Howard Marks

So the president comes out and he says, well, obviously, if you want to be in the top 5% of money managers, you have to be willing to be in the bottom 5%.

And the dichotomy between the implications of those two stories really caused me to write the first memo, the juxtaposition.

My clients don't hire me to be in the top 5%.

I don't care if I'm in the top 5% in any given year.

I'm absolutely unwilling to be in the bottom 5%, and I think so are they.

So that thing about being willing to be in the bottom 5% sounds to me like a post-justification.

But anyway, that's not how I choose to operate.

And so it was a great opportunity to write that up.

And so I wrote that one in 1990.

I think I wrote another one in 91.

Then I wrote one in 93.

There was no regularity.

And one of the things I like to mention, David, is that for the first 10 years, I never had a response.

Wow.

Not only did nobody say it was good, nobody ever said I got it.

And these were mail?

This was pre-fax?

This was the old days of mail, but they only went to our clients.

So probably a few hundred.

Now it's a few hundred thousand by the subscriptions.