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Investor viewpoints

Viewpoints

Firm public videos, interviews, shareholder letters, public Q&A, and site analysis are shown from newest to oldest.

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What’s Going on in Private Credit?

Oaktree Capital Management · Howard Marks

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.

Private credit Credit cycle Direct Loans Risk control
Investment memo

AI Hurtles Ahead

Oaktree Capital Management · Howard Marks

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.

AI Valuation discipline Bubble Capital expenditure NVDA MSFT
Investment memo

Is It a Bubble?

Oaktree Capital Management · Howard Marks

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.

AI Bubble Investment Psychology Valuation NVDA
Investment memo

Cockroaches in the Coal Mine

Oaktree Capital Management · Howard Marks

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.

Credit risk Breach of contract Market warning Risk control
Investment memo

A Look Under the Hood

Oaktree Capital Management · Howard Marks

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

Asset Allocation Investment process Risk Definition Governance
Investment memo

The Best of...

Oaktree Capital Management · Howard Marks

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.

Featured Second-order thinking cycle Risk control
Investment memo

The Calculus of Value

Oaktree Capital Management · Howard Marks

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.

value Price Valuation Expected return
Investment memo

More on Repealing the Laws of Economics

Oaktree Capital Management · Howard Marks

Marks continues the discussion of economic laws and policy intervention, using insurance, rents, tariffs, and fiscal deficits to illustrate the side effects of governments trying to suppress price signals.

Economic laws Policy Fiscal deficit Price signals
Investment memo

Gimme Credit

Oaktree Capital Management · Howard Marks

Marks answers the market's most frequently asked credit spread question: The key is not whether the spread is narrow, but whether current earnings are sufficient to cover future credit losses.

Credit High yield bonds Spread Yield
Investment memo

On Bubble Watch

Oaktree Capital Management · Howard Marks

Marks looks back at the Bubble Identification Framework on the 25th anniversary of bubble.com, discussing the dangers of extreme psychology, hot faucet persistence, and "this time it's different."

Bubble Investment Psychology Market cycle Risk control
Investment memo

Sea Change

Oaktree Capital Management · Howard Marks

Marks believes that changes in interest rates and inflation in 2022 may constitute the third major environment switch of his career, ending the tailwind that long periods of low interest rates have had on asset prices in the past.

Interest rate Asset Allocation Credit Classic
Investment memo

The Most Important Thing

Oaktree Capital Management · Howard Marks

This memo was one of the sources of thoughts for Marks' later book of the same name. The core is that there is no single most important thing, and good investment requires multiple principles to be established at the same time.

Second-order thinking Risk control Price discipline Classic
Investment memo

You Can't Predict. You Can Prepare.

Oaktree Capital Management · Howard Marks

Marks' classic risk control memo: Investors cannot reliably predict events, but they can improve their survival probability through portfolio structure, risk budget and psychological preparation.

Risk control Prepare Uncertainty Classic
Investment memo