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最赞的是这一句 'He’s in a Regus office.' (Regus rents office space in its business centres on a short-term basis)....）

An Address in Mayfair

Donald MacKenzie on Hedge Funds

You could walk around Mayfair all day and not notice them. Hedge funds don’t – can’t – advertise. The most you’ll see is a discreet nameplate or two. An address in Mayfair counts in the world of hedge funds. It shows you’re serious, and have the money and confidence to pay the world’s most expensive commercial rents. A nondescript office no larger than a small flat can cost £150,000 a year. Something bigger and in the style that hedge funds like (glass walls, contemporary furniture) can set you back a lot more. It’s fortunate therefore that hedge funds don’t need a lot of space. Two rooms may be enough: one for meetings, for example with potential investors; one for trading and doing the associated bookkeeping. Some funds consist of only four or five people. Even a fairly large fund can operate with twenty or fewer.

These small organisations control substantial amounts of capital. If a hedge fund manages less than $100 million it isn’t seen as a big player; $1 billion is quite commonplace. The capital managed by the world’s ten thousand or so funds amounts to around $2000 billion. (Hedge funds don’t have to divulge the details of their finances and operations, so no one knows the exact numbers.) About a fifth of this money is managed by funds based in London, and two fifths by those based in the US, mostly in New York and its upmarket suburbs, especially Greenwich, Connecticut.

Hedge funds’ physical and legal locations are often separate. The funds themselves are normally registered offshore for tax reasons, many of them in the Cayman Islands. In the offices in Mayfair or Greenwich are the funds’ managers, the legally distinct firms or partnerships that control them. Hedge funds are often described as unregulated, but that’s not quite right. Fund managers based in the UK have to register with the Financial Services Authority, and are bound by its codes of market conduct. It is just as illegal for an employee of or a partner in a hedge fund based in London or New York to spread false rumours or indulge in insider trading as it is for someone working for a more conventional investment firm. Nevertheless, hedge funds enjoy lighter regulation and considerably greater freedom of action than the investment companies that advertise in the financial pages.

The ‘hedge fund’ was the inadvertent creation of the wave of financial market regulation that followed the 1929 crash and the Great Depression. To avoid a repeat of the excesses of the 1920s, legislators in the US enacted a series of measures – the 1933 Securities Act, the 1934 Securities Exchange Act and the 1940 Investment Company Act – which, among other things, laid down what investment companies taking money from the general public had to do and couldn’t do. Two practices in particular were limited or prohibited: leverage (buying securities using borrowed money) and short selling (selling securities that the investment company doesn’t own). Expecting prices to fall, a short seller might, for example, borrow securities from their owner (in exchange for a fee), sell them, then later buy them back (at a lower price, if things have gone according to plan) and return them.

If you wanted to employ leverage or to short sell – characteristic features of what hedge funds do – you therefore had to make sure that, legally, you weren’t classed as an investment company open to the public at large. That’s the reason hedge funds can’t advertise, and why they can generally take money only from individuals who are ‘accredited investors’. The US Securities and Exchange Commission’s regulations define these as people with net assets of at least $1 million and an annual income of $200,000 or more. In practice, most hedge funds would have little interest in investors who only just reach those fairly modest thresholds (they haven’t been raised since 1982). A new fund might accept a minimum investment of as little as $250,000, but established funds will usually demand much more – perhaps $1 million, sometimes even $10 million.

Over time, the restrictions on what regulated investment companies can do have gradually loosened, but hedge funds remain distinct from them. The most noteworthy difference is the fee structure. In addition to a management fee typically set at 2 per cent – which is a bit higher than the fees of most conventional investment firms – hedge funds also charge a performance fee, usually 20 per cent of profits, which has no real analogue in the mainstream investment world. (The performance fee is generally subject to a ‘high-water mark’: if the fund has lost money in previous years, it must recoup those losses before it can impose the fee.) A handful of especially favoured funds are able to charge even more: Renaissance Technologies, founded by a mathematician, James Simons, and based in East Setauket on Long Island’s affluent north shore, is reported to charge investors in its Medallion Fund a 5 per cent management fee and a 44 per cent performance fee, though I haven’t been able to confirm those figures.

To stop the performance fee from being an incentive to take wild punts, hedge fund investors generally want to be sure that the people who manage the fund have hefty investments in it – half a manager’s net worth is the traditional requirement, though that seems to have eased recently – so that they suffer from losses as well as benefiting from gains. The combination of high fees and substantial personal investment means that the most successful managers can make huge sums. Each year, the investment magazine Alpha publishes estimates of top individual earnings. The 2007 list was headed by John Paulson of Paulson & Co., who earned $3.7 billion by betting that the value of securities backed by US sub-prime mortgages would collapse. He was followed by George Soros ($2.9 billion) and James Simons ($2.8 billion). These are figures far beyond even the most generous remuneration packages offered by banks or other public companies.

How do you get to run a hedge fund? Nearly all the managers I’ve met made their names in the big investment banks. Some simply want to make more money, but often their motives are more complex. A couple of years ago, one professional investor told me:

A lot of the people who are setting up the best hedge funds are . . . doing this for perhaps slightly ego-driven and political reasons as much as anything else. They’re not doing it for the money: they’ve got their Bentley Continentals and their yachts . . . so they’re going into it because they want to run something because they’re never, ever going to be the guy that sits right at the top [of an investment bank] because they can’t be bothered with the politics.

Anyone trying to set up a hedge fund will find their previous career invaluable. Their initial stake will come from the accumulated bonuses they have received, and they will have built networks of contacts. Financial markets aren’t the atomistic, anonymous places portrayed in conventional economic models. Asked how he set up his fund, one manager told me: ‘You call your friends and, you know, just talk through your ideas.’ If they’re persuaded by the ideas, those contacts might decide to invest in the fund themselves and they also pass you on to other potential investors: ‘Eventually you kind of pitch to people who allocate capital and if they like the idea they put money in; if they don’t then they send you on your way.’ These investors will want to assess the personal characteristics of those pitching to them. Asked how he knew what proportion of managers’ personal wealth was invested in their funds, one investor told me: ‘It’s a look-in-the-eye part of it.’ Professional allocators of capital will often phone people they trust who have worked with the prospective founders of hedge funds. You’ll get phoned up, said a well-established manager, and asked: ‘“Do you know so-and-so?” And if you say, “Oh actually he’s a smart guy,” that’s good; if you say: “I’d rather not comment” . . . That’s one of the ways it works, and because it’s people coming from those five or six big companies’ – the leading investment banks – ‘the funds of funds have a fairly easy job of checking up.’

As the name implies, ‘funds of funds’ aggregate investors’ capital and select which hedge funds it will be allocated to. Investors who use them pay a further layer of fees – typically a 1 per cent management fee and a 10 per cent performance fee – but avoid the onerous process of deciding which funds to invest in and having time-consuming face-to-face meetings with managers. Direct investment by the rich and their family offices has been falling as a proportion of hedge funds’ capital. It formed more than half of it in the 1990s; now it’s a little less than a third, according to research by International Financial Services London. (In case anyone reading this doesn’t have a family office, I should explain that they help keep the rich rich, by managing investments and minimising tax, as well as dealing with matters such as the hiring and firing of staff.) Funds of funds now provide a third of hedge funds’ capital, with the remainder coming from pension funds, endowments, foundations and so on.

Ultimately, of course, investors in hedge funds judge them and those who run them by their returns: ‘Eventually just the numbers matter. The relationships matter for a little while,’ was how one hedge fund manager put it. Investors want returns that are high and that ideally don’t fluctuate too much, and many of them – especially such institutional investors as pension funds – are also looking for returns that aren’t highly correlated with stock markets, because they’re already heavily invested there. It makes for an excellent pitch if you can plausibly promise that your hedge fund’s strategy will still be profitable when markets fall.

How do hedge funds make their money? What is generally regarded as the first of them was A.W. Jones & Co., set up in 1949. Jones had a PhD in sociology from Columbia but then became a financial journalist. His investment idea was what has become known as ‘equity long/short’. By adding modest borrowing to, let’s say, $100,000 of investors’ money, Jones might buy $110,000 worth of the shares in companies he liked, while simultaneously short selling $40,000 of shares he thought might do badly. He was thus partially insulated (‘hedged’) against overall market movements. If the overall market fell, the shares he had bought (his ‘long positions’, in market terminology) would lose money, but his short positions would gain because buying back borrowed shares would now be cheaper.

Equity long/short is probably the single most common hedge fund strategy, at least among newcomers to the industry: it’s a straightforward extension of the ‘stock picking’ practised by many conventional investment managers. Instead of simply avoiding shares that seem to have poor prospects, you bet against them by short selling them. Another relatively straightforward strategy is the ‘carry trade’. This involves borrowing in a currency with low interest rates, such as the yen, and investing the proceeds in countries where interest rates are higher (Iceland, Hungary and New Zealand have been especially popular in recent years). It sounds like a free lunch, but of course it isn’t: a rise in the value of the yen or a fall in the Icelandic króna or Hungarian forint can wipe out your profit or turn it into a loss. Carry traders have to be ready to liquidate their positions very quickly indeed when exchange rates start to move adversely, and their doing so can greatly amplify those movements. This autumn’s financial crisis has been marked by large increases in the value of the yen, almost certainly caused in part by the liquidation of carry trades.

Other strategies are more specialised, and the alumni of the top investment banks are more likely to be found pursuing them than sticking to carry trades. One example is ‘fixed-income arbitrage’. ‘Fixed-income’ refers to bonds, which usually pay set amounts to their holders, and to financial instruments similar to bonds; ‘arbitrage’ means the exploitation of price discrepancies. This was the field of operation of Long-Term Capital Management (LTCM), the hedge fund at the heart of a serious, albeit short-lived, global crisis in 1998. While equity long/short requires only limited borrowing, fixed-income arbitrage needs higher levels of leverage. The discrepancies being exploited are small (typically corresponding to a difference in rates of return of a fraction of a percentage point), so the rates of profit are attractive only if they can be boosted by financing, primarily by borrowing.

LTCM aside, specialist strategies such as fixed-income arbitrage generally attract little public attention. ‘Activist’ hedge funds such as Nathaniel Rothschild’s Atticus are more likely to get into the newspapers, especially in Germany, where what they do is often controversial. They buy a company’s shares and then press for changes in the way the company is structured or run. Even more prominent are ‘macro’ funds like Soros’s Quantum Fund. These seek to predict and profit from large-scale economic changes, such as a substantial rise or fall in the US dollar or other currency. The most famous hedge fund trade of them all was the Quantum Fund’s huge and enormously profitable September 1992 bet that the pound would fall in value. Soros’s $10 billion short position in sterling was a major source of pressure on the currency, and helped precipitate ‘Black Wednesday’, the pound’s forced departure from the Exchange Rate Mechanism.

In their everyday operations, hedge funds rely heavily on two other kinds of organisation. One is hedge fund administrators. Many of these are based in Dublin: Ireland has offered low tax rates in its push to attract this business. Administrators keep track of a fund’s trades, handle its accountancy and matters such as the movement of investors’ money into and out of the fund, and perform regular valuations of the portfolio. This last is crucial because many hedge funds take positions in financial instruments that aren’t traded on organised financial exchanges such as the London Stock Exchange, and for which fully reliable market prices are therefore not always available. Administrators are supposed to serve as an independent check that funds aren’t boosting their performance fees by recording inflated valuations, or using price estimates that ‘smooth’ profits – make them appear less volatile and thus more attractive.

Most hedge funds’ trading desks are now continuously linked electronically to their administrators. This helps make it possible to manage huge portfolios with small numbers of staff, which is a major reason the sector has grown so fast: as recently as 1990, there were fewer than a thousand funds worldwide, managing what now seems a trifling $25 billion.

The second organisation on which a hedge fund depends is a prime broker. These are usually big international banks, which typically hold funds’ money and act as custodians of their portfolios, transferring money or securities when trading demands. (Again, all this is now automated, so that funds’ computer systems are directly linked to those of their prime brokers.) Prime brokers are a major source of leverage: they lend to funds, often using securities in the fund’s portfolio as collateral. A prime broker is also usually the first port of call when a fund is selling short and needs to borrow the securities in question. Indeed, a fund’s prime broker, or other investment banks, will often in effect do some of its trading for it, by means of what’s called a ‘total return swap’. For example, hedge funds weren’t initially able directly to trade the European carbon dioxide allowances that I discussed in the LRB on 5 April 2007: if they had, they would have risked no longer qualifying for the Investment Management Exemption in UK tax law. (Introduced in 1995, the exemption protects the profits of offshore funds with British-based managers from UK taxation.) So a bank would hold a position in carbon for a fund, passing the gains and losses on to it and charging what was in effect a fee for doing so.

Prime brokerage has been a major source of income for the leading investment banks in recent years; that is one of the reasons their fate is so tightly interwoven with that of hedge funds. This autumn, the focus of attention has been on the troubles of banks, but hedge funds also have their vulnerabilities. The most obvious threat is that investors might withdraw their capital, which can happen after even short periods of poor performance. As one manager told me: ‘You’ve had one or two bad months and you’ve got a redemption notice in.’ It takes time for investors to get their money out – a requirement for 90 days’ notice is common, and some funds successfully insist on lengthier ‘lock-up’ periods in which no redemptions are permitted – but once redemptions begin it can be hard for a manager to stop them. The need to liquidate positions to release the money required to meet redemptions can cause further losses, sparking further redemptions and a spiral of decline. In the interconnected, gossipy world of the financial markets, a hedge fund known to have suffered or to be facing significant redemptions can quickly come to seem very unattractive. Speaking of the leading partner in one hedge fund, a fund-of-funds manager told me: ‘He’s in a Regus office.’ (Regus rents office space in its business centres on a short-term basis.) My informant was emphatic that I wasn’t to name the unfortunate man: the fact that his fund could no longer pay rent at Mayfair levels would be seen as too damning.

Hedge funds can be drained of capital in other ways too. If you’re doing something more complicated than just buying shares or bonds – and few hedge funds restrict themselves to that – trades often take the form of a contract between two parties, which typically demands that collateral (cash or securities) be transferred between them, often daily, as market prices fluctuate in favour of one party or the other. These collateral transfers are a sensible precaution because they reduce the risk that someone will default on their contract at a point at which they owe a lot of money: if they do, you can at least keep the collateral they’ve had to deposit with you. The result of the procedure, however, is that if market prices move against a hedge fund’s positions it faces increasing demands for collateral. It’s far from rare for managers to be forced to abandon their positions and incur the consequent losses, even in cases such as fixed-income arbitrage, in which it’s pretty certain that the adverse price movements will be temporary.

Prime brokers, too, can help kill hedge funds by reducing or withdrawing the credit available to them. If you’re leveraged, and your source of borrowing dries up, you will usually have no alternative but to liquidate your positions, again often at a loss. Gillian Tett of the Financial Times reports recent quiet conversations in which central bankers have sought to persuade prime brokers not to take away funds’ access to credit. The concern is with risks not to individual funds and their investors but to the financial system as a whole. The sector recorded disappointing results in the first half of 2008, and this autumn’s crisis has meant sharp losses for many funds. The restrictions on short selling worsened matters by making many of their strategies difficult or impossible to implement, and their investors now seem to have started to feel that cash or government bonds are the only safe havens.

So large-scale redemptions have begun. On 27 October, Alpha suggested that over the previous month hedge funds might in aggregate have received redemption notices totalling $500 billion. It’s not the sort of number one can be sure of, but if it’s roughly right it means that by the end of January a quarter of the sector’s capital base will have drained away. In that context, it may not be over-alarmist for Emmanuel Roman, joint chief executive of hedge fund managers GLG Partners, to have warned an industry meeting that almost a third of hedge funds faced collapse.

That would be serious enough if the resulting fire-sale liquidations of positions were spread evenly across the financial system, but they’re unlikely to be. Trading by hedge funds tends to cluster: in part because those following the same general strategy will often light on the same opportunities (the number of attractive fixed-income price discrepancies, for example, is finite); in part because there is lots of chatter in markets about potentially profitable trades. You might think that if you’d discovered such a trade you would want to keep it to yourself, but often that’s not so. Prudence dictates that a bank or hedge fund shouldn’t devote too much of its capital to a single trade – and, unfashionable as it may be to say so, most banks and funds do try to control the risks they take (which doesn’t mean they always manage to). Once you’ve devoted as much of your capital to a trade as is prudent, there’s nothing to be lost by telling others about the opportunity, and often quite a bit to be gained. If you’ve bought an asset you believe to be undervalued and short sold a similar asset you believe to be overvalued (and much hedge fund trading boils down to that), you want others to do the same. If they do, that will help boost the price of the asset you’ve bought and decrease the price of the asset you’ve sold short.

Situations in which many hedge funds have similar or identical positions are called ‘consensus trades’ or ‘crowded trades’. Every so often these cause sudden, huge movements in prices that have little or no basis in economic fundamentals such as the prospects for the firm, sector or country at issue. In the last week of October, for example, Volkswagen briefly became the world’s most valuable company by market capitalisation, but not because investors were suddenly struck by how attractive its cars were or by optimism about the prospects of the motor industry. Rather, a consensus trade had gone disastrously wrong. Volkswagen’s ordinary shares had started 2008 half as expensive again as its preference shares, and the difference had soared during the year. The holders of preference shares can’t take part in shareholder votes, and they receive a fixed rate of interest rather than the fluctuating dividends offered by ordinary shares, but both kinds of share are stakes in the same firm, and it seemed reasonable to conclude that the growing difference between their prices was an anomaly that would correct itself. So a large number of hedge funds – some say as many as a hundred – bought Volkswagen’s preference shares and short sold its ordinary shares. These matched long and short positions meant that the funds were insulated from overall fluctuations in the company’s fortunes: it ‘was meant to be a low-risk trade’, as one London fund manager told the Financial Times.

Unfortunately, Porsche, which already owns 42.6 per cent of Volkswagen’s ordinary shares, had quietly been increasing its stake by buying call options (a call option is a contract that gives you the right to buy an asset at a fixed price). If it turns all those options into Volkswagen shares, Porsche will own 74.1 per cent of them; the government of Lower Saxony owns a further 20.2 per cent that it’s very unlikely to sell. That would leave only 5.7 per cent of Volkswagen’s ordinary shares available to be traded on the market. However, hedge funds and other traders had between them short sold shares equivalent to 12.9 per cent of the total, and in consequence were obliged to buy and return them. They understandably panicked, and the resultant frantic efforts to buy Volkswagen shares caused the price to quadruple.

The forced unwinding of a consensus trade is not a pleasant business. Initial losses increase demand for collateral and can lead to the issuing of redemption notices, and prime brokers and others may restrict lending to the hedge funds involved. Weaker funds have to liquidate their positions, causing further losses and the onset of a downward spiral. Losses incurred in one trade can contaminate others, as funds have to sell assets across the board. The prices of seemingly unrelated assets start to move in lockstep, undermining the apparent safety that diversification provides. This was the process that led to the 1998 crisis. LTCM had only a small stake in the consensus trade that started the downward spiral (investment in rouble-denominated Russian government bonds, on which Russia defaulted on 17 August), but was fatally damaged by the highly correlated adverse price movements that ensued around the globe and across a wide range of assets.[*]

No single hedge fund seems currently to be in as pivotal a situation as LTCM was in 1998, but if the sector continues to shrink as fast as recent reports suggest it will, then the liquidation of trading positions is likely to lead to further violent price movements and market disruption, particularly where there are consensus trades. Paradoxically, though, the dramatic events of this autumn may lead, over the next few years, to an even greater role for the hedge funds that survive. With so many banks having been bailed out by the world’s taxpayers, they will be under considerable pressure from governments and regulators to concentrate on their core functions (receiving deposits, making loans to individuals and businesses, processing payments etc) and to reduce proprietary trading – that is the trading of financial instruments in order to make a profit for the bank, not to serve the needs of customers. Even banks that haven’t needed to be bailed out are moving in this direction: on 4 November, J.P. Morgan announced it was closing its global proprietary trading unit. As banks retreat from trading risky financial instruments, a potentially very profitable space will open up for those still prepared to do so, and hedge funds will step in to fill it.

俞敏洪 英语系80级校友、新东方教育集团董事长兼总裁

2008年9月21日 

各位同学、各位领导：

大家上午好！（掌声）

非常高兴许校长给我这么崇高的荣誉，谈一谈我在北大的体会。（掌声）

可以说，北大是改变了我一生的地方，是提升了我自己的地方，使我从一个农村孩子最后走向了世界的地方。毫不夸张地说，没有北大，肯定就没有我的今天。北大给我留下了一连串美好的回忆，大概也留下了一连串的痛苦。正是在美好和痛苦中间，在挫折、挣扎和进步中间，最后找到了自我，开始为自己、为家庭、为社会能做一点事情。

学生生活是非常美好的，有很多美好的回忆。 我还记得我们班有一个男生，每天都在女生的宿舍楼下拉小提琴，（笑声）希望能够引起女生的注意，结果后来被女生扔了水瓶子。我还记得我自己为了吸引女生的 注意，每到寒假和暑假都帮着女生扛包。（笑声、掌声）后来我发现那个女生有男朋友，（笑声）我就问她为什么还要让我扛包，她说为了让男朋友休息一下（笑 声、掌声）。我也记得刚进北大的时候我不会讲普通话，全班同学第一次开班会的时候互相介绍，我站起来自我介绍了一番，结果我们的班长站起来跟我说：“俞敏 洪你能不能不讲日语？”（笑声）我后来用了整整一年时间，拿着收音机在北大的树林中模仿了广播台的播音，但是到今天普通话还依然讲得不好。

人的进步可能是一辈子的事情。在北大也许是我们生活的一个开始，而不是结束。有很多事情特别让人感动。比如说，我们很有幸见过朱光潜教授。在他最后的日子里，是我们班的同学每天轮流推着轮椅在北大里陪他一起散步。（掌声）每当我推着轮椅的时候，我心中就充满了对朱光潜教授的崇拜，一种神圣感油然而生。所以，我在大学看书最多的领域是美学。因为他写了一本《西方美学史》，是我进大学以后读的第二本书。

为 什么是第二本呢？因为第一本是这样来的，我进北大以后走进宿舍，我有个同学已经在宿舍。那个同学躺在床上看一本书，叫做《第三帝国的兴亡》。所以我就问了 他一句话，我说：“在大学还要读这种书吗？”他把书从眼睛上拿开，看了我一眼，没理我，继续读他的书。这一眼一直留在我心中。我知道进了北大不仅仅是来学专业的，要读大量大量的书。你才能够有资格把自己叫做北大的学生。（掌声）所以我在北大读的第一本书就是《第三帝国的兴亡》，而且读了三遍。后来我就找这个同学去，我说：“咱们聊聊《第三帝国的兴亡》”，他说：“我已经忘了。”（笑声）

我也记得我的导师李赋宁教授，原来是北大英语系的主任，他给我们上《新概念》第四册的时候，每次都把板书写得非常的完整，非常的美丽。永远都是从黑板的左上角写起，等到下课铃响起的时候，刚好写到右下角结束。（掌声）我还记得我的英国文学史的教授罗经国教授，我在北大最后一年由于心情不好，所以考试不及格。我找到罗教授说：“这门课如果我不及格就毕不了业。”，罗教授说：“我可以给你一个及格的分数，但是请你记住了，未来你一定要做出我值得给你分数的事业。”（掌声）所以，北大老师的宽容、学识、奔放、自由，让我们真正能够成为北大的学生，真正能够得到北大的精神。 当我听说许智宏校长对学生唱《隐形的翅膀》的时候，我打开视频，感动得热泪盈眶。因为我觉得北大的校长就应该是这样的。（掌声）

我 记得自己在北大的时候有很多的苦闷。一是普通话不好，第二英语水平一塌糊涂。尽管我高考经过三年的努力考到了北大——因为我落榜了两次，最后一次很意外地 考进了北大。我从来没有想过北大是我能够上学的地方，她是我心中一块圣地，觉得永远够不着。但是那一年，第三年考试时我的高考分数超过了北大录取分数线七 分，终于下定决心咬牙切齿填下了“北京大学”四个字。我知道一定会有很多人比我的分数高，我认为我是不会被录取的。没想到北大的招生老师非常富有眼光，料 到了三十年后我的今天。（掌声）但是实际上我的英语水平很差，在农村既不会听也不会说，只会背语法和单词。我们班分班的时候，五十个同学分成三个班，因为 我的英语考试分数不错，就被分到了A班，但是一个月以后，我就被调到了C班。C班叫做“语音语调及听力障碍班”。（ 笑声）

我也记得自己进北大以前连《红楼梦》都没有读过，所以看到同学们一本一本书在读，我拼命地追赶。结果我在大学差不多读了八百多本书，用了五年时间（掌声）。但 是依然没有赶超上我那些同学。我记得我的班长王强是一个书癖，现在也在新东方，是新东方教育研究院的院长。他每次去买书我就跟着他去，当时北大给我们每个 月发二十多块钱生活费，王强有个癖好就是把生活费一分为二，一半用来买书，一半用来买饭菜票。买书的钱绝不动用来买饭票。如果他没有饭菜票了就到处借，借 不到就到处偷。（笑声）后来我发现他这个习惯很好，我也把我的生活费一份为二，一半用来买书，一半用来买饭菜票，饭票吃完了我就偷他的。（笑声掌声）

毫不夸张地说，我们班的同学当时在北大，真是属于读书最多的班之一。而且我们班当时活动非常地活跃，光诗人就出了好几个。后来挺有名的一个诗人叫西川，真名叫刘军， 就是我们班的。（掌声）我还记得我们班开风气之先，当时是北大的优秀集体，但是有一个晚上大家玩得高兴了，结果跳起了贴面舞，第二个礼拜被教育部通报批评 了。那个时候跳舞是必须跳得很正规的，稍微男女生靠近一点就认为违反风纪。所以你们现在比我们当初要更加幸福一点。不光可以跳舞，而且可以手拉手地在校园 里面走，我们如果当时男女生手拉手在校园里面走，一定会被扔到未名湖里，所以一般都是晚上十二点以后再在校园里面走。（笑声掌声）

我也记得我们班五十个同学，刚好是二十五个男生二十五个女生，我听到这个比例以后当时就非常的兴奋（笑声），我觉得大家就应该是一个配一个。没想到女生们都看上了那些外表英俊潇洒、风流倜傥的男生。像我这样外表不怎么样，内心充满丰富感情、未来有巨大发展潜力的，女生一般都看不上。（笑声掌声）

我记得我奋斗了整整两年希望能在成绩上赶上我的同学，但是就像刚才吕植老 师说的，你尽管在中学高考可能考得很好，是第一名，但是北大精英人才太多了，你的前后左右可能都是智商极高的同学，也是各个省的状元或者说第二名。所以， 在北大追赶同学是一个非常艰苦的过程，尽管我每天几乎都要比别的同学多学一两个小时，但是到了大学二年级结束的时候我的成绩依然排在班内最后几名。非常勤 奋又非常郁闷，也没有女生来爱我安慰我。（笑声）这导致的结果是，我在大学三年级的时候得了一场重病，这个病叫做传染性侵润肺结核。当时我就晕了，因为当 时我正在读《红楼梦》，正好读到林黛玉因为肺结核吐血而亡的那一章，（笑声）我还以为我的生命从此结束，后来北大医院的医生告诉我现在这种病能够治好，但 是需要在医院里住一年。我在医院里住了一年，苦闷了一年，读了很多书，也写了六百多首诗歌，可惜一首诗歌都没有出版过。从此以后我就跟写诗结上了缘，但是 我这个人有丰富的情感，但是没有优美的文笔，所以终于没有成为诗人。后来我感到非常的庆幸，因为我发现真正成为诗人的人后来都出事了。我们跟当时还不太出 名的诗人海子在一起写过诗。后来他写过一首优美的诗歌，叫做《面朝大海，春暖花开》，我们每一个同学大概都能背。后来当我听说他卧轨自杀的时候，嚎啕大哭了整整一天。从此以后，我放下笔，再也不写诗了。（掌声）

记 得我在北大的时候，到大学四年级毕业时，我的成绩依然排在全班最后几名。但是，当时我已经有了一个良好的心态。我知道我在聪明上比不过我的同学，但是我有 一种能力，就是持续不断的努力。所以在我们班的毕业典礼上我说了这么一段话，到现在我的同学还能记得，我说：“大家都获得了优异的成绩，我是我们班的落后 同学。但是我想让同学们放心，我决不放弃。你们五年干成的事情我干十年，你们十年干成的我干二十年，你们二十年干成的我干四十年”。（ 掌声）我对他们说：“如果实在不行，我会保持心情愉快、身体健康，到八十岁以后把你们送走了我再走。”（笑声掌声）

有 一个故事说，能够到达金字塔顶端的只有两种动物，一是雄鹰，靠自己的天赋和翅膀飞了上去。我们这儿有很多雄鹰式的人物，很多同学学习不需要太努力就能达到 高峰。很多同学后来可能很轻松地就能在北大毕业以后进入哈佛、耶鲁、牛津、剑桥这样的名牌大学继续深造。有很多同学身上充满了天赋，不需要学习就有这样的 才能，比如说我刚才提到的我的班长王强，他的模仿能力就是超群的，到任何一个地方，听任何一句话，听一遍模仿出来的绝对不会两样。所以他在北大广播站当播 音员当了整整四年。我每天听着他的声音，心头咬牙切齿充满仇恨。（笑声）所以，有天赋的人就像雄鹰。但是，大家也都知道，有另外一种动物，也到了金字塔的 顶端。那就是蜗牛。蜗牛肯定只能是爬上去。从低下爬到上面可能要一个月、两个月，甚至一年、两年。在金字塔顶端，人们确实找到了蜗牛的痕迹。我相信蜗牛绝 对不会一帆风顺地爬上去，一定会掉下来、再爬、掉下来、再爬。但是，同学们所要知道的是，蜗牛只要爬到金字塔顶端，它眼中所看到的世界，它收获的成就，跟 雄鹰是一模一样的。（掌声）所以，也许我们在座的同学有的是雄鹰，有的是蜗牛。我在北大的时候，包括到今天为止，我一直认为我是一只蜗牛。但是我一直在 爬，也许还没有爬到金字塔的顶端。但是只要你在爬，就足以给自己留下令生命感动的日子。（掌声）

我常常跟同学们说，如果我们的生命不为自己留下一些让自己热泪盈眶的日子，你的生命就是白过的。我们很多同学凭着优异的成绩进入了北大，但是北大绝不是你们学习的终点，而是你们生命的起点。在一岁到十八岁的岁月中间，你听老师的话、听父母的话，现在你真正开始了自己的独立生活。我们必须为自己创造一些让自己感动的日子，你才能够感动别人。我们 这儿有富裕家庭来的，也有贫困家庭来的，我们生命的起点由不得你选择出生在富裕家庭还是贫困家庭，如果你生在贫困家庭，你不能说老爸给我收回去，我不想在 这里待着。但是我们生命的终点是由我们自己选择的。我们所有在座的同学过去都走得很好，已经在十八岁的年龄走到了很多中国孩子的前面去，因为北大是中国的 骄傲，也可以说是世界的骄傲。但是，到北大并不意味着你从此大功告成，并不意味着你未来的路也能走好，后面的五十年、六十年，甚至一百年你该怎么走，成为 了每一个同学都要思考的问题。就本人而言，我觉得只要有两样东西在心中，我们就能成就自己的人生。

第 一样叫做理想。我从小就有一种感觉，希望穿越地平线走向远方，我把它叫做“穿越地平线的渴望”。也正是因为这种强烈的渴望，使我有勇气不断地高考。当然， 我生命中也有榜样。比如我有一个邻居，非常的有名，是我终生的榜样，他的名字叫徐霞客。当然，是五百年前的邻居。但是他确实是我的邻居，江苏江阴的，我也 是江苏江阴的。因为崇拜徐霞客，直接导致我在高考的时候地理成绩考了九十七分。（掌声）也是徐霞客给我带来了穿越地平线的这种感觉，所以我也下定决心，如 果徐霞客走遍了中国，我就要走遍世界。而我现在正在实现自己这一梦想。所以，只要你心中有理想，有志向，同学们，你终将走向成功。你所要做到的就是在这个 过程要有艰苦奋斗、忍受挫折和失败的能力，要不断地把自己的心胸扩大，才能够把事情做得更好。  

第 二样东西叫良心。什么叫良心呢？就是要做好事，要做对得起自己对得起别人的事情，要有和别人分享的姿态，要有愿意为别人服务的精神。有良心的人会从你具体 的生活中间做的事情体现出来，而且你所做的事情一定对你未来的生命产生影响。我来讲两个小故事，讲完我就结束我的讲话，已经占用了很长的时间。

第 一个小故事。有一个企业家和我讲起他大学时候的一个故事，他们班有一个同学，家庭比较富有，每个礼拜都会带六个苹果到学校来。宿舍里的同学以为是一人一 个，结果他是自己一天吃一个。尽管苹果是他的，不给你也不能抢，但是从此同学留下一个印象，就是这个孩子太自私。后来这个企业家做成功了事情，而那个吃苹 果的同学还没有取得成功，就希望加入到这个企业家的队伍里来。但后来大家一商量，说不能让他加盟，原因很简单，因为在大学的时候他从来没有体现过分享精 神。所以，对同学们来说在大学时代的第一个要点，你得跟同学们分享你所拥有的东西，感情、思想、财富，哪怕是一个苹果也可以分成六瓣大家一起吃。（掌声） 因为你要知道，这样做你将来能得到更多，你的付出永远不会是白白付出的。

我 再来讲一下我自己的故事。在北大当学生的时候，我一直比较具备为同学服务的精神。我这个人成绩一直不怎么样，但我从小就热爱劳动，我希望通过勤奋的劳动来 引起老师和同学的的注意，所以我从小学一年级就一直打扫教室卫生。到了北大以后我养成了一个良好的习惯，每天为宿舍打扫卫生，这一打扫就打扫了四年。所以 我们宿舍从来没排过卫生值日表。另外，我每天都拎着宿舍的水壶去给同学打水，把它当作一种体育锻炼。大家看我打水习惯了，最后还产生这样一种情况，有的时 候我忘了打水，同学就说“俞敏洪怎么还不去打水”。（笑声）。但是我并不觉得打水是一件多么吃亏的事情。因为大家都是一起同学，互相帮助是理所当然的。同 学们一定认为我这件事情白做了。又过了十年，到了九五年年底的时候新东方做到了一定规模，我希望找合作者，结果就跑到了美国和加拿大去寻找我的那些同学， 他们在大学的时候都是我生命的榜样，包括刚才讲到的王强老 师等。我为了诱惑他们回来还带了一大把美元，每天在美国非常大方地花钱，想让他们知道在中国也能赚钱。我想大概这样就能让他们回来。后来他们回来了，但是 给了我一个十分意外的理由。他们说：“俞敏洪，我们回去是冲着你过去为我们打了四年水。”（掌声）他们说：“我们知道，你有这样的一种精神，所以你有饭吃 肯定不会给我们粥喝，所以让我们一起回中国，共同干新东方吧。”才有了新东方的今天。（掌声）

人的一生是奋斗的一生，但是有的人一生过得很伟大有的人一生过得很琐碎。如果我们有一个伟大的理想，有一颗善良的心，我们一定能把很多琐碎的日子堆砌起来，变成一个伟大的生命。但是如果你每天庸庸碌碌，没有理想，从此停止进步，那未来你一辈子的日子堆积起来将永远是一堆琐碎。所以，我希望所有的同学能把自己每天平凡的日子堆砌成伟大的人生。（掌声）

最后，我代表全体老校友向在座的三千多位新生表一个心意，我代表全体老校友和新东方把两百万人民币捐给许校长，为在座同学们的学习、活动和成长提供一点帮助。（掌声）