Howard Marks

So you have to have an advantage, a knowledge advantage, a skill advantage, if you're going to be one of the people who ends up on the positive side of that equation.

And in 1978, when I left the equity area, it was really because of the terrible performance of the Nifty Fifty, which I, as director of research, was associated with.

So they said to me, what do you want to do next?

And I said, I'll do anything except spend the rest of my life choosing between Merck and Lilly.

Because you can take the best drug analyst in the world and sit him down on the first day of every year and ask him which is going to perform better, Merck or Lilly.

And my guess is he'll get it right half the time.

But the good news is my boss said, I want you to go into the bond department.

And

it played to my quantitative skills and to my conservative personality.

And if they would have said, I want you to start a venture capital fund and be ready to invest in Amazon when it starts, I would have been a disaster because I'm not an optimist.

I'm not a futurist.

And financially, I'm something of a chicken.

So the point is, so far, Andrew and I have gravitated things that are right for us.

And that's a hell of a lot easier than doing something which is wrong for you and trying to put a square pig in a round hole.

Remember what I said, that Andrew said...

readily available quantitative information about the present is not going to give you the key to the castle.

He said a couple of minutes ago, however, that he's good at making qualitative judgments about the future.

And so if everybody has all the company data about today and the means to massage it,

how do you get a knowledge advantage?

And the answer is you have to either somehow do a better job of massaging the current data, which is challenging, or you have to be better at making qualitative judgments, or you have to be better at figuring out what the future holds.