Howard Marks: Today’s Conditions Are Better For The Bargain Hunter Since GFC

During his recent interview with Forbes, Howard Marks explained why today’s conditions are better for the bargain hunter since the GFC. Here’s an excerpt from the interview:

Back in ’79, most of your viewers may not remember but Business Week ran an article, The Death of Equities, and basically what it said is equities have done so badly that nobody will ever buy them. Which makes absolutely no sense. If they’ve done badly that means they must be cheap and people should buy them.

And that was the same condition in 2012 and I wrote Deja Vu All Over Again and so forth.

So the point is we do vary our degree of aggressiveness and defenseness. We vary our degree of fundraising, how much money we should have under management.

Clearly when the opportunities are better we should have more money. When the opportunities are less good we should have less.

And I think that’s an important thing that distinguishes OakTree is that we’re willing to have less when it’s appropriate.

Today I’m in a fairly normal posture except increasing my aggressiveness. I think that the conditions for the bargain hunter, for the lender, for the asset buyer today are better than they have been since the global financial crisis, which ended in 2008. We’ve been… tough times for the bargain hunter for the last 14 years.

I think we’re in a better situation today so I would increase my level of aggressiveness.

You can watch the entire discussion here: