Top 40 Howard Marks Quotes (2024 Update)

1. “Voltaire: “The perfect is the enemy of the good.” This.”

— Howard Marks

2. “Investment success doesn’t come from “buying good things,” but rather from “buying things well.”

— Howard Marks

3. “What the wise man does in the beginning, the fool does in the end.”

— Howard Marks

4. “There are three ingredients for success – aggressiveness, timing and skill – and if you have enough aggressiveness at the right time, you don’t need that much skill.”

— Howard Marks

5. “The biggest investing errors come not from factors that are informational or analytical, but from those that are psychological. Investor.”

— Howard Marks

6. “We have to practice defensive investing, since many of the outcomes are likely to go against us. It’s more important to ensure survival under negative outcomes than it is to guarantee maximum returns under favorable ones.”

— Howard Marks

7. “Never forget the six-foot-tall man who drowned crossing the stream that was five feet deep on average.”

— Howard Marks

8. “Buying something for less than its value. In my opinion, this is what it’s all about – the most dependable way to make money. Buying at a discount from intrinsic value and having the asset’s price move toward its value doesn’t require serendipity; it just requires that market participants wake up to reality. When the market’s functioning properly, value exerts a magnetic pull on price.”

— Howard Marks

9. “Being too far ahead of your time is indistinguishable from being wrong.” So.”

— Howard Marks

10. “I like to say, “Experience is what you got when you didn’t get what you wanted.”

— Howard Marks

11. “The most dangerous thing is to buy something at the peak of its popularity. At that point, all favourable facts and opinions are already factored into its price and no new buyers are left to emerge.”

— Howard Marks

12. “There’s a big difference between probability and outcome. Probable things fail to happen – and improbable things happen – all the time.” That’s one of the most important things you can know about investment risk.”

— Howard Marks

13. “It’s worth noting that the assumption that something can’t happen has the potential to make it happen, since people who believe it can’t happen will engage in risky behaviour, and thus alter the environment.”

— Howard Marks

14. “The superior investor is mature, rational, analytical, objective and unemotional.”

— Howard Marks

15. “As Sir John Templeton put it, “To buy when others are despondently selling and sell when others are greedily buying requires the greatest fortitude and pays the greatest reward.”

— Howard Marks

16. “An accurate estimate of intrinsic value is the essential foundation for steady, unemotional and potentially profitable investing.”

— Howard Marks

17. “Selling for more than your asset’s worth. Everyone hopes a buyer will come along who’s willing to overpay for what they have for sale. But certainly the hoped-for arrival of this sucker can’t be counted on. Unlike having an underpriced asset move to its fair value, expecting appreciation on the part of a fairly priced or overpriced asset requires irrationality on the part of buyers that absolutely cannot be considered dependable.”

— Howard Marks

18. “Warren Buffett tells us, “The less prudence with which others conduct their affairs, the greater the prudence with which we should conduct our own affairs.”

— Howard Marks

19. “Skepticism and pessimism aren’t synonymous. Skepticism calls for pessimism when optimism is excessive. But it also calls for optimism when pessimism is excessive.”

— Howard Marks

20. “The desire for more, the fear of missing out, the tendency to compare against others, the influence of the crowd and the dream of the sure thing – these factors are near universal. Thus they have a profound collective impact on most investors and most markets. The result is mistakes, and those mistakes are frequent, widespread and recurring.”

— Howard Marks

21. “The process of intelligently building a portfolio consists of buying the best investments, making room for them by selling lesser ones, and staying clear of the worst.”

— Howard Marks

22. “If everyone likes it, it’s probably because it has been doing well. Most people seem to think that outstanding performance to dates presages outstanding future performance. Actually, it’s more likely that outstanding future performance to date has borrowed from the future and thus presages subpar performance from her on out.”

— Howard Marks

23. “If one is approached with a deal predicated on cycles having ceased to occur, remember that invariably that’s a losing bet.”

— Howard Marks

24. “Here’s the key to understanding risk: it’s largely a matter of opinion.”

— Howard Marks

25. “Risk means uncertainty about which outcome will occur and about the possibility of loss when the unfavorable ones do.”

— Howard Marks

26. “There’s only one way to describe most investors: trend followers. Superior investors are the exact opposite. Superior investing, as I hope I’ve convinced you by now, requires second-level thinking – a way of thinking that’s different from that of others, more complex and more insightful.”

— Howard Marks

27. “There’s a big difference between probability and outcome. Probable things fail to happen – and improbable things happen – all the time.” That.”

— Howard Marks

28. “The best foundation for a successful investment – or a successful investment career – is value. You must have a good idea of what the thing you’re considering buying is worth. There are many components to this and many ways to look at it. To oversimplify, there’s cash on the books and the value of the tangible assets; the ability of the company or asset to generate cash; and the potential for these things to increase.”

— Howard Marks

29. “We conclude that most of the time, the future will look a lot like the past, with both up cycles and down cycles. There is a right time to argue that things will be better, and that’s when the market is on its backside and everyone is selling things at giveaway prices. It’s dangerous when the market’s at record levels to reach for a positive rationalisation that has never held true in the past.”

— Howard Marks

30. “Charlie Munger gave me a great quotation on this subject, from Demosthenes: “Nothing is easier than self-deceit. For what each man wishes, that he also believes to be true.” The belief that some fundamental limiter is no longer valid – and thus historic notions of fair value no longer matter – is invariably at the core of every bubble and consequent crash. In fiction, willing suspension of disbelief adds to our enjoyment.”

— Howard Marks

31. “If your behavior is conventional, you’re likely to get conventional results – either good or bad. Only if your behavior is unconventional is your performance likely to be unconventional, and only if your judgments are superior is your performance likely to be above average.”

— Howard Marks

32. “Here’s the key to understanding risk: it’s largely a matter of opinion. It’s hard to be definitive about risk, even after the fact. You.”

— Howard Marks

33. “The safest and most potentially profitable thing is to buy something when no one likes it. Given time, its popularity, and thus its price, can only go one way: up.”

— Howard Marks

34. “No asset class or investment has the birthright of a high return. An asset is only attractive if it’s priced right.”

— Howard Marks

35. “SETH KLARMAN: Most of these characteristics are not permanent. Something broadly accepted can become controversial or even taboo. Information can become more or less available. Thus, an asset class deemed close to efficient at one point may become quite inefficient at another. European.”

— Howard Marks

36. “Thus, the investor’s time is better spent trying to gain a knowledge advantage regarding “the knowable”: industries, companies and securities. The more micro your focus, the greater the likelihood you can learn things others don’t.”

— Howard Marks

37. “There’s only one form of intelligent investing, and that’s figuring out what something’s worth and buying it for that price or less. You can’t have intelligent investing in the absence of quantification of value and insistence on an attractive purchase price. Any investment movement that’s built around a concept other than the relationship between price and value is irrational.”

— Howard Marks

38. “Like so many other things in the investment world that might be tried on the basis of certitude and precision, waiting for the bottom to start buying is a great example of folly. So if targeting the bottom is wrong, when should you buy? The answer’s simple: when price is below intrinsic value.”

— Howard Marks

39. “Will Rogers said, “You’ve got to go out on a limb sometimes because that’s where the fruit is.” None of us is in this business to make 4 percent.”

— Howard Marks

40. “The key turning point in my investment management career came when I concluded that because the notion of market efficiency has relevance, I should limit my efforts to relatively inefficient markets where hard work and skill would pay off best.”

— Howard Marks

41. “Patient opportunism, buttressed by a contrarian attitude and a strong balance sheet, can yield amazing profits during meltdowns.”

— Howard Marks

42. “It’s frightening to think that you might not know something, but more frightening to think that, by and large, the world is run by people who have faith that they know exactly what’s going on.”

— Howard Marks

43. “Achieving gains usually has something to do with being right about events that are on the come, whereas losses can be minimized by ascertaining that tangible value is present, the herd’s expectations are moderate and prices are low. My experience tells me the latter can be done with greater consistency.”

— Howard Marks

44. “If the market were a disciplined calculator of value based exclusively on company fundamentals, the price of a security wouldn’t fluctuate much more than the issuer’s current earnings and the outlook for earnings in the future. In fact, the price generally should fluctuate less than earnings, since quarter-to-quarter changes in earnings often even out in the long run and, besides, don’t necessarily reflect actual changes in the company’s long-term potential.”

— Howard Marks

45. “How? Try to travel into the future and look back. In 2023, do you think you’re more likely to say, “Back in 2018, I wish I’d been more aggressive” or “Back in 2018, I wish I’d been more defensive”? And is there anything today about which you’d be likely to say, “In 2018, I missed the chance of a lifetime to buy xyz”? What you think you might say a few years down the road can help you figure out what you should do today.”

— Howard Marks