READ THE ORIGINAL
Published in full and free by Oaktree Capital Management. This page indexes its arguments; it is not a copy.
THE ARGUMENT
Published for the 35th anniversary of the memos, this is a curated collection rather than a new argument: 45 memos from 1990 to 2025 reprinted in full, with a short note from Marks on each saying what it was for. His own framing splits them into the enduring truths — second-level thinking, risk control, the inevitability of cycles, the futility of macro forecasting — and the chronicles of the three events that defined three decades. The notes are the closest thing he has written to a statement of which of his arguments he thinks held up.
What it actually claims
The collection is organized around two claims about his own work: that a handful of principles have not changed in 35 years, and that the events worth chronicling across three decades were the dot-com bubble, the Global Financial Crisis and the 2022 shift in rate policy.
- 35 years of memos
- the first, The Route to Performance, dated October 12, 1990
One of the threads he traces furthest back is the pendulum — the swing between optimism and pessimism, greed and fear, risk tolerance and risk aversion, which he calls one of the most dependable features of the investment world, and which drives short-term prices from hopeless to flawless rather than any weighing of merit. Calling the market is not his practice, and the calls he does count were each made at one of those extremes, on a reading of psychology rather than of data.
- five main market calls, revisited in Taking the Temperature
What he chose to preserve from the run-up to 2008 is a sequence of standards warnings rather than a forecast: investors with too much money and too much eagerness bid the terms down, and the specific symptoms he named in mid-2007 were excessive leverage, untested securitization structures and too-easy access to capital.
He keeps the memo arguing that when vast sums arrive in an asset class, the fees available distort what managers are trying to do — alongside the position that no asset class is owed a return by birthright, since returns depend on mispricings existing and on the skill to find them.
On bubbles his selection pairs the psychology with the excuse: the dot-com boom rested on excessive belief in the new new thing, and the phrase by which soaring prices often get justified is that this time it is different — which he tested against a list of such theories rather than dismissing outright.
- nine such theories examined in This Time It’s Different
The valuation position he restates most plainly is that growth in value supplies most of the impetus for returns over the long run and that value pulls price toward it, so a high starting valuation should be expected to presage low subsequent returns — with the corollary that the better recent equity returns have been, the less good the next ones are likely to be.
The one macro call he singles out as possibly seminal is the rate regime: four decades of declining interest rates halted by the need to fight post-pandemic inflation, which he treats as the case where a strategy built for the old environment has to be reviewed from the ground up.
- 40 years of declining interest rates
Figures are the author's own, as cited in the memo.