Memo to Oaktree Clients

Marks has written memos to Oaktree’s clients since 1990, and they are the working record of a distressed-debt investor thinking in public about the same few problems: where in the cycle we are, what risk actually is as opposed to volatility, why the price paid determines the return, and what the second-level thinker sees that the consensus does not. The memos are the raw material his books were built from — The Most Important Thing (2011) and Mastering the Market Cycle (2018) are largely distillations of them — and they carry something the books cannot, which is a date stamp: the January 2000 memo on the tech bubble and the 2007 memos on credit read differently when you can see he wrote them before the outcome.

Why it’s on the list: Li Lu’s value-investing section is the one Kyle’s saved posts actually photographed, and it is built out of practitioners’ own writing rather than commentary. A twenty-five-year run of dated memos is the closest thing the discipline has to a laboratory notebook.

Where I saw it: On Li Lu’s Recommended Book List, the Himalaya Capital bibliography — 137 entries across six numbered sections. This entry sits in the value-investing section, the one the saved X posts photographed; the full list was recovered from the source PDF.

Connections

• Li Lu’s Recommended Book List — the list this came from.
• Howard Marks — the author.
• Market Cycles — the memos’ recurring subject.
• Risk — Marks’s definition (permanent loss of capital, not price variance) is the memos’ through-line.
• Value Investing — the tradition the memos argue from.