Howard Marks interviewed by Hugo Scott-Gall

Via Zero Hedge:

Hugo Scott-Gall: How can we understand investor psychology and use it to make investment decisions?

Howard Marks: It's the swings of psychology that get people into the biggest trouble, especially since investors’ emotions invariably swing in the wrong direction at the wrong time. When things are going well people become greedy and enthusiastic, and when times are troubled, people become fearful and reticent. That’s just the wrong thing to do. It’s important to control fear and greed.

Another mistake that people often make is that they compare themselves with others who are making more money than they are and conclude that they should emulate the others’ actions ... after they’ve worked. This is the source of the herd behaviour that so often gets them into trouble. We're all human and so we’re subject to these influences, but we mustn’t succumb. This is why the best investors are quite cold-blooded in their professional activities.

We can infer psychology from investor behaviour, and that allows us to get an understanding of how risky the market is, even though the direction in which it will head can never be known for certain. By understanding what’s going on, we can infer the “temperature” of the market. In my book, I give a list of characteristics that can give you an idea whether the market is hot or cold, and by using them we can control our buying patterns. They include capital availability, the eagerness of lenders and investors, the ease of entry for new funds, and the width of credit spreads, among others.

We need to remember to buy more when attitudes toward the market are cool and less when they’re heated. For example, the ability to do inherently unsafe deals in quantity suggests a dearth of scepticism on the part of investors. Likewise, when every new fund is oversubscribed, you know there's eagerness. Too little scepticism and too much eagerness in an up-market – just like too much resistance and pessimism in a down-market – can be very bad for investment results.

Warren Buffett once said, "The less prudence with which others conduct their affairs, the greater the prudence with which we must conduct our own affairs." I agree thoroughly, and in order to understand how much prudence others are applying, we need to observe investor behaviour and the kinds of deals that are getting done. In 2006 and 2007, just before the onset of the financial crisis, many deals got done that left me scratching my head. That indicated low levels of risk aversion and prudence. We can't measure prudence through a quantitative process, and so we have to infer it by observing the behaviour of market participants.

The fundamental building block of investment theory is the assumption that investors are risk averse. But, in reality, they are sometimes very risk averse and miss a lot of buying opportunities, and sometimes very risk tolerant and buy when they shouldn’t. Risk aversion isn’t constant or dependable. That's what Buffett means when he says that when other people apply less, you should apply more.

Hugo Scott-Gall: Why do behaviour patterns and mistakes recur despite the plethora of information available now? Are we doomed to repeat our mistakes?

Howard Marks: Information and knowledge are two different things. We can have a lot of information without much knowledge, and we can have a lot of knowledge without much wisdom. In fact, sometimes too much data keeps us from seeing the big picture; we can “miss the forest for the trees.”

It's extremely important to know history, but the trouble is that the big events in financial history occur only once every few generations. The latest global financial crisis began in 2008 and the one before that in 1929. That’s a gap of 79 years. So, while memory has the potential to restrain action and induce prudence by reminding us of tough periods, over time as memory fades the lessons fade as well.

In the investment environment, memory and the resultant prudence regularly do battle with greed, and greed tends to win out. Prudence is particularly dismissed when risky investments have paid off for a span of years. John Kenneth Galbraith wrote that the outstanding characteristics of financial markets are shortness of memory and ignorance of history. In hot times, the few who do remember the past are dismissed as relics of the old, lacking the ability to imagine the new. But it invariably turns out that there's nothing new in terms of investor behaviour. Mark Twain said that “history does not repeat itself but it does rhyme,” and what rhyme are the important themes.

The bottom line is that even though knowing financial history is important, requiring people to study it won’t make a big difference, because they'll ignore its lessons. There's a very strong tendency for people to believe in things which, if true, would make them rich. Demosthenes said, "For that a man wishes, he generally believes to be true" Just like in the movies, where they show a person in a dilemma to have an angel on one side and a devil on the other, in the case of investing, investors have prudence and memory on one shoulder and greed on the other. Most of the time greed wins. As long as human nature is part of the investment environment, which it always will be, we’ll experience bubbles and crashes.

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Hugo Scott-Gall: What things in your skill set have served you well?

Howard Marks: While knowing financial analysis and accounting is essential, almost any smart person can acquire those skills and get a rough idea of the merits of a company. Superior investors are those who understand both fundamentals and markets and have a better sense for what a given set of merits is worth today and what it will be worth in the future. I don't think I became less able to do financial analysis over time, but I engaged much more in understanding and sensing markets and values: the “big picture”. A lot of my contribution comes from understanding history and investor behaviour, from inferring what's going on around me, and from controlling my emotions.