Howard Marks Quotes
Best 120 Quotes by Howard Marks – Page 1 of 4
“All investors can’t beat the market since, collectively, they are the market.”
“An investor can obtain margin for error by insisting on tangible, lasting value in the here and now; buying only when price is well below value.”
“Ask yourself, Would I rather be the worst lover in the world and be known as the best or the best lover in the world and be known as the worst?”
“First-level thinkers look for simple formulas and easy answers. Second-level thinkers know that success in investing is the antithesis of simple.”
“For investing to be reliably successful, an accurate estimate of intrinsic value is the indispensable starting point. Without it, any hope for consistent success as an investor is just that: hope.”
“Great investing requires both generating returns and controlling risk. And recognizing risks is an absolute prerequisite for controlling it.”
“If something is not going to be an obvious double in a short period of time – you know, 2 to 3 years – I have to show interest.”
“If we avoid the losers, the winners will take care of themselves.”
“Investing, like economics, is more art than science. And that means it can get a little messy.”
“Investment risk comes primarily from too high prices, and too high prices often come from excessive optimism and inadequate skepticism and risk aversion.”
“Low price is the ultimate source of margin for error.”
“Many of the great financial disasters we’ve seen have been failures to foresee and manage risk.”
“Many people are misled into believing that everyone can be a successful investor. Not everyone can.”
“Margin of error is critical. It takes margin for error to render outcomes tolerable when the future doesn’t oblige.”
“Market prices are often wrong. Because access to information and the analysis thereof are highly imperfect, market prices are often far above or far below intrinsic values.”
“Millions of people are competing for each available dollar of investment gain. Who’ll get it? The person who’s a step ahead.”
“Most people view risk taking primarily as a way to make money. Bearing higher risk generally produces higher returns. The market has to set things up to look like that’ll be the case; if it didn’t, people wouldn’t make risky investments.
But it can’t always work that way, or else risky investments wouldn’t be risky. And when risk bearing doesn’t work, it really doesn’t work, and people are reminded what risk’s all about.”
“No matter how good fundamentals may be, humans exercising their greed and propensity to err have the ability to screw things up.”
“Not only should the lonely and uncomfortable position be tolerated, it should be celebrated.”
“Nothing goes in one direction forever… Cycles always prevail eventually. Just about everything is cyclical.”
“One of our mottos is ‘we don’t look for our investments; they find us’.”
“Return alone — and especially return over short periods of time — says very little about the quality of investment decisions.”
“Risk arises when markets go so high that prices imply losses rather than the potential rewards they should.”
“Risk cannot be eliminated; it just gets transferred and spread.”
“Second-level thinkers know that, to achieve superior results, they have to have an edge in either information or analysis, or both.”
“Skillful risk control is the mark of the superior investor.”
“The best defense against loss is thorough, insightful analysis and insistence on what Warren Buffett calls ‘margin for error’.”
“The difference between successful people and really successful people is that really successful people say no to almost everything.”
“The fact that a stock’s price has risen for the last ten days tell you nothing about what it will do tomorrow.”
“The oldest rule in investing is also the simplest: ‘Buy low; sell high’.
But what, in turn, does that mean? What’s high, and what’s low?”
You Might Like
“The Heisenberg principle: If something is closely observed, the odds are it is going to be altered in the process. The more a price pattern is observed by speculators the more prone you have false signals; the more the market is a product of non-speculative activity, the greater the significance of technical breakout.”
You Might Like These Related Authors
- John C. Bogle
- Warren Buffett
- Charles Dow
- Stanley Druckenmiller
- William H. Gross
- Thomas Kaplan
- Seth Klarman
- Bruce Kovner
- Jim Rogers
- Arnold Van Den Berg