Memo to Oaktree Clients
From kwharrison13.com · Anti-library
Memo to Oaktree Clients
| Author | Howard Marks |
|---|---|
| Recommended | Once |
| Buy | Amazon |
| Why it’s on the list | Howard Marks’s memos to Oaktree’s clients since 1990 — the working record of a distressed-debt investor thinking in public about where in the cycle we are, what risk actually is, why the price paid determines the return, and what the second-level thinker sees. They are the raw material for his books, with something the books lack: a date stamp, so the January 2000 memo on the tech bubble and the 2007 memos on credit can be read as written before the outcome. |
Memo to Oaktree Clients
Where I heard about it
- Li Lu — on Li Lu’s Recommended Book List, the Himalaya Capital bibliography (137 entries across six sections), in its value-investing section — a section built from practitioners’ own writing rather than commentary, where a twenty-five-year run of dated memos is the closest thing the discipline has to a laboratory notebook.
About this edition
Not a book but an ongoing series of memos, published free by Oaktree — which is why the link points at Oaktree’s own memo archive. The Most Important Thing (2011) and Mastering the Market Cycle (2018) are largely distillations of them.
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.
What links here
Curated by Kyle Harrison. Organized by Claude. Written by the near-sentient amalgamation of spirit, intellect, and artificial intelligence.