A lesson for value investors from investor Howard Marks

Value investors need to open their minds, says US investor Howard Marks. But why is he saying it now?

Howard Marks of Oaktree Capital
Oaktree Capital’s Howard Marks
(Image credit: © Brendon Thorne/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Howard Marks of Oaktree Capital is a highly successful distressed-debt investor, whose regular memos on markets and investing are widely regarded as “must-reads”. His latest piece addresses the “value” versus “growth” debate. He raises some good points on the debate, worth highlighting here – but there’s another interesting point about his letter, which I’ll get to later.

As Marks notes, value investing has its roots in an era when information on companies was much harder to come by and investment management was “a cottage industry” rather than the massive business it is today. As a result, in the early days it was easier to hunt down companies that were obviously cheap – trading for less than their book value (see below), for example. Now that the hunt for information is far more competitive, it stands to reason that, outside of market panics, it should be much harder to find such obvious bargains. Moreover, the pace of change today is far greater than it was in Warren Buffett’s early days, for example.

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John Stepek

John Stepek is a senior reporter at Bloomberg News and a former editor of MoneyWeek magazine. He graduated from Strathclyde University with a degree in psychology in 1996 and has always been fascinated by the gap between the way the market works in theory and the way it works in practice, and by how our deep-rooted instincts work against our best interests as investors.

He started out in journalism by writing articles about the specific business challenges facing family firms. In 2003, he took a job on the finance desk of Teletext, where he spent two years covering the markets and breaking financial news.

His work has been published in Families in Business, Shares magazine, Spear's Magazine, The Sunday Times, and The Spectator among others. He has also appeared as an expert commentator on BBC Radio 4's Today programme, BBC Radio Scotland, Newsnight, Daily Politics and Bloomberg. His first book, on contrarian investing, The Sceptical Investor, was released in March 2019. You can follow John on Twitter at @john_stepek.