Speaker

Howard Marks

Howard Marks

Co-founder and co-chairman of Oaktree Capital Management (founded 1995 with Bruce Karsh and three colleagues), one of the world’s largest alternative investment managers with a focus on distressed debt, high-yield bonds, and credit. Born 1946. Career began at Citibank (1968), where he moved from equity research to convertible bonds and then high-yield bonds — joining the Michael Milken-era birth of the junk-bond market — before moving to TCW and then founding Oaktree.

Known for investment memos written since 1990, distributed to clients and widely read across the industry. Author of The Most Important Thing (2011) and Mastering the Market Cycle (2018). Widely regarded as one of the most articulate investors on risk, uncertainty, and market psychology.

Appearances

Key positions

  • Price over quality: superior investing comes from buying things well, not from buying good things; quality without price discipline is the mechanism of every bubble (Nifty 50, dot-com).
  • The Something of Value revision: capital-V Value investing, focused only on present price metrics, cannot account for great compounders; holding a great company for decades can outperform constant rotation through discounts, especially as markets become more efficient and those discounts shrink.
  • Market efficiency and feel: as everyone gets the same screens and data, alpha from widely available quantitative information is competed away; the remaining edge comes from non-quantitative insight or a superior understanding of the future — what Marks calls “feel.”
  • Unemotional contrarianism: most investors buy high and sell low because they are emotionally amplified by market direction; the structural edge of the great investor is the ability to act contrary to the emotional crowd.
  • China as economic adolescent: China’s best decades are ahead, not behind; “uninvestable” as a descriptor signals potential cheapness, not genuine unattractiveness.