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the most important thing is based on decades of memos that billionaire value investor Howard Marks has written throughout his investment career how does a knack of succinctly eloquently describing perspectives on investing that make you think I never thought of it that way and given the amount of time and success he's had in the markets his opinions on them have become really sort out his first point on markets is that they are quick to reflect the consensus views but the consensus view is not necessarily right he's kind of in between agreeing and disagreeing with the efficient market hypothesis which says that stocks are always efficiently priced so they are never under or over value take the New York Stock Exchange you have millions of people looking at these stocks and miss pricings won't often happen but they will happen and that's his point there's tons of examples of this just look at how the market valued Yahoo during the.com bubble it went from 237 dollars a share in January 2002 $11 a share in April 2001 the idea I mean the idea that the market correctly valued Yahoo on both of those occasions pretty ridiculous and this is a clear example of where the market quickly reflected a consensus view but the consensus was wrong and it's by differing with consensus that you make money in the market you have to hold non-consensus views and they have to be accurate that's not easy stock prices already reflect the consensus so if you share that view you'll probably earn the average market return to beat the market you have to have non-consensus views that are right the problem is stock market valuations depend on what happens in the future and we as humans suck at predicting most forecasts extrapolate the recent past and assumed the future world merit most of the time future is pretty similar to the recent past and those forecasts are generally correct but they're not valuable because everyone expects them but then soon enough there's an unexpected change extrapolation stops working and non consensus for causes that are correct become hugely valuable because they're not priced in by the market the problem with this is it's really difficult to consistently make accurate non-consensus for costs I mean let's take 2008 and the financial crisis some investors and economists correctly predicted but how many of them then correctly predicted the recovery to start in 2009 how many predicted interest rates to remain low nearly a decade later very very predictions are most useful when they correctly anticipate change but we suck at predicting changes in the course of history this is one of the reasons why Marx prefers to look bottom up instead of top down you can learn more than your neighbor about individual companies but that becomes a lot harder to do when you start looking at the whole economy now we can't predict the future but we can keep tabs on where we are now just because we can't predict it doesn't mean we cannot prepare and the way we do this is by monitoring the current investment environments to get a feel for what kind of market we're in now you can do that by keeping tabs on risk premiums the credit cycle and how people in the markets are behaving for a stock the risk premium is the amount of additional return that investors demand from stocks compared to government bonds because government bonds are considered risk-free that extra return from the stock is what investors demand to take on the risk associated with stocks instead of sticking with the risk-free bonds keeping tabs on risk premiums is important because small risk premium suggests that investors aren't being risk averse which may suggest an overheated market it's a similar thing with the credit market keeping tabs on the supply demand for investable funds and how eagerly investors are investing them can give hints on where we are in the stock market cycle when there's not enough money around investors are nervous about investing it the economy usually slows down and we have a critical edge conversely they can also be too much money chasing too few ideas Marx wrote a memo in July 2007 as well as several others where he noted the high degree of risk in the market although that memo was well timed it had nothing to do with predicting the future he was able to see what he needed to just by being aware of what was going on at the time then this might sound like the same thing but being a way of the temperature of the market is very different to predicting what the market will do next week next month even next year prices are too high is a very different statement to the markets going down next year shares can be undervalued for a long time and that's a part of what makes predictions so difficult to do depending on where the market is you have to balance aggression and caution in your investments okay so let's play a hypothetical let's say that you can consistently predict the direction of the market you're the next genius how should you construct your portfolio and invest the answer becomes obvious you should be really aggressive when you think we're about to enter a bull market and super defensive when you think we are about to enter a bama your investment style would mirror American football where you have an offensive lineup and you have a defensive mode the offense has four attempts to go ten yards if they don't they leave the field and the defense comes on to stop the other team from advancing the ball now investing doesn't work that way you don't get a heads up telling you when it's time to play offense and when it's time to play defense it's a lot more like football outside the United States in a soccer game you have eleven players who collectively are responsible for attacking and defending some focus more on attackman defense and vice versa but the team as a whole has to strike the right balance between attack and defense that's a lot like what investing you have to balance aggression and portion in your portfolio there may be times where you should be more aggressive like the financial crisis in oh eight where assets were selling super cheaply but there are also times where you need to be a little more defensive like the years leading up to the crisis where risk premiums kept shrinking the credit cycle was reaching a top and investor behavior was getting a little crazy now in general it's easier to win the game of investing by playing defense than it is playing open that's because investing is a loser's game where you win by avoiding mistakes and other sounds kind of weird but a great analogy for this is the game of Tim's in professional tennis you have what's basically a winner's game the victor is generally the player who can hit the most winners but when you and I go play tennis as amateurs tennis is really a loses game the winner is generally the player who hits the fewest loses when we play tennis as amateurs the focus is just on getting the ball above the net points onto one they're lost and that's how Howard Marks approaches investors by avoiding losses over his investment career of more than 35 years there are very few competitors still standing a lot of them tried to hit too many winners instead of just gain the ball back of the net what is trying to hit winners looked like in the investment world it's taking on debt concentrating that is being under diversified and holding expensive growth stocks what does avoiding losers look like in the investment it's avoiding date being well diversified and requiring a margin of safety and the prices you pay see price is everything investing is not about buying good things it's about buying things well it's about finding good buys not good assets and the difference between the two comes down to the price you pay for them it's on this point that Howard Marks may be most emphatic and insistent and given his investment record it's hard to argue
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