Monday 27 June 2016

The Most Important Thing : Uncommon Sense for the Thoughtful Investor (Howard Marks)


Howard Marks is a co-founder of Oaktree Capital Management and writer of Oaktree's memos. This book is the annotated version and contributors are Christopher C. Davis, Joel Greenblatt, Paul Johnson and Seth Klarman, all well-known themselves. The book is about thinking about investing.

The topics include, but are not limited to, second-level thinking, value, price, risk, market efficiency, cycles, and luck. All the topics do not deal with specifics but inspire thinking about how to go about investing, or thinking about thinking. There is a sizeable portion dedicated to covering risk concepts. The book itself is not difficult to read although I found the annotations irritating and distracting; in the end, I ignored reading them. However, other readers may find it useful to read these comments as reinforcing the point Marks tries to make. The book draws many excerpts from Oaktree memo archives to support the author's words and subtly hints that the ideas in the book are timeless.

This is a very good book about thinking and probably deserves a second or third reading.


Recommended: Definitely Yes

Found in NLB: Yes