Oaktree Capital Management avatar

Investment memo · 2025-10-12

The Best of...

Oaktree Capital Management · Howard Marks

Featured Second-order thinking cycle Risk control

AI summary and analysis

Marks creates a curated index of his 35 years of memo writing, directly giving the material he believes best represents Oaktree's investment thinking and market cycle observations.

Key points

  • This is not an ordinary new point of view, but a navigation of Howard Marks' public memo system, which can help readers enter Oaktree's ideological system.
  • He divides the featured memos into two categories: timeless investing principles, and real-time recordings of the most important market events of the past thirty years or so.
  • Timeless principles include the limitations of second-order thinking, risk control, cycles, price discipline, and macro forecasting.
  • Market events include the dot-com bubble, the global financial crisis, and changes in the interest rate environment in 2022.
  • This piece of information connects Howard Marks' representative memos together, making it easy to extend from the latest content to classic content.

Other viewpoints from the same firm

What’s Going on in Private Credit?

Howard Marks sorts out the evolution of private credit and direct lending. The focus is not to simply judge whether the industry is good or bad, but to remind investors to distinguish between asset structure, underwriting discipline, leverage, liquidity and cycle testing.

Investment memo

AI Hurtles Ahead

Marks discusses AI again, but the core is not to predict which company will win, but to use bubbles, infrastructure overinvestment, and price discipline to evaluate the investment risks of AI assets.

Investment memo

Is It a Bubble?

Marks responded directly to the AI bubble issue. He did not simply give a binary answer, but split it into four levels: corporate investment behavior, investor psychology, AI infrastructure and market pricing.

Investment memo

Cockroaches in the Coal Mine

Marks discusses risk exposure using the case of early stage problems in credit markets. His concern is whether localized defaults and stress events represent a broader credit cycle turn.

Investment memo

A Look Under the Hood

Marks starts from the perspective of the institutional investment process and discusses easily overlooked issues in investment committees, advisors, risk metrics, and portfolio governance.

Investment memo

The Calculus of Value

Marks returns to the core of value investing: the relationship between value, price, and expected returns. He uses the valuation of public securities to explain why price discipline is central to all investment judgments.

Investment memo