Howard Marks Quotes
100 Howard Marks Quotes
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For the last twenty years I’ve been writing occasional memos… first at Trust Company of the West and then at Oaktree Capital Management, the company I cofounded in 1995.
Howard Marks
Skepticism and pessimism aren’t synonymous. Skepticism calls for pessimism when optimism is excessive. But it also calls for optimism when pessimism is excessive.
Howard Marks
A hugely profitable investment that doesn’t begin with discomfort is usually an oxymoron.
Howard Marks
In both economic forecasting and investment management, it’s worth noting that there’s usually someone who gets it exactly right… but it’s rarely the same person twice.
Howard Marks
You can’t predict. You can prepare.
Howard Marks
I like to say success carries within itself the seeds of failure, and failure the seeds of success.
Howard Marks
What the wise man does in the beginning, the fool does in the end.
Howard Marks
We must strive to understand the implications of what’s going on around us. When others are recklessly confident and buying aggressively, we should be highly cautious; when others are frightened into action or panic selling, we should become aggressive.
Howard Marks
Believe me, there’s nothing better than buying from someone who has to sell regardless of price during a crash. Many of the best buys we’ve ever made occurred for that reason.
Howard Marks
When everyone believes something is risky, their unwillingness to buy usually reduces it’s price to the point where it’s not risky at all. Broadly negative opinion can make it the least risky thing since all optimism has been driven out of it’s price.
Howard Marks
Just about everything is cyclical.
Howard Marks
Cycles always prevail eventually.
Howard Marks
Nothing goes in one direction forever.
Howard Marks
Tree’s don’t grow to the sky.
Howard Marks
Few things go to zero.
Howard Marks
There’s little that’s as dangerous for investor health as insistence on extrapolating today’s events into the future.
Howard Marks
Investors with no knowledge of (or concern for) profits, dividends, valuation or the conduct of business simply cannot possess the resolve needed to do the right thing at the right time.
Howard Marks
Value investors score their biggest gains when they buy an underpriced asset, average down unfailingly and have their analysis proved out. Thus there are two essential ingredients for profit in a declining market: you have to have a view on intrinsic value, and you have to hold that view strongly enough to be able to hang in and buy even as price declines suggest that you’re wrong. Oh yes, there’s a third; you have to be right.
Howard Marks
When things are going well and prices are high, investors rush to buy, forgetting all prudence. Then, when there’s chaos all around and assets are on the bargain counter, they lose all willingness to bear risk and rush to sell. And it will ever be so.
Howard Marks
[On the consistent swinging of the pendulum between fear and greed] The significance of all this is the opportunity it offers to those who recognize what is happening and see the implications. At one extreme of the pendulum – the darkest of times – it takes analytical ability, objectivity, resolve, even imagination, to think things will ever get better. The few people who possess those qualities can make unusual profits with low risk. But at the other extreme, when everyone assumes and prices in the impossible – improvement forever – the stage is set for painful losses. It all goes together. None of these is an isolated event or a chance occurrence. Rather, they’re all elements in a recurring pattern that can be understood and profited from.
Howard Marks
The air goes out of the balloon much faster than it went in.
Howard Marks
Those who believe that the pendulum will move in one direction forever – or reside at an extreme forever – eventually will lose huge sums. Those who understand the pendulum’s behavior can benefit enormously.
Howard Marks
Inefficiencies – mispricings, misperceptions, mistakes that other people make – provide potential opportunities for superior performance. Exploiting them is, in fact, the only road to consistent outperformance. To distinguish yourself from the others, you need to be on the right side of those mistakes.
Howard Marks
The thing I find most interesting about investing is how paradoxical it is: how often the things that seem most obvious – on which everyone agrees – turn out not to be true.
Howard Marks
The process has to begin with investors who are unusually perceptive, unconventional, iconoclastic or early. That’s why successful investors are said to spend a lot of their time being lonely.
Howard Marks
I’d say the necessary condition for the existence of bargains is that perception has to be considerably worse than reality. That means the best opportunities are usually found among the things most others won’t do. After all, if everyone feels good about something and is glad to join in, it won’t be bargain-priced.
Howard Marks
Investors can pass up lots of opportunities until they see one that’s terrific.
Howard Marks
We can make excellent investment decisions on the basis of present observations, with no need to make guesses about the future.
Howard Marks
In more skeptical times, investors take a dim view of combining leverage and cyclicality.
Howard Marks
To achieve superior investment results, your insight into value has to be superior.
Howard Marks
There is no surefire recipe for investment success. Just a way to think that might help you make good decisions and perhaps more important, avoid the pitfalls that ensnare so many.
Howard Marks
One cannot develop an effective philosophy without having been exposed to life’s lessons.
Howard Marks
Experience is what you got when you didn’t get what you wanted.
Howard Marks
First-level things says, ‘It’s a good company; lets buy the stock.’ Second-level thinking says ‘It’s a good company, but everyone thinks it’s a great company, and it’s not. So the stock’s overrated and overpriced, let’s sell.
Howard Marks
First-level thinking says, ‘The outlook calls for low growth and rising inflation. Let’s dump our stocks.’ Second-level thinking says, ‘The outlook stinks, but everyone else is selling in a panic. Buy!’
Howard Marks
First-level thinking says, ‘I think the company’s earnings will fall; sell.’ Second-level thinking says, ‘I think the company’s earnings will fall less than people expect, and the pleasant surprise will lift the stock; buy.’
Howard Marks
I should limit my efforts to relatively inefficient markets where hard work and skill would pay off best.
Howard Marks
Investors with no knowledge of (or concern for) profits, dividends, valuation or the conduct of business simply cannot possess the resolve needed to do the right thing at the right time. With everyone around them buying and making money, they can’t know when a stock is too high and therefore resist joining in. And with a market in freefall, they can’t possibly have the confidence needed to hold or buy at severely reduced prices.
Howard Marks
An accurate estimate of intrinsic value is the essential foundation for steady, unemotional and potentially profitable investing.
Howard Marks
Well bought is half sold.
Howard Marks
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