The Best of . . .

Howard Marks argues that long-term investment success comes from a string of consistently good returns and an absence of poor years — not from occasional flashes of brilliance. Across 35 years of memos, his recurring thesis is that superior investors achieve "asymmetry": returns more than commensurate with the risk they bear, which requires skill and insight rather than aggressive forecasting. Marks repeatedly warns against macro forecasting, calling it futile because the factors everyone knows provide no edge, and because a huge number of variables must be correctly predicted for any forecast to prove accurate. His contrarian framework holds that investor psychology — swinging between excessive optimism and excessive pessimism — creates the real opportunities, and that identifying those extremes matters more than crunching financial data. The collection spans the dot-com bubble, the Global Financial Crisis (where levered mortgage-backed securities played the central role), and the 2022 sea change in interest rate policy that ended 40 years of declining rates. Marks argues that when the investing environment undergoes fundamental change, strategy must undergo a thorough review — and that price relative to value remains the strongest predictor of future returns.