Motley Fool Hidden Gems Investing - Howard Marks, The State of the Market

Episode Date: June 15, 2025

Howard Marks the founder of Oak Tree Capital Management. He joins Motley Fool CEO, Tom Gardner, plus Chief Investment Officer Andy Cross and Senior Analyst Buck Hartzell for a conversation about: - How investors should think about the deficit - Investing in human emotion - The inescapability of risk Hosts: Tom Gardner, Andy Cross, Buck Hartzell Guest: Howard Marks Engineers: Bart Shannon, Dan Boyd Advertisements are sponsored content and provided for informational purposes only. The Motley Fool and its affiliates (collectively, "TMF") do not endorse, recommend, or verify the accuracy or completeness of the statements made within advertisements. TMF is not involved in the offer, sale, or solicitation of any securities advertised herein and makes no representations regarding the suitability, or risks associated with any investment opportunity presented. Investors should conduct their own due diligence and consult with legal, tax, and financial advisors before making any investment decisions. TMF assumes no responsibility for any losses or damages arising from this advertisement. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Most people are subject to emotion and that emotion causes people to buy high and sell low. Then what you got to do is you got to tie your hands and not do it. And now we run funds, they're institutional funds, they're not open to the public. But in many of our funds, you lock up your money for 10 years. You can't get out. And it's kind of like Odysseus tying himself to the mast when he had to sail past the sirens. That's Howard Marks, the celebrated value investor and founder of Oak Tree Capital Management. Earlier this week, Marks joined a Motley group of fools, including CEO Tom Gardner,

Chief Investment Officer Andy Cross, and Senior Analyst Buck Hartzell on our live stream, Fool 24, to discuss the state of the market. We're replaying the conversation in full here on Motley Fool Money, in case you missed that live version. Buck and Andy, great to have you both here. I was reflecting a little bit on all the many things that we've studied and learned from Howard Marks and from Oak Tree over the years. And then I was thinking, I wonder, and we'll ask Howard as he joins us, I wonder if it gets a little annoying for Howard and his team of many, many great investors that they're probably referred to as Oakworth, Oakbridge, Oakmont. There's a lot of Oaks out there.

There are a lot of Oaks out there, but there is one Oak tree, uh, capital management that specializes in distressed debt and alternative assets. And we are joined by its co-founder and co-chairman, uh, Howard Marks for this hour. And Mr. Marks, thank you so much for spending this hour with us. Mr. Marks is my father. It's great to be with you, Tom, as well, as well. Do you often hear different phrasing of your company name? Like you, you all are so great over there at Oak Hill. Well, of course that happens. You know, by the way, we started up 30 years ago in April, you know, and, uh, a couple of months later I saw an ad or some, some, something about Oak tree, this or that. And I said, that's ridiculous. We're going to sue those people. And then it

turned out that there's an Oak tree in just about every city. I mean, an Oak tree investment management firm in just about every city and we're the last not the first so no loss well i won't i won't uh give a detailed story of the time i met nicky six from motley crew and he playfully threatened to sue us uh for that and that was an enjoyable moment that we had how are this is how we want to spend the hour together if you're willing to take this journey with us if you'd like to edit any of the major themes that we that we're heading towards please do so but we thought we would start with debt and the markets today, then investing in human emotion, and then designing a great investment process, and then what you've learned in business to close. Okay. Great. That'll

be a good hour. I'm looking forward to it. Yeah. What is the debt market telling us today about the equity markets? I mean, there hasn't been that much change, except that when the whole tariff thing occurred, the yield on the 10-year jumped by about 50 basis points, half a percent. And, you know, that basically, I think you can say that people demand higher interest rates when they're more aware of risk. And, of course, you know, I think that most people think that the tariffs introduced new risks, and it's reflected in bond prices, as it should be. I'd like to ask about one other form of debt, and that's for our country. You know, you talked about tariffs.

Debt to GDP is probably about 124% right now. We've had a kind of really high-profile divorce from the leader of Doge. Elon Musk is headed back to Tesla. And a big, wonderful bill kind of making its way through Washington right now. But I just wonder, from your investment standpoint, how big of a deal is that deficit? Am I the only one worried about it? Or how should investors think about $2 trillion deficits as kind of as far as the eye can see right now? No, I don't think it's a non-issue. You know, the U.S. was given by the world a golden credit card, the way I describe it, where there's no credit

limit, and you never get a bill, and the interest rate is one of the lowest in the world. And we got that because of our leadership in many areas, including economic, but also the fact that, you know, the dollar is the reserve currency of the world. And that has permitted us to spend more than we bring in in taxes for, I don't know, I think, let's say 41 out of the last 45 years. and of course that's the rational behavior for somebody who has a golden credit card why would you possibly live within your means if you can you know if you can do what i describe but the question is can we lose that status that's really the question if the world decides to impose a limit on our credit card it's as you can see with what's going on now is it'll be very hard to go back to living within our means. So, you know, exactly what that means is hard to say.

If the world worries about us and they raise the interest rate, then that'll increase the cost of our debt service and that'll add further to the deficit and the debt. And, you know, as we spend more on interest, it adds to the deficit and the debt balloons. And so it seems like a spiral um it it has it seems uncontrollable because you can't imagine you know i guess one of you said mentioned uh two two trillion dollar deficits as far as the eye can see uh it it doesn't seem possible to get it under control so where does this lead hard to say yeah yeah but and you know warren buffett at the berkshire athlete annual meeting said you know this is going to be a problem but nobody knows if it's two years or 20 years

right one of you mentioned somebody mentioned that that our maybe it was andy mentioned that our debt is 120 odd percent of gdp which sounds like a lot uh is that a problem well where where does the problem set in nobody knows um you know in japan it's 200 right so well so maybe maybe 120 is not a problem. But, you know, the golden credit card sounds too good to be true. There was an economist once named Herbert Stein, and he's famous for saying one thing. If something cannot continue, it will stop. And I agree 100 percent. And if you can't spend two trillion more than you bring in in taxes every year forever, then it will stop. And what happens? Hard to say. And there are two choices. You can spend less or you can you can raise more in the form of revenue.

And neither of those are politically very attractive to folks. Well, you know, you you have to you. We need what we need is elected officials who for whom not getting elected isn't the worst thing in the world. because we what we need i'm writing a memo about this and it'll be out within a week or 10 days uh and i touch on it and i say what we need is austerity the trouble is austerity isn't fun and uh if you want to get re-elected and what you want to do is you want to entertain uh the voters and they're not going to be amused by austerity uh and and so far uh you know, we have let that dominate the discussion. So as you say, they say, well, I'm all for a balanced budget. I just don't want to increase taxes or cut spending.

And I would say, you know, two years ago at the Berkshire meeting, when Warren was asked about selling Apple, which he sold over 600 million shares eventually, and he just said basically taxes are going up. He believed that that was the reason that he gave for selling it. He wasn't than he didn't believe in. Of course, Apple was trading at a higher multiple than when he acquired those shares, too. I think that you talk about percentage of GDP. I think that our taxes at the federal level now are 17 percent of GDP, which is unusually low. And by the way, and the top rate on the federal, I think, is 37, if I'm not mistaken. And that's unusually low. You know, when I was a boy, it was 95. So 37 is a bargain. But you have to have some spine. And you have to say it's not

OK to spend more than we make. We have to get it under control. And by the way, an interesting thing to note is nobody ever pays their debts. No company, no country, very few people ever reduce the amount they owe. They just roll it over and usually add to it. So we're not talking about erasing the $36 trillion of debt. We're only talking about bending the curve a little so that it grows slower than GDP. We're not even saying it shouldn't grow. But if it ever started to grow slower than GDP, everybody would celebrate. What would be your balance? What would be the Howard Marks plan in terms of raising revenue and cutting spending? 50-50, 70-30? I'm not astute enough to know. The trouble is a large percentage of Americans don't pay any

taxes, federal taxes. It would be hard to start them on it. You can't get that much more out of the people in the top few percent. So you have to hit the middle class, uh, you know, the people who make probably between a hundred and a hundred or a hundred and 200, let's say thousand a year. And, you know, by the way, I was, I was doing some research for this memo I'm writing. And it turns out that the baby boomers of which I'm about the oldest, yeah, he had to be born between 46 and 64, and I was born in 46. The baby boomers, they estimate, were 38% of the voters in the 2020 presidential election. So it's a very, very populist group, and you don't want to antagonize them. Howard, how about on the corporate debt side, distressed debt? I mean, balance sheets

seem to be pretty strong, at least at the S&P 500 level. You mentioned that you don't really pay down your debt some do but you typically companies roll it over and just continue to pay even now relatively low interest rates but the state the status of the of the corporate distressed debt market um how are you thinking about that today well the the real the the the the typical company i think is not too leveraged what happened however is that in the last 20 years something called private equity, leveraged buyouts, was tapped as the silver bullet, the sure solution. And money flowed into it like water. And those companies are highly levered. Those companies have basically,

let's say, $3 of debt for every dollar of equity or something like that. And they were purchased, a lot of them were purchased in the last 10 years, and a lot of them purchased when the Fed funds rate was zero or close to it. And so they were saddled with capital structures, highly levered capital structures that did not anticipate a world where interest rates were 4% or 5% higher and that are going to be hard to refinance when they come due. And leverage is not as easy to get anymore and not as cheap. And that will be an issue. And so we don't usually think about ordinary S&P 500 companies going bankrupt. We think about companies, good companies that were bought by the private equity

industry, saddled with too much debt, get into a low spot, or have trouble refinancing, and then we tend to get involved. Good company, excuse me, our mantra, Andy, is good company, bad balance sheet. If you have a good company with a bad balance sheet, it's easy to fix. It goes through bankruptcy, they reject a bunch of their debt, and they emerge with low leverage. If you have a bad company is hard to fix yeah you have to be a magician and we don't say we don't claim to be guys one more quick question about debt and this relates to retail investors you know we've seen a lot of changes in in people's ability to buy stocks right from discount brokers all kinds of changes and i get this question a lot from people why can't individual retail investors just go buy

their own bond. The market is so opaque and it's difficult. You got to know the QSIP number. And even if you can, the spreads are wide. Why hasn't there been much evolution in that market for the retail investor? I'm sorry, which market? The bond market. The bond market. If I want to buy my own corporate bond or I want to go do that, it's just kind of out of the reach for most retail investors, it seems? Well, I mean, I'm not an expert on the subject. I don't know. I mean, it just never has developed. I mean, look, people go into the stock market because historically, the stock market has made people rich. The S&P has returned 100%, 10% a year for the last 100 years and that was enough to turn a dollar into something like 14 or 15 000 so so everybody wants

to get in the stock market and you hear all these stories about this company went up that much in this company you don't hear those stories about bonds so bonds never have been that popular and you just don't see companies people going out and buying bonds one at a time and managing their own portfolios and you know it's kind of like there's i don't know you never know anymore what's what sayings are PC or not. But we used to say kissing your sister. And I think most people view bond investing as kissing your sister. But it's not that exciting. So it doesn't have the allure of the stock market. But today, you can go into a high-yield bond fund. And high-yield bonds pay before fees, which matter, and before potential defaults, which are bound to occur once in a

while, today they yield 7.5%. So that's not bad. And if you have a million dollars, you can get $75,000 a year of income with very little uncertainty and in cash in the hand. So I I think that's pretty good, especially at a time when the stock market is historically expensive. What do you advise an equity investor if you were, for example, I know I've watched you reference occasionally the dynamic between you and your son and the different ways that you invest. Somebody in the equity markets who's looking at, we could look at any number of factors.

We could say, you know, the, the Buffett, uh, uh, market market cap to GDP. We could look at, um, the 200 week, um, uh, moving average of the S and P is now something like 25% above, um, P ratios, et cetera. Uh, are you, are you somebody who generally thinks you should reduce your equity exposure and pay the tax, or you should be looking for, uh, larger cap, lower beta dividend paying underfollowed, unloved, because we're certainly getting into a period now where people are beginning to celebrate the winners and see the concentration of the attention around those winners. So how do you suggest an investor reacts in scenarios like this? Well, you know, I'm not a

professional stock market investor. And so clearly nobody should take my advice on that. Now, having gotten that out of the way, that doesn't keep me from giving advice. And so what do we know? You alluded to some of it. The statistics on the valuations of something like the S&P are above average. The P.E. ratio, the ratio of price to earnings on the S&P 500 companies looking out for the next 12 months is around 22. And the historic average is 16. So 22 is high. It's not crazy high. It's somewhat high. Back in 2000, I think it was 32. That was crazy. And the people who bought the stock market at

that level, the S&P, in short order, I think we're probably down half. This is not that kind of thing, but it's lofty nevertheless. I tend to think of things as either rich, cheap, or fair. And in the middle is fair. And if it's rich, you might think about reducing your exposure. If it's cheap, you might pile in. In the middle ground, I don't think there's that much to do. And I don't make great distinctions within fair because it historically hasn't paid off. If something's a little expensive, things go from a little expensive to a little more expensive to a bunch expensive to somewhat expensive to a very, you know, and if you get off them just because they're a little expensive, you, you've missed a lot. So I think, uh, you know, when the market is in fair

territory, you shouldn't do anything. And I invade against, uh, hyperactivity. Um, so, uh, you know, And by the way, who was it? Bill Miller has this saying that it's time in the market, not timing the market, that makes you rich. And I think that's generally true. Now, of course, if the market's at an extreme, you might like to know it. You might like to take some chips off the table. But as you say, you do have to pay taxes. And then you have to remember to get back in when it cheapens. Charlie Munger used to talk about market timing like that as a two-decision problem you have to decide when to get out and you have to be right and then once it goes down rather than just congratulate yourself you have to remember to get back in and most people don't

do that because they're so thrilled with the fact that they got out um but you know jp morgan put out a chart around the end of last year and it showed for every every dot on the chart was a month end, between the period of 87 to 14, I think. So that's 27 years. And there was a plot of P-E ratio versus 10-year return, average annual return over the next 10 years. And it was a very strong relationship. Not surprising. The higher the P-E you paid, the lower your subsequent return wise but your pay matters and and uh according to that chart every single time you bought if the pe was 22 your return of the subsequent 10 years was between minus two and plus two percent a year much different than much different than 10

percent that you quoted yes well if so what you would say not don't hang up me on the numbers but if you buy at 16 which is the average pe you'll get the average return which is 10 buy at a pe of 22 which is high you get two to minus two which is low if you buy at eight which is low you might get a return of 15 to 20 which is high so the higher you the higher the price you pay the lower your return makes sense um but uh of course if if you're a real long-term holder and indifferent you just strap yourself in and you hold for the long run and and and you hope once you get past your period of overpricing and underperformance that you regress toward 10. But if you bought in 2020, which I mentioned, I think you made no money for the next 12 years.

So that was an extreme overvaluation, but valuation matters. Yeah. Well, you've written about how investing patience is so important. pivoting over now to investing in human emotion i just wanted to maybe get your thought get your thoughts on uh risk preparation you say that you can't predict but you can prepare you've written about that a few times and i think we all respect that but as we as investors are thinking whether it's equities or or distressed debt or wherever it is um how do you think about when you're in that 80 range and you're saying okay well i in general allocating capital fully in but trying to balance a time when it should be a little bit more opportunistic or a little bit more cautious

based on whatever metrics you're looking at but but mentally there's a time when you have to start to make that change yes and i guess just over your experiences any guidance you can give us to managing that that temperament when things are getting a little bit extreme or when your outperformance or the performance is actually not so good in your portfolio, but you're just waiting to see better days in the market? Well, first of all, Andy, I'd like to give a commercial for myself. During this discussion, once in a while, I'll say I wrote a memo, this or that. And I hope that people, if they're interested, will read the memos. You go to oaktreecapital.com under the heading the insights and it says memos from Howard Marks, I think, and you can click on it and you

can subscribe to it. And I heartily recommend it. And the, but the one thing I'm sure of is that the price is right because it's free and people can read whatever they want. And, and there's 35 years worth there. So it'll keep, it'll keep you busy. But I wrote a memo, as you say, called, you can't predict, you can prepare. And I think it was 2002. And now that I sold that line, as I do most lines, that was the tagline of the MassMutual life insurance company. And I saw it during a football game. I thought it's a great line. Now, what is investing? Investing is positioning your capital to benefit from future events. So how can you prepare for the future events if you can't predict the future events. It sounds like an oxymoron. But the truth of the matter is you can

prepare for an uncertain future. I don't believe in forecasts. I inveigh against predictions wholeheartedly, macro predictions, economy and markets and rates and currencies and that kind of thing. But I think you, you can, one of my sayings is we never know where we're going, but we sure as hell ought to know where we are. I think you can get a sense for the climate we're in. And the question is, are we in a, is, is everybody ecstatic and optimistic and thrilled with the way things are going and generous and paying high prices, in which case the market is risky? Or is everybody chastened and pessimistic and downcast and paying low prices, in which case the market can be above average in attractiveness? Or is it in between, in normal territory?

So I think it's possible to get a sense for the environment and thus what you should do. Now, the main dimension, when I say what you should do, the main dimension in portfolio management, in my opinion, is, well, the main thing that matters is the balance in a portfolio between offense and defense. And do you want to have an offensive portfolio that might get you to lose some money in the bad times? Or do you want to have a defensive portfolio, which might cause you to miss some gains in the good times?

That's your choice. or do you want to balance them? Absolutely. And people should make a choice based on their own risk tolerance. And, and, but you, you know, so you can figure out it, is this a time when the market's depressed and that's a time to be aggressive or when the market's elated, which is a time to be defensive. Buffett said, Buffett said the less prudence with which others conduct their affairs, the greater prudence we must conduct our own affairs. And that's about right. When other people are carefree, we should be terrified. When other people are terrified, we should turn aggressive.

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whatever lies ahead don't change your morning let your morning change you discover coffee plus on espresso.com howard do you find that is a skill that most investors can learn because buying into pessimism for i think for many is is rather difficult uh and maybe that's the opportunity of an investor like yourself for those who are really optimistic to take advantage of distressed securities, but it's a learned skill, I think. And any guidance you have to learning that skill, I would love to hear. Well, now I'll make a commercial for something that costs money, which is my books. But in 2011, I wrote a book called The Most Important Thing. There's 21 chapters. Each one says the most important thing is, and it's a different thing

because there were so many things in our business that are important. But there's a chapter which says the most important thing is contrarianism. And that's what we're talking about here. and so number one you can you can learn about the importance of contrarianism at the extremes not all the time and then but then the question is can you do it can you learn to do it and the trouble is as you say it goes against human nature because what you have to do is you have to you have to be sober when everybody else is elated and you have to be stable when everybody else is suicidal. But if you can do those things, obviously, you can be an above-average investor because the average investor is excited at the high and buys, which is wrong, and depressed at

the low and sells, which is wrong. So you want to be a contrarian to the extent you can, but it's not easy. None of these things are easy. In my last memo, or well, I think it was in my last I quoted a chartist. Remember that word chartist? Technical analyst called Walter Deamer. I hadn't heard of him before. I was reading Doug Cass's newsletter and he quoted Wally Deamer and it's the title of his book. And the quote is, when the time comes to buy, you won't want to. And this is such a, in just 10 words, this captures so much truth. The thing, what creates the great buying opportunity? What creates the bet? So what creates it is that the economy is not doing so great.

The companies are reporting poor earnings. The stock market is declining. most people want to get out. They've lost money. Their main concern is not losing anymore. And and they just want out. So that's the time when the greatest buying can be accomplished. But as as Wally says, when the time comes to buy, you won't want to because you will also see poor economy, poor earnings reports, declining stock prices, and heavy volume on the down days. And you'll say, I want out, too. So the point is, everybody is subject to the same influences. Everybody reads the same headlines and hears the same stories on the news and on the podcasts. And

how many people can say, you know what? The world is a mess. And I think that means it's time to buy. I'd like to hear. Oh, sorry, Howard. No, I just want to say it's, it's just not that easy. And, and there are very few of us who can do it. And, and, uh, you know, uh, in, in one of the main requirements seems to be that you have to have your, uh, you have to be unemotional. And, And and if you look at, you know, some of the great investors, I think that unemotionalism has been one of the common threads, because emotion will get you to my mother said, Howard. You should buy low and sell high, but emotionalism gets you to buy high when things are going great and sell low when things are going badly. And that's a formula for disaster. So you have to be unemotional. I'd like to hear any guidance you have for investors in setting their time horizon as an

investor. It could be their overall time horizon or position by position. At The Motley Fool, what we have advocated now for 31 years is to make your minimum holding period for average holding period for a stock something like five years. Then you will see business performance returns through most of a cycle. Obviously, trading activity has increased dramatically with all of the technology and access to information. But one of the things we've also said is if everyone doubled their average holding period, they would be richer. That was just a default that everyone, if you hold a stock four days now, make it eight days. If you hold three years, make it six years. If you hold 10 years, make it 20 years. Chances are

your returns will increase. But people have a difficult time knowing what that average anchor should be. And then, of course, the news and crisis and different dynamics come in, but they often don't have that anchor. How might somebody set that anchor? Well, you know, first of all, there's no solution. There's no number that's right for everybody. Everybody's number is different. But along the lines you're talking about, Tom, which I think is, I think this is one of the most important subjects we can tackle on this podcast. I wrote in one of my memos, and I'll tell you which one I think it is, that they did a study and they found that fidelity, that the best performing accounts belong to people who are dead.

Now, apparently, fidelity can't find the study and nobody else can find the study. So my guess is the study doesn't exist, but I still like the idea because it tells you a lot. And, and, and obviously if it's true that most people are subject to emotion and that emotion causes people to buy high and sell low, then what you got to do is you got to tie your hands and not do it. Now we run funds, they're institutional funds. They're not open to the public, But in in in in many of our funds, you lock up your money for 10 years. You can't get out. And it's kind of like Odysseus tying himself to the mast when he had to sail past the sirens, you know. And so it's the same thing as you're saying, Tom, if you go into a fund that will not no matter how you kick and scream on when the market's down 50 percent,

they're not going to let you go get out they're doing you a favor uh so i think i think that lengthening your holding period is very important now if i can get the listeners to listen to one thing or to read one thing i'd love you to read a memo that i wrote in october of 22 called what really matters and i'll bet you guys haven't read it either because nobody read this memo. I can always tell from the response, you know, who read it and who liked it. And I didn't get much response on this. And I think that this memo probably had the highest ratio of value to responses. What really matters? And I start off, I think you'll enjoy it. I start off by talking about five things that I think don't matter. Short-term events. And I talk about the fact

You go through these periods of time, like 2017, 18, and I would travel the country as I do and speak to audiences or clients even, and I would get one question, what month will the Fed raise interest rates? That's all they asked me, what month? And I would say, why are you asking me? What does it matter? If I tell you May, what are you going to do? And if I call you back and I say, no, no, not May, August.

what are you going to do different? Those are short-term events. They don't matter. And by the way, it's interesting to note that what are the most, what were the most forceful short-term events of the last, let's say, 20 years? Global financial crisis, pandemic, downgrade of the U.S. credit rating, things like this. If you got out in advance of all those things and forgot to get back in, you left a lot of money on the table. So number one, short-term events. Number two, short-term trading. In, out, in, out. Almost nobody has been successful at that. And certainly not the amateur investor. Well, let's say almost nobody. Number three, short-term performance. How did you do last

month? How did you do last quarter? It doesn't matter. I have a news bulletin. Last quarter's over. What matters is how you're positioned for next quarter. But yeah, every investment committee I sit on, when they have a meeting of the investment committee, they spend the first hour discussing last quarter's performance. It's over. So that's number three. Number four, hyperactivity. And I say that when I was a kid, we used to have a saying, don't just sit there, do something. My suggestion is don't just do something, sit there. You'll be a lot better off. And number five is volatility. And, you know, when things are volatile and they fluctuate a lot, people get spooked. But Buffett says, I'd rather have a lumpy 15 than a smooth 12.

And, you know, just tie yourself to the mast, make some good investments, strap yourself in and live through the volatility. And hopefully if you've made good fundamental decisions, that will produce a good long-term return. And the volatility in the short term doesn't matter if you've made a good fundamental decision. So I think this is really in line with what Tom said. And I think that you have to be patient and think about the long term. And so this memo grew out of a conference we had for some investors in June of 22. And I was on the stage. And all they asked me was, when are the rates going to go up? When are they going to stop going up? When is the recession going to start when it's going to end how bad will it be and i said to him this

is all short-term stuff what really matters this is stuff that doesn't matter what matters is two things do you buy into companies that grow and do you lend money to companies that pay you back it's all that matters and and and the the you know you if you watch the the shows there's an enormous preoccupation with what the market did today and what it's going to do tomorrow. And it doesn't matter. I once wrote a memo in January, February of 15, I think it was. Well, in January, I wrote one called On the Couch, because I think every once in a while, the market needs a trip to the shrink. And then people were asking me, well, the market's down. isn't that a warning system? So then a couple of days later, I wrote a memo

called, what does the market know? And I think the market doesn't know anything. And if you want to outperform, you have to take advantage of the market's manic depressive behavior. You can't act as if the market is a sage and tells you what to do. You have to say the market's a manic depressive. And when the market makes a mistake, we're going to be on the other side. We're not going to take its advice. Anyway, that was a long answer to one of my favorite questions, Tom. Yeah, no, that was a great answer. We try and tell folks, I think most recently with the tariffs that were announced, and we had extreme volatility for several days in the market that on those big down days, if you sell out of stocks, the biggest up days in the

market tend to be very close in proximity to the biggest down days. And that halves your return from 10% to 5%. So selling out on those down days can look smart for a day or so, but usually it doesn't look smart in the rearview mirror. Well, and I would add one thing. You bought something yesterday and it paid a hundred. Tomorrow, a bad piece of news comes out like a tariff and it falls to 90. If you had decent reasons for buying at a hundred, shouldn't you buy more at 90 and not sell? And most people just do not have what it takes to extract the significance of these events and they should just ignore them. something you've mentioned is um you said the biggest people make the biggest mistake

investors make is they project whatever happened most recently long into the future and i think regression to the mean is something that's really important to you and oak tree can you talk a little bit to investors about that well you're going to get another long answer i only i only have long answers not not nothing nothing in our business is simple nothing in our business permits a short answer. But when I was a kid, and I mean 73 or 74, somebody gave me a gift. And it was the first of the great adages that I ever learned. And somebody said, I'm going to tell you about the three stages of the bull market. The first stage in the bull market is there's been a crash or a crisis or some loss of confidence

and stocks are on their rear end, and nobody's interested in the market. And only a few smart people realize things could get better. In the second stage, most people understand that improvement is actually taking place. And in the third stage, everybody assumes that things can only get better forever. And this tells you most of what you have to know. If you buy in the first stage, when nobody's optimistic, you get a bargain. If you buy in the last stage, when everybody's optimistic and has pushed prices up, you often overpay. So again, it's desirable to have a sense for where we are in the market. And certainly, you should never sell something just because it's down. Or buy it because it's up. People buy things, they see it's up, they say,

oh, I better get on because it could keep going up, and I might miss it, and then I'll have to kill myself. In bad markets, people are overly concerned about losing money because they take the bad news as portending continued bad news, not regressions to me. And the fear of losing money drives people out. But in the good times, an even stronger force, in my opinion, takes hold. And that's FOMO, the fear of missing out. And when the stock market is rocking and rolling, and it's going up every day, and you see headlines about Joe Blow turned 10,000 into 15,000 in a day, people say, oh my God, I feel so terrible. I've been missing this. Everybody else is getting this. I got to get on this. I can't stand to miss out. I better get in.

Now they don't, may, may not know what the thing they're doing is or why. And by the way, they may have decided not to buy it when it was a hundred, but now that it's 200, they say, I got to get in or I'll keep missing out. And the, all these things, this is all emotion. And you have to, you have to stand against these things. And, um, you know, there's a book called, I think it's called man panics, manias, and crashes, if I'm not mistaken, uh, by Kindleberger. And in a later edition, it has a great line. It says, there is nothing so injurious to your mental wellbeing as to watch a friend get rich. And it's really true. I mean, that's, that's, that's human nature for you and you know you have this guy who has the locker next to you at the gym

and you really he's a he's not that smart he's a nice guy good to have a drink with once in a while but you don't think he's not that smart he starts telling you about the money he's been making and you say oh that's so that's silly stuff you don't even know what you're doing you know back in the uh but that can back in the dot com bubble you know people would say oh i'm buying your stock it's come coming public yesterday they say what say what what what's the symbol they say lbr he says well what's the name so i don't know well what does it do i don't know but i hear it's going to double so the next day you see the person you say did you buy that stock he says yeah i did he said what happened oh he's tripled so after you hear five of these then then then first when

the first time you heard it and the guy says, I'm buying it, but I don't know the name or what it does. You think he's an idiot, but after five of them, you say, I got to get in on that. And that's the way this thing works. And so you have to, you have to get away from excessive fear of losing money, excessive respect for fluctuations. And especially you have to get away from this fear of missing out and and just when you're in the third stage of the bull market when things have been rocking and rolling for a couple of months or a couple of years and everybody's getting rich that's when people capitulate and get in at just the wrong time because the market has it's it is the fact that the market has risen a great deal that attracts you but that's not a reason to buy

hmm howard do you live in a world of uh balanced stoicism and the do you view the world as a market and when others are getting excited about something unrelated to the capital markets you start to see a reason i was i was at the new york knicks playoff game and i looked down over to my left and there you were at the game i saw you and i and are you somebody who says you know well we've had a good first quarter in the game but i'm not going to get too excited because there's there's another three quarters to go um is that a general stance for you or a particular i think it is i think that you know that uh people who are that way might describe themselves as level-headed uh people who are who aren't that way might describe us as you know kind of dead from the

neck up or something. But I think you just can't get too excited about the good moments or the bad moments. Investing is hard enough. And if you let your emotions run wild and get you to do the wrong thing at the wrong time, it becomes infinitely harder. I mean, it's hard enough to find a good company with a great future and buy the stock. But then if you let the short-term fluctuations of the market drive you in and out, it becomes infinitely harder. Well, Howard, one of my favorite memos of yours was the indispensability of risk, because as investors, we think a lot about risk. And this is how you ended this piece, and I want you to just guide us on this. You shouldn't expect to make money without bearing

risk but you shouldn't expect to make money just for taking the risk you have to sacrifice certainty but it has to be done skillfully and intelligently and importantly with emotion under control i love that thinking about because investing especially in the equity market well really anywhere almost takes this notion of managing emotions with risk and balancing those two out right well you see andy most people say well why are you in the stock market say well i want to make money well don't you think everybody else does too why should you be the one who gets to make money and the answer is or or or what do you have to do to make money and the answer is you have to bear uncertainty. And if you do very safe things, you shouldn't expect

much of a return. In our business, we talk about something called the risk-free rate, and that's the interest rate on 30-day T-bills. There's no credit risk, and there's no time risk because you get your money back so soon. And it's absolutely safe. But because it's absolutely safe, it pays the absolutely lowest return of anything. And then if you will say, no, you know what? I'm not interested in that. I'm going to take some risks. So I'm going to lend money to some great corporations. And if you do that rather than today, rather than four and a half, maybe you can make five and a half, but you've taken credit risk because every once in a while, a corporation goes bad and defaults or goes bankrupt. So, or you might say, well, I don't

know, five and a half, not so great. You know, I have to pay taxes. I'm only left with two and three quarters. So I want to have a higher return. Well, then you can go into high yield bonds and high yield bonds. You can get today seven and a half, but that's because they have a real possibility of default. And over the last, you know, I've been involved in them for 47 years And on average, something like almost 4% of all the bonds outstanding have defaulted every year. So that's four is not a huge number, but it's not zero. And, and, you know, basically, you have to think of high returns as being the compensation for bearing risk. But as the quote says, because risk actually entails danger and occasional loss, you don't

want to bear risk passively and without investigation. You want to do it intelligently and knowledgeably. And so it's not easy. It introduces and you can get safe returns absolutely dependably, but they're not that interesting. But to try for a return that is interesting, you have to do some things that aren't easy. Simple as that. Now, now, most people look at a chart. When I went to University of Chicago, they had just developed the capital market theory. And I don't know, I can't do it backwards, but there's a line that goes like this.

on this axis, you have return. On this axis, you have risk. There's a line that points up like that. And when we see a line that points up like that, we say the two factors are positively correlated. There's a positive relationship between return and risk. Now, what people say erroneously, when you say, well, what does that mean, that upward sloping line? A lot of people say, well, what it means is that risky assets have higher returns. And that is a terrible trap to fall into. Because if risky assets could be counted on to produce high returns, then by definition, they wouldn't be risky. So that can't be right. What it means, that upward sloping line, is that investments that appear to be risky have to appear to offer high returns, or else nobody

will make those investments. That makes perfect sense. But they don't have to deliver. And it's from the possibility that they won't deliver that the risk comes in. So the more you go out on the risk curve, the higher the expected return is, but the wider the dispersion of possible returns and the bad returns get worse. So risk is a real thing. It's not some academic concept. and every person has to figure out the right level of risk for them and it's not easy and and of course then if once they do they have to figure out how much risk there is and the things they're contemplating and that's not easy none of this is easy given our predilection to take on risk in our lives often um under-researched risk i wanted to cite a couple

sources and see what you think of this in terms of a process somebody might embrace in scratching the itch of taking on a lark. I'm thinking of Walter and Edwin Schloss, the father and son, wonderful money managers who, when asked at a particular shareholder meeting, why do we have 150 holdings when maybe 20 of them make up 85% of the portfolio? And one of the Schlosses answered, because if we don't buy new unknown risky things, we won't learn about the world ahead. We'll get comfortable with our 17 companies and not realize that their competitive advantages

are being eroded. And then I'm thinking about a book entitled The Zerk Axioms, which a book I really enjoyed by Max Gunther in which he articulates, if I'm remembering correctly, maybe graduates of business school trying to put together an investment club to make extreme wealth.

Not let's figure out a few stocks to buy, but how does one make $30 million? How does one make $50 million in life? And one of their concluding principles was you have to be willing to embrace small risk continually to learn more about the world around us. Any reflections on that? Well, it makes sense. It happens, by the way, not to be my approach. And again, I'm not a stock market investor. But if you will only buy, you know, what are the things some people might do to improve their probability of success? You buy things that have obvious merit, great products, great management, great history of profits, and things that have gone up in the past. If you think about it,

those things are easy to buy. Everybody's attracted to the things that have obvious merit, which means that probably a lot of buying has taken place and the price has been driven up. So if you want to be, by the way, if you want to be an average investor, it's really easy. And I recommend for most people that average is very good. And you just have to tie yourself into an index fund and stay with it for the long term and you and you know if you if you buy an s&p index fund you're guaranteed s&p performance whatever that might be you're not guaranteed good performance but you're guaranteed s&p performance but if you want to go beyond that and have better performance than the index you're going to have to uh do something that's not

obvious to everybody else because the things that are obvious to everybody else they've already done So you might have to buy a small company, an obscure company, a company that has not demonstrated greatness yet, a company whose product is on the come, unknown. It might be a stock that's down a bunch, which scares everybody else. But among other things, it might mean that it's on the bargain table, having been marked down. So above average success can never lie in doing the obvious. it's it's that's really just a simple rule now you have to study and you have to read

up on things like contrarianism to understand to to get to the point where you can understand that question so the i guess what i'm saying is that maybe the the viewers or listeners should should ask themselves if they get that above average success can never lie in doing the obvious and i would say if you want to be an above-average investor read and study until you can really explain why that sentence is true buck you will have the final question of our hour with harrod marks oh this is great it's a privilege and i have enjoyed uh your books and your memos uh throughout the year so i do recommend people go to oak tree and and and check those out because there's a wealth of information there so i'm going to ask you about something that's a little

bit maybe contrary um i know forecasting you have your six principles and you got you don't rely on macro forecasting and those kind of things but there is there's a wonderful book called the super forecasters and um i don't know if you're familiar with that with philip petlock and dan gardner wrote that um but it turns out they kind of build a group of people that could do forecasting good now not really long they've learned it's like it's easier to do shorter term than it is to do long-term forecasting but those group of people came from a variety of different backgrounds but they had some things in common they were open-minded they were humble people um they were willing to update their beliefs and they used a variety of sources of information whenever

they got new facts they changed their forecast so they would update them kind of all the time so i would just say it sounds to me a lot like oak tree and so i would just like to know about some of the processes at oak tree and just like when you hire people there do you do you hire a certain type of person or do you train those people to think along the lines of your principles and emotional intelligence and those types of things so just well i think buck i i like this i like to believe both uh because uh just like in selecting a marital partner it's not a good idea to select somebody who who is the opposite of what you want in the expectation you can make them what you want uh a lot of uh sweat and tears have resulted from that um so uh what we try to

get is independent thinkers and people who can think different from the crowd and uh who will see things that others don't see or take a chance on a maverick point of view uh and then we we you know, and they invariably have to be highly intelligent, but also have this streak of independence. And in my book, the most important thing I talk, I say the most important thing is second level thinking, which means thinking differently from the crowd and better. What the crowd knows is already in the stock price. So if you only know the same as the crowd, you can't improve on the stock price. You can't tell when the stock price is higher or lower than it should be and do something about it. So we need people who are capable of second level thinking,

thinking different from others, but also better. If you think different from everybody else and worse, all you'll do is lose money. And by definition, relatively few people have the possibility of thinking different and better, and probably even fewer can actually do it. but you have to understand the essential nature of contrarianism and and you have to understand what I said before that that success can't lie in the obvious and it can't lie in agreeing with what everybody else knows now most of the time what everybody else knows is is is pretty correct so disagreeing with them for the sake of disagreeing is not a good idea but on the other hand if you think the same as everybody else that's not a very good formula for having

above average performance so you have to be able to find those times and they may be few when you have a view which is different from that of the herd and it's correct but if you if you never have a view that's different from the herd and correct then you just can't be an above average investor and you should buy an index fund and, and just hold on. A lot of this has reminded me of a line I've heard from my father over his, well, my, my handful of decades in his 87 year life. I don't like to be wrong, so I don't make predictions. And that's, and that's right for many people. That's, that's not dumb. Uh, but, uh, you know, but, but, you know, uh, well, I'll, maybe i'll close it out by citing my favorite fortune cookie uh i once got a fortune cookie

and it said inside the cautious seldom error or write great poetry and i think it's great and because it can be read two ways that if you're cautious you'll seldom error which is good but you'll also never write great poetry which is bad and if your goal is to write great poetry you have to take a chance of being incautious and occasionally erring and and and that but there's no there's no sure formula uh for for doing so and there's no uh algorithm you can follow or no machine you just have to turn the crank on and you know when i when i got through writing uh the most important thing i had lunch with charlie munger who worked in the building next to us in Los Angeles and and he says I got I've got up to go and he says just remember

none of this is easy anybody who thinks it's easy is stupid and you know that was Charlie but it's true if everybody wants to make money it can't be easy to make an above or your amount of money. You have to take risk and you have to excel in some way. And you have to know something that not everybody else knows. Howard Marks, thank you so much for this hour. What would be your estimated length of time on an interview if, say, you were willing to come back again and have The Motley Fool interview you on all of your memos? One at a time. one at a time. Yeah. Well, let's do it again in a year. Love it. Thank you very much for your, what a wonderful hour. And thank you, Andy and Buck as

well. Well, I've enjoyed this and your, your, your questions are knowledgeable and that's the most important. As always, people on the program may have interests in the stocks they talk about and The Motley Fool may have formal recommendations for or against. So don't buy or sell stocks based solely on what you hear. All personal finance content follows Motley Fool editorial standards and are not approved by advertisers. Advertisements are sponsored content and provided for informational purposes only. To see our full advertising disclosure,

please check out our show notes. For the Motley Fool Money team, I'm Mary Long. Thanks for listening. We'll see you tomorrow.