8月23日，传奇的投资人Julian Robertson去世了，买书的时候看到说这本书是其唯一的传记，看到作为新书出版，当时就担心别是回锅饭。买到了才发现真是，这本书是2004年出版的，原名是：Julian Robertson：A Tiger In the Land of Bulls and Bears。假期难得在将府公园附近的漫咖啡里读完的，读的中文版，最后翻了翻英文版，照例做些摘录。
基金公司所有投资的关键是“说法”，如果说法靠谱，那么投资也靠谱。如果没什么说法，或者解释不清楚，那么这个说法就无法被纳入投资组合。如果说法变了，投资也需要做相应的改变。一切都取决于说法。罗伯逊有一个坚定的理念：只要关于投资的说法保持不变，投资仓位就应该加大；一旦说法发生改变，应该立即平仓。生意就的这么做，简单又明知。
The key behind all of the firm’s investments was the story. If the story made sense, then the investment made sense. If there was no story or it was not easily understood, then it had no place in the portfolio. When the story changed, the investment had to change as well—it was and is all about the story.
Robertson’s mantra was, as long as the story around the investment remained the same, the position should get bigger. As soon as the story changed, it was time to get out.
Story是投资的灵魂，非常精确的描述，无论中文的故事还是说法的翻译都不够传神。
Part of the success is due to the efforts of Julian and Blanche Robertson and their family. Julian Robertson Sr. was a businessman who knew that hard work not only paid off but it allowed you to do things that others could not. And while working to the make the community better was something he enjoyed, business was his passion.
努力工作的成果不仅是报酬，也塑造了自己的独特性——那些其他人做不了的事情。非常好的见解。
“I was an honest slob they could count on,” he has said many times in public of his rise and success at the venerable firm.An honest slob who had gained the trust and admiration of many. He gained this trust and admiration not only because of his incredible people skills, but also because of his ability to make money for his clients and his peers, regardless of overall market conditions.
实诚是非常优秀的特质，当然只是实诚也不够，还要配上能力。不少实诚人觉得社会不公，可能是没去检视自己的能力缺陷。
For Robertson, certainly, Graham and Dodd laid out the principles of value investing. Throughout his career he knew of no substitute for careful and comprehensive analysis of invest- ment situations. It was all about the research process, which included not only rigorous financial analysis, but interviews with senior members of a company’s management team, and discussions with important customers, suppliers, and competitors in order to get a true handle on the business and it prospects. His skills as a value investor were learned in the trenches, where he worked as a salesman pitching ideas to clients. It was during his time at Kidder that he learned to appreciate the basic value phi- losophy and the opportunity that it offered.
The basics to any fundamental-based investment company comes from the text of Graham and Dodd, but what seems to separate some from others, and what seems to make others more successful than their peers is not only their ability to implement Graham and Dodd’s theories and practices, but also how competitive they are and how they translate that competitive nature into the day-to-day activities of making investment decisions. For Robertson the choice was clear: Use a system that works and is adaptable. Over the years, as he began to look for and search out investment opportunities, he would focus on finding something that was cheap or undervalued and offered the potential for value to be realized.
真是没想到，Julian居然是格雷厄姆的信徒，并且是非常坚定的信徒。Julian还把严格的投资研究流程深入发展了，不只是书面研究、财务研究，还去和企业管理层谈，和客户、供应商和竞争者谈。这样工作的结果自然是有保证的。Julian把这个理论转化为日复一日的重复工作，创造了竞争优势出来。
Robertson also learned that “the market,” as many called it, didn’t exist. There was no market as such, he decided—just a collection of companies that trade in one place or another. He came to believe that nobody really makes any money playing the markets. He came to believe that the only way to make money is to buy stocks that are cheap and watch them go up. The hunt for value was what he enjoyed most—the hunt for those opportunities is what drove him to be successful.
Robertson believed that he was not the only investor to come to the conclusion that it is easier to find great values than to make market timing judgments as to when the market is going up and down. “Remember, the market timer must be right both when he buys and when he sells,” he wrote.
“I hate that term, learn the market,” he said. “ the market has never spoken to me.” Peter Lynch once told Robertson that the only thing for sure was that whenever he got a promotion, the market would go down. As such Robertson does not believe that anybody really makes any money playing the markets. He believes that the only way to make money is to buy stocks that are cheap and watch them go up—or short stocks that are overpriced and watch them tumble.
Julian的观点很有意思，市场并不存在，或者说不存在所谓的市场。重点是说判断市场来获利其实很难，重要的是选择价值股票，等着上涨。
Robertson liked the idea that in a hedge fund environment one is compensated based on performance. When you do well you are rewarded; when you don’t do well, you get nothing. There was no quota and no salary so to speak. It is about the managers and all about their ability to make money for their in- vestors. If they made money and the investors profited, then so did the managers—if they lost money and the investors lost money, well, then they did not get paid. Their fortunes were clearly aligned with their investors. It was a model he liked, and it was a model that worked for him.
对冲基金完全基于业绩发放薪酬，挺好。
Communication was always a key element in Tiger’s success. As a writer of sorts, Robertson was very keen on communicating his views on the markets, the economy, the White House, and the world to his investors. His willingness to communicate was one of the things that buoyed his success in marketing and selling his hedge funds, both domestically and abroad. But he also used his vast network of contacts to gather information faster than he disseminated it, making him an information superhighway of sorts years before the concept became a reality.
When he launched Tiger Management, Robertson’s network was already so vast that all he had to do was pick up a phone and he could get pretty much in touch with anyone he wanted to. He prided himself on his connections, whether they were potential investments or potential investors. It was this skill and the constant refinement and expansion of his network that allowed him to build Tiger’s foundation for the future.
His use of the phones to gather information is legendary. A reporter once commented after watching him in action that speed dial must have been invented for Robertson, in that he is constantly finishing up one call and dialing anther. At Tiger, Robertson spent most of his time either on the phone, looking at charts, or reviewing information. He constantly developed networks in order to make sure that when Tiger got information it had the right people available to process it.
老虎基金的成功三大法宝：Julian和LP的良好沟通，不断的发表报告沟通进展；广泛的社会关系网络，以及Julian的工作方式：专注在电话上获取信息、看表格、看信息。
During the 1980s, Tiger consisted of a small group of people, about 16 to 20, and then as assets grew, the company expanded to include around 50 people. While Robertson ultimately retained all authority over investment decisions, there were many people involved in the analytical side of the business. But no matter how good the information or story was, nothing got into the fund’s portfolio without his approval.
老虎基金即便到了50人，所有的决策也是Julian一人独断。这其实是成功的保证。
Robertson found the actions of Japanese corporate treasurers rather interesting. His research showed that the treasurers of many large corporations were not satisfied like their American counterparts to simply put the companies’ cash into certificates of deposit. They had decided to put the money to work in the stock market through funds set up just for this purpose. The problem was that many of the treasurers had not been satisfied with the 40 percent increase the market had achieved and therefore had borrowed money to put even more into the market. They were basically using their free cash as margin collateral in order to make money in the markets. And while some of the funds were successful with this effort, the idea of using free cash to fund margin trading in the stock market was unsettling to Robertson and his analysts. The problem as Robertson saw it was that the Japanese, who had been so successful in achieving cooperation between government, management, and labor to create a great economic power, was operating under the mindset that if the market went up, it would only go higher, and that because it is better for everyone if the market goes higher, they would find the money to make it go higher. This thinking, of course, is what led to the tulip mania in Holland in the 1600s and all of the subsequent market busts.
荒诞的日本泡沫时期，上市公司把自由现金流+借款来炒股票，赌股票上涨，全民炒股。
A Tiger person came to mean many things over the years, but was and is a person with the following characteristics:
- Smart, bright, and quick with functional intelligence
- Strong sense of ethics
- Background in sports and interest in physical fitness
- Interest in charity and public welfare
- Sense of humor and fun to be around
- Good resume
对人的特别要求。
Upon reflection of what went wrong, Robertson said that the firm just got to be too big. “The hedge fund business is about success breeding success,” he said. “Over time as we continued to perform, many of our investors told their friends, their colleagues about what we were doing and that is how we grew.” He always thought that a firm could grow talent commensurate with the burgeoning assets under management but came to realize that while the idea was “theoretically sound, it was practically impossible.” The bigger Tiger got, the bigger the amount of stock he would have to buy for it to affect the portfolio.
对失败的反思。太大了不好管，或者说突破了有效边界，对于对冲基金来说，基金越大，单纯招人是解决不了问题的。这也是对我们很大的警醒。
Many of the people the firm brought on in the late 1990s had been working in one or two specific areas of the markets and were true sector specialists. This posed a significant problem with the investment process. An analyst who was covering the automobile sector, for the most part, had little if any interest in anything else. This meant that at the Friday meetings, they didn’t ask critical questions, and when they were asked critical questions, they took it as an affront to their abilities and not part of a sound investment process. In the end, this resulted in a number of very bad positions getting into the portfolio.
Some of these people were not interested in critiquing ideas and were put off by having so many young people around who they perceived did not have the level of knowledge that they professed to have about their industries or their segment of the market. The interaction between the people started to break down; people started focusing on what they knew and showed little if any interest in anything else. In the end, this hurt the firm because nobody seemed to care about anything other than what was going on in their area of the firm or their segment of the portfolio.
非常重要的专家陷阱。专家只专注自己的领域，对其他领域的漠视其实搞坏了公司文化。特别是对一家Tiger这样自由度高的基金来讲。专家就只能当专家用，投资经理本身是需要很广的涉猎范围的。
The second generation of Cubs—Cubs who run individual, independent funds—is being bred in the Tiger offices at 101 Park Avenue. When Tiger closed its funds it was not able to close its offices or get rid of its infrastructure, so Robertson turned the spacious facility into one of the city’s hedge fund hotels.
“Julian realized that he did not really have any use for the facility and the capabilities and, more importantly, all the costs that go along with maintaining the infrastructure,” said one ex-Tiger. “So he decided to do what any smart person would do: Find someone who could use the facilities and defray some of his costs while maintaining the infrastructure to handle his own needs.”
“It was a very smart move,” he continued. “By bringing these guys in, he not only covers some of his costs but he also gets a significant amount of idea generation without the costs of em- ploying all the analysts.”
Julian关闭老虎基金后，没有关闭办公室，反而孵化了一堆小老虎基金，小虎队。非常好的策略。
The question still remains, however: Why did so many good managers come out of one organization? In a profile in the December 2002 issue of Institutional Investor, Robertson said that the people he hired were “highly intelligent, competitive and highly ethical.” Besides being smart, Robertson also looked for people who were competitive and were jocks—in other words, people who liked to win.
In the 20-odd years of Tiger, most of the people who came through the door were people with athletic or near athletic backgrounds. Robertson shied away from hiring book smarts people—he looked for well-rounded people who excelled both in and outside of the classroom. Robertson taught the Cubs his bottom-up stock-picking approach to the market. He emphasized the need for shorts and the need to get information at every level of an industry. Many of the Cubs say today they operate in much the same way.
“He taught us how to search for information and make decision on an investment only after exhausting all of our research capabilities,” said one ex-Tiger. “The level of research that is performed on an investment idea is incredibly in depth. There are very few people who dig as deep as the Tiger people do.”
老虎基金为何能成为对冲基金的黄埔军校？核心是其严谨的从下而上的选股研究过程，研究的广度和深度是最为推荐的。
In his pitch, Robertson told potential investors that the way to search for value is to use fundamental research like that described by Graham and Dodd. He and his team knew of no substitute for careful and comprehensive analysis of investment situations. Their research process included not only rigorous financial analysis, but interviews with senior members of a company’s management team and discussions with important customers, suppliers, and competitors. The aim was to under- stand how management thinks about their businesses and at the same time develop a clear understanding of the industries in which they compete.
To do this, Robertson understood the two most important aspects of reliable research: first, hire a staff with strong qualitative and quantitative skills, grounding in their specific area and rela- tionships with knowledgeable and important people in that area. Second, separate the wheat from the chaff. Tiger’s size and trading activities around the globe allowed it to take advantage of “the best research available” to do just that.
严谨投资分析的价值。