Howard Marks

Yeah.

But again, remember, we put a very heavy emphasis on predictability.

And I think that for the most part, Oaktree does what Warren and Charlie do.

They put it on the too hard pile.

Well, this captures two of our earliest points of discussion.

Number one,

that the companies we're talking about are more complex than the simple profit earners of the, let's say, deep value era.

And so you can't, as Andrews says, have a knee-jerk reaction to some superficial knowledge.

You have to really get deep.

And then the other concept was this idea of optional profitability.

The value investor wants to maximize cash flow and profits, EPS, but the growth investor sees losses sometimes as the right thing in the interest of the future.

So that's a very, very important divergence.

Right.

Wasn't it Mark Twain who said all generalizations are flawed, including this one?

And by the way, when I say the value investor does this and the growth investor does that, probably the biggest single theme of the memo was that that dichotomy should not be so hardwired.

Right.

Well, I think one of the great enemies of profitability is rigidity.

Right.

Because I'm lucky when I switched to managing money by switching to the bond department at Citibank and there couldn't be a bigger backwater at the time.

They said, could you figure out what high yield bonds means and start a fund?