” he declares.

Miller says he identifies with philosophers of the pragmatism movement, such as William James, John Dewey, and Charles Sanders Peirce.

“It’s not about thinking of things as true or false, but as useful or not useful,” he says. “I don’t let the price of a company’s stock confuse me about a company’s fundamentals. That’s rarely the end of the story.”