Thanks for the very insightful comment, Aditya! I fully agree with you that Howard Marks is a perma bear. Reading his commentary is not very useful. Being eventually right after a very long period of time is the equivalent to being wrong. He even said it himself if I remember correctly.

Now I don’t like following his forecasts that always “call for caution”. But I quite like reading his books as I find them much more balanced. There is some
really good info in there such as how to understand risk, how price and value are not always moving together as well as behavioural lessons for the average investor. He treats defence and offence equally and he’s not biased towards safe assets. If something, he even says that in times of worry, being aggressive is a safe bet!

It’s incredibly hard to time the market as you rightly said. Sure, Marks did very well building his distressed-debt fund empire but for the average
investor, timing should be avoided. Buying consistently, being well-diversified, keeping the costs low and avoiding selling during market declines is the key to investment success.

Thanks for the post. Just gone through your thoughts, one thing you see here are all common sense thinking but not collated together in one place and, therefore, we forget in the heat of the moment.

However, I do have issues with Howard Marks, Mark Mobius and some of the others in the ilk I would call perma bears and that results in a loss of credibility of them in my eyes. As the saying goes – a broken clock is right twice a day. So, if you had quit the market when they started warning of recessions and overvaluations as early as 2011, you would have lost out on a 300% S&P growth. So, assuming they would be right now and the market would go down over 50%, you would still be ahead if you stayed in the market for the whole time. This is where I feel listening to the so called experts is wrong. I do read these people’s commentary but in my mind I have a view of bottom up investing where I look at good companies in good sectors and invest in them periodically.

In that sense, I believe in the following adage:

Time in the Market is much more important that timing the market…..

Thanks for all the good advice you are giving to people and all the best…

Cheers,
Aditya

Glad you liked it, Vlad! Cheers