Howard Marks Explains Price vs Value in 5 Minutes

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01. matters a great deal, and the shorter your time horizon is, the more it matters. The shorter your time horizon is, the more important One of my favorite Buffett quotes is price is what you pay, value is what you get. Um I'm curious on a couple of things around price and value. One is Well, let's just start with what is your earliest memory that taught you the importance of price?

02. Uh Malcolm Gladwell wrote that great book Outliers, who talked about the importance of what he calls demographic luck, what you and I might call right time, right place. And I was lucky in a perverse way, um because I started my career as a uh in the investment management business in 1969. At Citibank as a security analyst.

03. And and the in those days, the banks were did most of the investing. There were no boutiques, uh and there were no there were very few firms like like Oaktree or or or or uh you know, the firms that are on everybody's lips today. It was the banks. And most of the banks, what we called the money center banks, that's the banks in New York and Chicago and Boston and places like that, most of the money center banks invested in what were called the Nifty 50.

04. And these were the 50 best and fastest growing companies in America. Companies that were considered so good that nothing could ever go wrong. And because they were so good and nothing could ever go wrong, that meant there was no price too high. And if you look in the index of my uh recent book Mastering the Market Cycle under no price too high, you'll find see there lots lots of citations because that's We talked before about a bubble.

05. That's one of the greatest indications of a bubble. If if if if investors can think of an asset class and and say, "Oh, you know what? For that, there's no price too high." That's a bubble because by definition it's irrational. For everything, there's a low price, a fair price, and a price too high.

06. Anyway, so the banks invested in the Nifty 50. That certainly included Citibank. We were one of the great leaders. That meant uh uh IBM, Xerox, Kodak, Polaroid, Merck, Lilly, uh Hewlett-Packard, Texas Instruments, PerkinElmer, Avon, Coca-Cola, and on like that. The great great great companies. And if you would have invested in those companies that they have sought to work in September of '69 and held them for 5 years diligently, you would have lost almost all your money investing in the best companies in America.

07. Why? Because people ignored price. And so they didn't get enough value to use Warren's terminology. And the answer is that price matters a great deal. And the shorter your time horizon is, the more it matters. The shorter your time horizon is, the more important it is that you're not overpaying. Uh so anyway, the the the Nifty 50 were selling at PE ratios.

08. Today, the average PE ratio is in the low 20s. PE ratios between 60 and 90 in those days. And and and for the most part, those PE ratios have never been seen again. And then 5 years later, the PE ratios were between 8 and 9. And that's a good way to lose 90% of your money, which most people did. Um so that taught me an important lesson.

09. And uh I I I concluded at the time, it's not what you buy, it's what you pay for That that really matters. Then I was very fortunate. The break of my life came in 1978 when I was assigned to the bond department. I wanted to get into money management. My reign as director of research at Citibank involved, as it was with the Nifty Fifty, was not so successful.

10. So, they said I said I want to manage money. They said, "Okay, we'll put you in the bond department, start a convertible bond fund." Which I found very interesting. It was a backwater that nobody else was looking at. And then in August of '78, I got the call that changed my life from the head of the bond department.

11. He said, "There's some guy out in California named Milken or something, and he deals in something called high-yield bonds. Can you figure out what that means?" Cuz a client had come in and they said, "We want a high-yield bond fund." So, so now I'm investing in the worst public companies in America, and I'm making money safely and steadily.

12. Whereas, investing in the best companies in America had been really dangerous. So, then I concluded that good investing is not a matter of buying good things, but buying things well. And if you don't know the difference, then you shouldn't be uh doing much investing. Uh so, you know, that that brush with the Nifty Fifty taught me the importance of paying a fair price.

13. And and uh the the real lesson is that there are no assets which are so good that they can't become overpriced and dangerous. And there are few assets which are so bad which that at the right price they can't be bargains. You know, one of the things that Oaktree has done for the last 33 years with great success is investing in the debt of bankrupt or likely to be bankrupt companies.

14. And we call it distressed debt investing. And you might say, "But Howard, how can you invest in the in the debt of bankrupt companies? You know you're going to not going to get repaid." And the answer is that a if you buy the debt of a bankrupt company or a soon-to-be bankrupt company, it embodies it it gives you a claim on the value of the company as a creditor.

15. If you buy it cheap enough, that maybe you're you're paying a price for that claim which is so low that it's going to have a great return. And that's what we try to do. So, I think that uh price is extremely important. And as I said in bubbles, basically what it means is they ignore price. And that's a terrible thing to do.