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Finance & economics | Buttonwood
财经| 梧桐树专栏
英文部分选自经济学人20241026期财经板块
Finance & economics | Buttonwood
财经| 梧桐树专栏
Investors should not fear a stockmarket crash
投资者应无惧股市崩盘
Take a long view, and shares are a lot less risky than many realise
股海沉浮心莫慌，长远视角风险降
Shareholders areenjoying one of their best runs in history. Since a trough last October the s&p 500 index of large American firms has risen by more than 40%; peers in Europe, Japan and Canada have all gone up by at least half as much. The fears of last year, that stubborn inflation would prevent central banks from cutting interest rates, keeping bond yields high and dragging share prices down, have all but vanished. In fact, many of the world’s monetary guardians have been slashing borrowing costs just as corporate profits have climbed and animal spirits have surged. The result is that plenty of stockmarkets are now hovering near all-time highs.
股票投资者正享受着历史上数一数二的牛市行情。自去年10月的低谷以来，由美国大型企业构成的标普500指数上涨逾40%，欧洲、日本和加拿大的主要股指也至少录得20%的涨幅。去年，市场还在担忧顽固的通胀导致央行无法降息，债券收益率居高不下进而拖累股价，如今，这样的担忧已经随风而散。事实上，在企业利润攀升、市场信心大增之际，全球多家货币监管机构大幅降息，于是，多地股市徘徊在历史高位。
注释：
1.Trough: n. the minimum point of a complete cycle of a periodic function: such as a): an elongated area of low barometric pressure; b): the low point in a business cycle n.低谷
2.Animal spirits: 动物本能（英语：Animal spirits），又译为动物精神、生命本能、生命活力，由约翰·梅纳德·凯恩斯在1936年发表的《就业、利息和货币通论》一书中提出的经济学术语，这个术语用来指影响与引导人类经济行为的本能、习惯与感情等非理性因素。凯恩斯学派用此来解释企业家精神。
Source: https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E5%8B%95%E7%89%A9%E6%9C%AC%E8%83%BD#:~:text=%E5%8B%95%E7%89%A9%E6%9C%AC%E8%83%BD%EF%BC%88%E8%8B%B1%E8%AA%9E%EF%BC%9AAnimal%20spirits,%E6%84%9F%E6%83%85%E7%AD%89%E9%9D%9E%E7%90%86%E6%80%A7%E5%9B%A0%E7%B4%A0%E3%80%82
Accordingly, investors are engaged in the activity that is traditional for such moments: not sending champagne corks flying, but obsessing about whether the good times are already over. They are hardly short of reasons to fret. Relative to underlying profits, American stocks have rarely been pricier, and then only before big slumps. Unnervingly, more than a third of thes&p 500’s market value is concentrated in just ten firms. Spurred on by rich-world governments’ insatiable appetite for borrowing, and especially the prospect of Donald Trump entering the White House and sending America’s deficit even higher, bond yields are again rising quickly. Volatility is up, too, and gold—typically seen as a hedge against chaos—has been on a rally for the ages. A crash would need a catalyst. But a lot of other potential causes are already in place.
因此，投资者正忙于行情大好时的传统“节目”，并非开香槟庆祝，而是焦虑好时光是否已到尽头。他们的担忧并非空穴来风。以利润为基准，美股的估值鲜有如此之高，而此前几次相似的高估值之后，通常紧跟着市场大跌。令人不安的是，标普500指数中逾三分之一的市值集中在仅十家公司中。受发达国家政府强烈借贷需求的刺激，叠加唐纳德·特朗普可能入主白宫并推高美国赤字的预期，债券收益率再度激增。同时，市场波动性增加，代表性避险资产黄金正经历历史性涨势。股市崩盘往往需要一个导火索，但眼下其他潜在因素似乎已然就位。
注释：
Catalyst: a substance that enables a chemical reaction to proceed at a usually faster rate or under different conditions (as at a lower temperature) than otherwise possible n.催化剂
Here, then, is a reason to be cheerful should you end up watching a big chunk of your portfolio go up in smoke. Naturally, this would be unpleasant. Yet the nicest result of the past few decades’ academic research on finance is that, at least in the long run, it matters less than you might think. The reason is that stocks are more like bonds than most investors realise. As prices (or, more precisely, valuations) fall, expected returns rise.
不过，即便最终在股市崩盘中，眼睁睁看着大部分投资化为乌有，你也有理由振作起来。虽然亏损当然令人不快，但过去几十年金融学术研究得出的一项最积极的结论是：至少从长期来看，这种损失的影响比想象中小，因为大多数投资者没有真正意识到股票与债券十分相似，当价格（或者确切地说是估值）下跌时，预期收益率会相应上升。
For bonds, this is easy to see. Just consider what happened in 2022. Interest rates rose by several percentage points, dragging up bond yields with them. To align existing bonds, many of which paid next to no interest, with prevailing yields, prices were hammered. After all, investors would buy bonds only if they were sufficiently discounted from face value to make up for their low coupons. Viewed this way, American Treasuries had their worst year in over a century. Unless they sold after the crash, though, this would not have altered their owners’ returns by one jot. If they held their Treasuries to maturity, they would still receive every coupon they had been promised, followed by the repayment of principal.
对于债券，这一点显而易见。想想2022年的情形：利率上升了几个百分点，带动债券收益率同步上升。在高收益率环境的影响下，大量此前发行的、票面利率几乎为零的旧债券价格大幅下跌，因为投资者只会在这类债券价格低到能够补偿票面利率差异的情况下才会购买。这样来看，美国国债度过了一个多世纪以来最糟糕的一年。不过，除非在价格崩盘后抛售，债券持有人的收益其实并不会改变分毫。如果他们持有国债到期，承诺的票面利息一分不少，本金也将悉数归还。
It is not obvious that stocks behave similarly—for one thing, there is no repayment of principal to make up for a drop in prices. Even so, they do, concluded a panoramic survey of asset-price research published in 2011 by John Cochrane, then at the University of Chicago. The ratio of profits to share prices, once thought to forecast future earnings, in fact does not. What it does predict, much like the yield on a bond, is the shareholder’s expected return. Unlike a bond yield, this is not a sure thing: realised returns might fall on either side of the forecast. Thankfully, as is the case with bonds, investors are compensated for falling share prices with higher expected returns.
股票表现的相似性并不明显——首先，股票价格一旦下跌，付出去的本金就回不来了。即便如此，2011年芝加哥大学约翰·科克伦（John Cochrane）发表的一项全面资产价格研究表明，股票与债券仍有相当高的相似性。人们普遍认为一只股票的收益/股价比率能够预测其未来收益，实际上它就像债券收益率，只能预测股票持有人的预期回报。但与之不同的是，这种预测并不是确定的，因为实际回报可能低于或高于预测。幸好跟债券一样，股票价格下跌将带来更高的预期回报，投资者亦可从中得到补偿。
Armed with this information, one class of investor should welcome a crash. Sky-high stock valuations have badly eroded the returns youngish savers can expect to earn as they age. In a recent note, analysts at Goldman Sachs, a bank, put this into grim numbers. Based on valuations and factors such as market concentration and interest rates, they forecast annualised nominal returns of just 3% for thes&p 500 over the coming decade, compared with a historical average of 11%. A painful crash might at least reset the dial and give youngsters a better chance of retiring at some point.
有了这些信息，有一类投资者应该会欣然接受股市崩盘。高企的股市估值严重蚕食了年轻储户今后随年龄渐长所能获得的预期回报。在最近一份报告中，高盛银行的分析师用冷冰冰的数字刻画了形势之严峻。基于估值和市场集中度、利率等因素，他们预测未来十年标普500指数的年化名义回报率仅为3%，而历史平均值为11%。一次痛苦的崩盘至少可以重置估值，好让年轻的牛马们将来还有退休之日。
The broader implication is that anyone holding stocks for the long run—in a pension pot, say—is taking less risk than they might think. Investors often imagine year-by-year returns as like a series of independent coin tosses, in which a run of poor luck implies nothing at all about the odds of the next flip. In this world a crash is simply terrible news. Reality is more pleasant. Investing in stocks is like flipping the coin of the gambler’s fallacy: a long series of tails really does make it more likely that you will come up heads next time. Cold comfort, perhaps, when prices are plunging and some of your savings have disappeared. But a good reason to buy at the bottom.
更广泛的含义是，长期股票投资者（例如在养老金投资组合中持有股票）承担的风险比他们想象的要小。投资者总觉得每年的回报就像抛硬币，每一次抛掷的结果都相互独立，一连串的坏运气并不影响下一次抛掷结果的概率。其实在这个世界上，崩盘只是一个可怕的消息，现实要乐观得多。投资股票更接近赌徒谬误中幻想的抛硬币场景：连续几次抛出反面，下一次确实更有可能得到正面。在熊市来袭、存款蒸发时，这样的安慰或许不够暖心，但却是抄底的好由头。
注释：
赌徒谬误（Gambler’s Fallacy），又称“赌徒逻辑错误”或“蒙特卡罗谬误”，是指人们错误地认为，在一个独立的随机事件中，过去的结果会影响未来的结果。例如，在掷硬币时，连续几次出现正面后，许多人会错误地认为下一次出现反面的概率会增加。
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