Howard Marks: key principles for successful investing

My philosophy is I guess it’s Oaktree’s philosophy six very simple points.

1. Risk control I believe it’s easy to make money in the market. That’s especially true in the good years and most years are good years. The challenge, the real skill is to make money with the risk under control so that if it turns out to be a bad year instead you won’t do too badly.
2. Consistency. My clients don’t want results that are all over the lot and at the top one year and at the bottom the next so we try to be just consistently a little bit above the middle. But then thanks to risk control in the really bad years we do bounce up to the top.
3. There’s such a thing as market efficiency, and we target only the less efficient markets.
4. High degree of specialization, you can’t be a successful generalist in my opinion, you have to know more than everybody else about a few things.
5. Don’t rely on macro forecasting to drive our investments.
6. Don’t expect much from market timing.