Oaktree Capital Management

Howard Marks

Howard Marks is co-founder and co-chairman of Oaktree Capital Management, long counted among the world's largest investors in distressed debt. He came to it by an unusual path: after an economics degree from Wharton and an MBA from the University of Chicago, he spent sixteen years at Citicorp, rising to vice president and senior portfolio manager overseeing convertible and high-yield bonds, then moved to TCW Group, where he led the high-yield and distressed groups. In 1987 he hired Bruce Karsh to help run TCW's special-credit funds. In 1995 the two men left TCW with three partners — Sheldon Stone, Larry Keele, and Richard Masson — to start Oaktree out of Los Angeles. The firm's approach is contrarian and value-driven. Oaktree buys the debt of companies in distress, prices it against what the underlying business is worth, and holds while others flee; it has never been built around market timing or macroeconomic calls. Marks's own framework, which he calls "second-level thinking," means asking not just how an asset looks but how everyone else sees it, and favoring the avoidance of big losses over the capture of big gains. He has been publishing his plain-spoken investment memos since 1990, and Warren Buffett has said of them: "When I see memos from Howard Marks in my mail, they're the first thing I open and read." Marks has also written two books drawn from that work, The Most Important Thing and Mastering the Market Cycle, and Oaktree itself joined the Brookfield group in 2019.