【英语中国】艺术品、房产与中国股市

Last week, the Shanghai stock market reached new highs, London house prices shrugged off higher interest rates and a new hedge fund invited punters to take positions in the art market. Out in Nebraska, Warren Buffett, the world's most successful investor, delivered his annual homily to the admiring stockholders of Berkshire Hathaway.There are two approaches to valuing assets. For fundamentalists, the value of an asset is the sum of the returns it will yield over its life. For fellow travellers, an asset is worth what someone else is willing to pay for it. The conflict between fundamentalists and fellow travellers is the root of many financial controversies, over investment styles, over fair value accounting. Anyone who owns, or might buy, a Chinese share, a house, or a work of art is pressed into – implicitly – taking a view.

As with other doctrinal disputes, the debate between fundamentalists and fellow travellers would resolve itself in a perfect world where the future was known with certainty and everyone had the same preferences.

A world dominated by fundamentalists is a lonely place, its inhabitants scattered in locations such as Omaha. Buyers and sellers constantly make independent assessments of value, coming up with answers that vary over time, across individuals and with collective states of mind. The price is an average of their assessments, it follows a trend but it is impossible ever to be sure whether a rise or fall represents a deviation, subject to mean reversion, or a shift in the trend itself. Fundamentalist life can be nerve-racking, but fundamentalists can reduce the cost of risk-bearing by simply not following day-by-day price fluctuations too closely.

Fellow travellers, however, cannot afford to be away from their screens, or the streets of London or Manhattan, for even a short time. Fellow travelling is a social activity and successful fellow travellers are constantly second-guessing each other, estimating not just what each other will pay but what they might be willing to pay tomorrow, what they think others will think and what they think others will think they think.

Fellow travellers create bubbles, when markets become dominated by the belief that you can sell on anything you buy at a higher
price to someone else. Once every potential fellow traveller is on the road – there are no suckers left – these bubbles burst.

Fundamentalists such as Mr Buffett can sometimes infiltrate the society of fellow travellers. They can reconcile the fundamentalist and fellow travelling doctrines by observing that, for the patient investor, the value of an asset is always the higher of market value and fundamental value – you have the choice of selling it now or holding it for life. Professional fund managers, however, are generally confined to the company of other fellow travellers. They are forced to mark to market every day and are benchmarked to relative performance.

The Chinese stock market is frequented mostly by fellow travellers, but the housing market is populated by fundamentalists. Most people who buy houses, even in the last stages of housing booms, are buying them to live in. Their decision is based on their assessment that the returns to them over the years will exceed the price. Their judgments may be panicked or mistaken but are based on fundamental value. There are a few pockets of exception to the principle that people buy houses to live in – where buy-to-let predominates or off-plan purchases in speculative developments – but these exceptions prove the general rule. Nemesis in Shanghai is certain. Nemesis in the housing market is not.

And what of art? The market for the most expensive art has two distinctive features. In the long run the supply of houses responds to the price and the supply of Chinese equities is potentially very elastic indeed, but the supply of old masters is fixed. And because the supply is so limited, only a few fellow travellers need to be recruited in each decade. There are few assets whose prices can remain for ever unrelated to an assessment of fundamental value. So Mr Buffett owns his Omaha bungalow, and even a stake in PetroChina but no old master collection.

上周，上海股市屡创新高，伦敦房价对利率的上升不屑一顾，一家新的对冲基金邀请玩家在艺术品市场建仓。在美国内布拉斯加州，全球最成功的投资者沃伦•巴菲特(Warren Buffett)，向景仰他的伯克夏哈撒韦公司(Berkshire Hathaway)股东进行了一年一度的说教。评估资产价值的方式有两种。对基本面分析派来说，资产的价值就是其整个生命周期产生的回报的总和。对跟风者来说，资产的价值就是其他人愿意支付的价格。在投资风格上，在公平价值会计方式上，基本面分析派和跟风者之间的对立是很多金融争议的根源。任何一个拥有或可能购买中国股票、房产或艺术品的人，都隐含地被迫选定一个“立场”。



正如其它学术争论一样，假如是在一个完美的世界里——未来是确知的，每个人的偏好都相同，那么基本面分析派和跟风者之间的辩论自然会得到解决。

基本面分析派主宰的世界是一个孤独的地方，它的居民散落在奥马哈(Omaha)之类的地方。买家和卖家不停做出独立的价值评估，随着时间、个体和集体心态的不同，给出的答案也各异。他们的平均估值就是价格，它遵循一个趋势，但永远也不可能确定，价格的上涨或下跌代表着价格偏离（这种情况下随时可能出现均值回归），抑或是趋势本身的转变。基本面分析派的生活可能会很伤脑筋，但他们可以降低负担风险的代价，只要不过于密切地追踪每日价格波动。

但跟风者承受不起离开电脑屏幕、伦敦或是曼哈顿大街的代价，哪怕一小会儿都不行。跟风是一种社会行为，成功的跟风者一直在相互猜测，不仅要估计彼此的出价，还要估计别人明天可能愿意支付的价格，猜测别人会怎么想，以及别人认为自己会怎么想。





“你买的任何东西都能以更高价格转手卖给别人”——当这种信念在市场上占据主导地位时，跟风者就会创造出泡沫。一旦所有的潜在跟风者都加入了跟风行列——再也没有傻瓜了——泡沫就会破裂。

巴菲特这样的基本面分析派有时能够渗入跟风者群体。他们可以将基本面分析派与跟风者的原理融合在一起。他们观察到，对于耐心的投资者而言，一件资产的价值永远是市场价值和基本面价值中较高的一个——你可以选择现在将资产出售，也可以选择终生持有。但专业基金经理通常只能与其它跟风者为伍。他们被迫每天盯着市场，并以相对业绩作为基准衡量指标。



光顾中国股市的大多是跟风者，而住宅市场上多为基本面分析派。多数购房者（即使是在房地产热潮最后阶段购房的人）都是以居住为目的。他们的决策基于这样一种判断：未来数十年获得的回报将超过房价。或许他们的判断仓促或有误，但却是以基本价值为基础的。购房自住的原则也存在一些例外——主要是买房出租或是购买投机开发项目的期房——但这些例外恰恰证明了一般规律。在中国股市跌倒是必然的，在住宅市场则未必。





那艺术品市场又如何呢？最昂贵的艺术市场有两个显著特征。长期来看，房产供应受价格影响，而中国股票供应可能极具“弹性”，但早期绘画大师作品的供应量是固定的。而由于供应如此有限，每10年仅需要少数人加入跟风队伍。很少有资产的价格能够与基本价值永远脱节。因此，巴菲特会持有他的奥马哈平房，甚至还有中石油(PetroChina)的股票，但却不收藏早期绘画大师的作品。



译者/何黎