3 Takeaways Podcast Transcript Lynn Thoman (https://www.3takeaways.com/)

Ep 34: Getting The Odds On Your Side: Legendary Investor Howard Marks

INTRO male voice: Welcome to the 3 Takeaways podcast, which features short memorable conversations with the world's best thinkers, business leaders, writers, politicians, scientists, and other news makers. Each episode ends with the three key takeaways that person has learned over their lives and their careers, and now your host and board member of schools at Harvard, Princeton, and Columbia Lynn Thoman.

Lynn Thoman: Hi everyone, it's Lynn Thoman, welcome to another episode. Today, I'm excited to be here with legendary investor, Howard Marks. He is co-founder and co-chairman of Oaktree Capital Management, a global investment firm, which has about $150 billion under management, and is the largest investor in worldwide. According to , "When I see memos from Howard Marks in my email, they're the first thing I open and read. I always learn something." I'm excited to find out from Howard how we can all invest better for higher returns and less risk. Thank you, Howard, for being here today.

Howard Marks: Pleasure, Lynn.

LT: Howard, you have said, "Businesses are both more vulnerable and more dominant in today's world with much greater opportunities for dramatic changes in fortune, both positive and negative." Can you elaborate on that and its implications?

HM: If you go back 40 or 50 years, the world felt like an unchanging place. There were new developments, there were new car models, there was sports news, but the world didn't change very much, we didn't have a feeling of transiency. Events played out in front of this stable backdrop, but the backdrop was unchanging. Well, today it changes every day, and change and technology are much more a part of life today than in the past. We used to talk about companies as being defensive, and they may not do so well in the great times, but they're very safe in the bad times, and we talk about companies with moats. Newspapers were a good example of that. But today, everything is vulnerable, almost everything can be disrupted. So that's the origin of that statement, I mean, you come up with a better mouse trap, you can get on top and maybe you can stay there until somebody else comes up with a better mouse trap, or maybe you can stay there if you evolve yours. But almost everybody is subject to being disrupted and disruptors have a lot of opportunity.

LT: And what are the implications for investing?

HM: The main implication is, you'd better think about that. When you're looking at a company or an industry, you'd better give a lot of consideration to its potential for being disrupted. This is something we didn't think about in the past, we didn't think about whether newspapers could be supplanted by another form of communication, but now we know that they are and they're fighting for their lives.

LT: So there are no safe stodgy companies to invest in that are lower risk anymore?

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HM: Well, I think that's right. Yeah, exactly.

LT: Can you describe the strategies of the most successful investors you've known?

HM: It's so interesting you should ask that, Lynn, because there is no common thread. I know people who do distressed debt, stocks, bonds, real estate, , , macro investors, etcetera, and they're hard working, demanding of themselves. Invariably highly intelligent, often unemotional, which is an important component in the mix, curious and most of them are somewhat well-rounded. But there are many ways to skin the cat in investing, and some of them I don't care for, but I also know people who are very good at it, so I think it's the attributes of the person rather than the philosophy.

HM: I'm what's called a value investor, which means that I only invest in assets where I think that they have a tangible value, an intrinsic value we call it, and that it's ascertainable, estimatable. Value investors, try to figure out the intrinsic value and then see if you can buy for less, and that's when we buy. But there are people who invest in potential new drugs, they can't quantify the value, they can only make wild seat of the pants guesses. But there are people who do drugs, technology, macro even, some of the greatest investors in history like George Soros and Stan Druckenmiller, invested primarily on macro, the movements of the economy, of currencies, of markets, not so much individual stocks. And there are people who do it many ways, but you have to have those attributes.

LT: What are the most important things in investing?

HM: Well, I wrote a book entitled The Most Important Thing, and it has 21 chapters, and each chapter says, "The most important thing is... " And then it's a different thing. Because there is no one most important. And I used to go to clients and I would say, "Well, the most important thing is not losing money," and then I would say, "The most important thing is buying cheap," and then I would say, "The most important thing is having upside potential." So I realized that that there is no one most important thing. Now in the book, it happens that I spend three chapters on the subject of risk, because I think risk is very important. Risk is what keeps you from losing... I mean risk control is what keeps you from losing money, and enables you to have hopefully upside, which is disproportional to the downside, so it covers a lot of bases.

HM: And the other thing is this, it's not hard to make money in the market, especially in good years and the vast majority of years are good years, the stock market goes up much more regularly than it goes down. So you can be a successful investor with ease, in terms of making money. I think the real accomplishment is to have profit potential, which is disproportionate to the risk you take. That's an accomplishment, and that gives what we call in the trade, superior risk-adjusted returns, and that requires attention to risk. So the three chapters are, the most important thing is understanding risk, identifying risk, and then managing risk. And I do think that the ability to manage risk and reduce risk without proportionally reducing your return potential, I think that's a real accomplishment.

LT: And are there simple things to manage and reduce risk that all investors should think about?

HM: Well, the obvious one is diversification, and diversification, it's not a magic elixir, it merely says that if you don't have any big positions, you can't have any big losses. Spread it out. Now, it is possible for something system-wide to happen, which affects all your investments even if you have

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them spread out in many places, but usually if something goes wrong with company A, that doesn't mean it goes wrong with company B, so you have diversification. Now, when you diversify, you have to remember, it's not having a number of things, it's having things that respond differently to a given situation. So if you have 100 stocks, but they all get their supplies from China, then you have one exposure. So it's important to bear that in mind.

HM: But I always say we diversify to protect against what we don't know, we concentrate to take advantage of what we do know. So if you are a great stock picker and you have one favorite, maybe you should put all your money in it. If you invest in say 10 things or 50 things or 100 things, you're diluting whatever appropriate judgement you made about that one good one. So diversifying is a matter of sub-optimizing, you trade away downside risk for upside, and you give up some upside potential at the same time, most people think that's the cheapest form of risk control available, but it also has a negative impact on return, and you can't ignore that.

LT: You've thought a lot about market cycles, both major long-term market cycles and shorter term cycles around the long-term trends, and you've even written a terrific book titled Mastering The Market Cycle, Getting The Odds On Your Side. Can you talk about how important cycles are and where we are in the current cycle?

HM: Yes, well, cycles are really important because we live our lives through something called pattern recognition, and we understand that it's colder in the winter than the summer, so we know how to dress. We don't have to put our finger out the door every morning to decide whether to put on shorts or a parka. And we understand phenomena through their repetition. Mark Twain is reputed to have said that history doesn't repeat, but it rhymes. There are concepts and themes that repeat from one iteration of history to the next, not necessarily the details. That's why he said history doesn't repeat, but the basic concepts. And so I think the cycles are a very important fact of life in the economy and in the markets.

HM: If you look at it, the economy goes like this, slight fluctuations along this upward trend line at a rate of about 2% or so a year. And then the company profits, they are more volatile because they have what's called leverage. And then the stock market goes like this, crazy fluctuations because of the involvement of people with their variable psyches. But still, I think that cyclical pattern of behavior is natural because rather than have the economy grow 2% every year, sometimes it's five and sometimes it's negative. Why? Because people become too optimistic and we have a deviation from the line and excess and then you have a correction back toward the line, but that usually carries you below the line to a negative excess. I like to think of cycles as excesses and corrections, and I think they'll always happen as long as there are people involved with the markets and the economy.

HM: Now, you asked, where are we in the current cycle? This is a very unusual cycle because remember, this cycle did not come about, this downturn that we just experienced, did not come about because of the correction of an excess, there were no excesses in January of 2020, it was an exogenous one-off, I hope one-off, factor that introduced the pandemic and as a consequence, the governments of the world had to shut their economies in order to prevent its spread or limit its spread. It's very hard to refer to this as a typical cycle, and I'll tell you one good reason in particular.

HM: Usually the stock market follows the economy, and when the economic news is good, stock prices rise, and as it gets better, stock prices go higher, and then eventually the economy crests and

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can't get better and starts getting worse, and the stock market also follows. Whether it's a lead or a lag, and what it is is variable but usually stocks are high when the economy is high, and then they both turn down together. Well now, we have stocks quite high when the economy is low. The bad news is that without much economic performance, we have high valuations, that's a negative. But on the other hand... And the great thing about investing is that there's always at least two hands. Even though stocks are high, we have a very favorable economic outlook for some period of years, and that's unusual to have that.

HM: If you think back to 2019, we had an economic recovery of more than 10 years, the longest post-war recovery in US history, and we had a 10-year-old bull market. They shared a birthday. They were having birthday parties together, and it's very unusual to have the stock market high when the economy is low. The Fed made the stock market high through the actions that it took last year. And so it's not naturally occurring. I think of cycles as being endemic, naturally occurring. And this one is not. So there are people talking about this being a bubble today, and I haven't signed on for that way of thinking, because I think the economic outlook is so positive, and the Fed of course, has promised to stay accommodative. And with easy money and a strong economy, it's hard to see the stock market coming off that much.

LT: The P/E ratio of the stock market, the average price of stocks divided by their earnings, is very high compared to long-term averages. Value investors tend to believe strongly in mean reversion. Do you think that the stock market will revert to its long-term averages? What do you see ahead?

HM: Regression to the mean is a normal condition. My partner, Bruce Karsh, is a recovering lawyer, and he uses a phrase I love, it's the rebuttable presumption or the null hypothesis. Normally things do regress toward the mean. Not always, because there are things that have underlying trendlines. I think that before you apply history to the present to make a judgment, you have to see if any adjustments have to be made. If you were doing this 60 years ago, and we talked about how long it takes to get from Miami to New York, we would probably revise our thinking today because of the invention of the jet airplane or the commercialization. How appropriate are historic P/Es as a measuring stick for today? There are two ways in which they're not appropriate, the most important one is the role of interest rates, you have to view P/E ratios in an interest rate context. What do I mean by that?

HM: Investors demand a certain return, given the riskiness. And the least risky thing in our world is 30-day T-Bills. You have no inflation risk and no credit risk, you know you're going to get your money in 30 days, you know exactly how much. If people are going to take more risk than that, incremental risk, then they expect incremental return. And so a one-year bond is a little riskier, that has to yield more. A 10-year bond that is a little riskier, that has to yield more. A corporate bond is riskier than a government bond, that has to yield more and so forth. And we get this curve that rises, and as the risk rises, the expected return rises, it has to in order to attract incremental capital.

HM: But today, the rate of return on the T-Bill is about zero, so the whole line is down. It used to be the T-Bill yielded three [percent], so in order to get people to buy a 10-year bond that had to yield five [percent]. Well, today the T-Bill yields zero and so the 10-year bond yields 1.6 [percent]. You see, the increment is still there, but at a lower level. And the lower interest rates are, the lower demanded returns are. The lower demanded returns are, the higher prices are justified because price and interest rates run inverse. It's mechanically obvious in bonds, but it's really true of all assets. A given asset is worth more, the lower prevailing interest rates are, because the more valuable it's cash

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flow stream is.

HM: Today, with interest rates the lowest they've ever been, P/Es would be justified at the highest they've ever been. It happens they're not, they're not even close to that. I think that the really high PE ratios are the ratio of today's price to the last 12 months earnings, because they include some really bad quarters economically. That number is ascertainable because last year's earnings exist, next year's earnings don't exist yet, so it's hard to be quantitative, but that's really what matters is the ratio of today's price to the coming earnings. On that standard we're not terribly high today. I think we're in 21 or something like that, 20-21 on the S&P 500 and I think that in 2000 it was 32. So that was a real bubble, but this is part of the reason I think that today is not a bubble.

LT: What are the most important warning signals in every boom or bust?

HM: I think that the biggest warning signal is when people say, "This is so good, that price doesn't matter." They said that in the tech boom in 1999, people would say, "The Internet will change the world, so for an e-commerce company, there is no such thing as a price too high." And these companies came out, they had no earnings, sometimes they had no sales, and rather than do P/E or price to sales, you had to do price to eye balls and things like that. I heard it when I started work in 1969 about the Nifty50. So good, no price too high. It was official dictum that you didn't have to worry about price. And if you bought the Nifty50 the day I reported to work in 1969 and held it strongly for five years, you lost almost all your money investing in the best companies in America. I've been through several bubbles.

HM: They said it in Holland, back in the Tulip Boom. They said, for a beautiful tulip there's no price too high. And this is really dangerous. But anything that smacks of over-enthusiasm. Your goal as an investor is to buy things for less than they're worth. Now that sounds like a reasonable objective until you start thinking about the fact that it requires somebody else to want to sell something for less than it's worth. What conditions give rise to that? Willingness, fear, panic, pessimism, depression, all those kinds of things. I always say one of the greatest things is to just figure out how much optimism there is around. Are IPOs easy to do or hard? Do they double on the first day, or do they languish? Are funds sold out or do they go begging? There used to be the anecdote about the shoe shine boy. Is the shoe shine boy giving you stock tips? As JP Morgan's shoe shine boy did for him. Retail participation in the market, option buying... Buying on margin. There are many indicators that show you whether the market's hot or cold, and in general they have an important role.

LT: How do you see the FAANG stocks, the Facebook, Apple, Amazon, Netflix and Google?

HM: I think the most important thing I can say about that Lynn is that I believe it's fair to say you have to be an expert in these things to understand what they're really worth. One of my recent conclusions is you can't just say, "Oh, that stock has a high P/E ratio, so it's over-priced," there's such a thing as having a high PE ratio and deserving it. And you have to be knowledgeable about the company to be able to ascertain that and I'm not about the FAANGs. They're great companies, they certainly seem like better companies than we had in the Nifty50, but you never know because I'm not a futurist and I'm not a technologist, and IBM and Xerox looked unbeatable in 1969. Amazon and Google perhaps look unbeatable today, but maybe somebody else out there knows better than that, and knows that there's a successor in the wings for one or both of them. So I think you have to know a lot before you can make these judgments and not shoot from the hip, and not

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blindly apply history.

LT: I've been struck by your perspective on real estate. You've noted that home prices had miserable returns for the 350 years from 1628 to 1973, that prices adjusted for inflation went up only 0.2% per year, and that it took 350 years for home prices to double. And you also observed that it's only in recent years that huge increases in real estate prices became the norm. Your firm also put together, about 10 years or so ago, one of the most compelling analysis of real estate I think I've ever read, which showed that 2010 housing starts were at their lowest level since 1945 and failed to take into account growth in the US population. So the ratio of housing starts to population was only half the depressed 1940 level. How do you see real estate now?

0:26:28.4 HM: First of all, real estate is a really big topic and a lot of things fall under it, some of which did very well in 2020, some of which did particularly poorly. Anything that was based on getting people together, did poorly. So stores, we know, hotels, and that kind of thing. But some things did very well. Data storage and industrial distribution hubs, for example. And then apartments always do pretty well. They're pretty stable because most people don't need their apartment. Although, they were hurt in the big cities where the pandemic was centered.

HM: Some of the most out of favor assets today are the real estate of the types I mentioned as being affected by the pandemic, so hotels and retail and also big city office. As I said earlier, sometimes things are cheap for a reason, sometimes they're cheap for no reason, and you have to try to figure out the difference between the two. And if you find something and it looks really cheap to you, the first thing you should say is, okay, what am I missing? There's this thing called the efficient market hypothesis, which basically says the market's always right, so you can't outguess it but I'm sure that's not correct. The market makes big mistakes. Back in the tech bubble, I remember seeing one stock that was 400, and then a couple of years later, it was five, so the market couldn't be right on both occasions.

HM: Our goal is to take advantage of those mistakes but to be able to do so, we have to know more than the market. The market is composed of thousands of people, and they all cast their vote today, "I think GM should be 54." "No, I think it should be 53 and three quarters." "No, I think it should be 55 and a half." And they come up with a price and then people who think it's cheap, they'll buy, and people who think it's expensive, they're selling. That's how we get trading. If you're going to beat the crowd of investors, you have to be superior to the crowd in some way, you have to have an edge. This is not like weightlifting where it's effort that counts. You have to have an edge, and it has to come from either the ability to collect data or to assess the importance of data or to look ahead to the future and understand implications of technological change and so forth. But just elbow grease, is not going to work in investing.

LT: How do you see Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies?

HM: I came out very negative about cryptocurrencies when they first emerged in 2017. I spent a lot of time in the pandemic with my son who's an investor and, of course, he's much younger than me and he understands things I don't understand but he made me conclude a few things. Number one, that I had been a knee-jerk skeptic, because I've seen a lot of financial innovation that failed and I've seen a lot of credulous investors who accepted the new. And because I thought that the cryptocurrency had no intrinsic value, which we've been discussing, they don't throw off cash, you can't value them, you can't say a Bitcoin is worth $55,000 or $78,000 or $42,000. There's no way

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you can justify that with hard analysis.

0:30:35.4 HM: But living with my son so much of the pandemic, and believe me we had some series discussions, he convinced me that I didn't see the whole picture because I didn't see the supply and demand side. And there are lots of things in life that don't have intrinsic value, but are very valuable in society. Art, for example. What's the intrinsic value of a Picasso painting? It's $100 for the frame and $20 for the canvas, and then it sells for $80 million. Why? Because people accord it value. So, Andrew talked to me about that and about the fact that the supply is capped and demand may grow if people like it as a substitute for dollars or even gold. I want to stop being a knee-jerk skeptic. I've made a lot of money in my life being skeptical of things appropriately, but it shouldn't be done as a knee-jerk and I'm applying that to cryptocurrencies also. So I don't have a strong opinion either way. I certainly am not knowledgeable enough to do that, but I would hope I'm more open-minded than I used to be.

LT: What are the primary risks that you see ahead?

HM: Well, the main risk is that the government, the Fed spent roughly $ 3 trillion last year buying bonds and the Treasury, let's say, added... I think the deficit will end up being about $3 trillion more than it would have been if we hadn't had the pandemic. So that's $6 trillion that got injected into the economy. This year, they will probably do between, I would say around $5 trillion and maybe next year, they'll sober up and only do $4 trillion. Of course, these are amounts of money that we never had before. And one of the most interesting things about the pandemic is that 2020 was the year we started to talk by trillions. The word trillion was not in common parlance before.

HM: But here's a simple question, can the Fed and the Treasury, dump $15 trillion of liquidity into the economy in a three-year period without having any negative effects? Without it causing too much money chasing too few goods? That gets you inflation. Or without lowering the world's opinion of the dollar. People in this world seem not to be contrarians, but trend followers, so if the dollar has weakened they assume it's going to weaken more so they don't want to hold it. They don't want to hold anything denominated in dollars. So if we have a $3 trillion deficit, we have to renew all the debt that matures and issue an extra $3 trillion every year. Is there an unlimited appetite for our debt, and is there a unlimited appetite for our debt at these prices, these interest rates? What happens if people say, "No, I have enough dollar debt, if I'm going to take anymore the interest rate has to be five [percent]." Then the cost of servicing our debt goes up and the deficit grows further, and it's self-fulfilling.

HM: So I think that the greatest concern is, what if any, will be the impacts of these monetary and fiscal actions? And we don't have a good model for it, because we've never operated at 140% ratio of national debt to GDP, and we've never operated in the trillions, so we don't have any history to fall back on and that's why you see estimates all over the line.

LT: You've talked about asset allocation earlier and diversification, can you talk about the major asset allocation categories that people should think about investing in and what the range of allocations for each category that you would suggest would be reasonable?

HM: I can't say much about what's reasonable because I always say that that's like a guy going into a doctor's office and saying, "Do you have any good medicines?" You need the medicine to treat a specific condition. Every person has different circumstances, and gets a different asset allocation.

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But the main categories are stocks and bonds, that's what we've heard about all our lives. And to oversimplify, stock means part ownership of a company. A bond is a debt of the company. If you wanted to start a business, Lynn, you would get some money from your friends, and your savings and your family, and you would get some money from the bank, a bank loan. Now, the bank has to get paid first. The owners, what we call the equity, the owners, people who own the stock, they get whatever is left over, they get the residual.

HM: Today, you buy a bond that pays 4%, so they get paid their 4% and eventually they get paid their interest back, their principal back, before the stockholders get anything. But their return is capped at 4% a year. Everything above 4% goes to the stockholders, so they could make 0 or a 5% or a 10% or 20% or a 30% a year. It all depends on how you value upside potential versus how you value safety.

HM: Because of the Fed actions in reducing the base interest rate to approximately zero, as I described earlier, everything pays less than it used to. The prospective of return on every asset class is lower than it used to be. And today Treasuries pay 1 or 2% and high grade bonds pay 3%, and high-yield bonds pay maybe 4.5% or 5% or something like that. Most people think you can make a 5 or 6% a year in the stock market, but for many people and for many institutions, most of my clients combining one, two, three, four, five, and six, doesn't give you the solution you need because most of my clients need seven. You can take one, two, three, four, five, six, rearrange them any way you want, they're not going to average out to seven [percent]. So, most people have gone beyond traditional stocks and bonds to what are called "Alternative Investments", and those are the things that you can't buy on an exchange.

HM: Well, I think the least exotic is what I started out in '78, high-yield bonds. They were considered junk bonds and were considered scandalous and fly-by night, 42 years ago. Now, they're in pretty common use. There's distressed debt, which is one thing that Oaktree does a lot of. Buying the debt of companies that are bankrupt or the market thinks are likely to go bankrupt. Private equity, we hear a lot about private equity. Buying firms, mostly with borrowed money to amp up the return. Private debt, making loans one party to one party, not selling bonds in the market place to many. Venture capital, investing in startups. Real estate, timber, hedge funds. There's a vast number.

HM: But in stocks and bonds, most of your return is determined by what the market does, and so you do a little better, you do a little worse, depending on your portfolio. In alternative investments, most of your return comes from the return in your idiosyncratic, in your individual investment, and that is largely a function of the skill of the manager. So when you invest in the alternative markets, you are much more dependent on the skill of the manager. A great manager will give you a great result and a bad manager will give you terrible result. Your uncertainty is greater and your extremes are much further out, both to the good side and the bad side.

HM: It's hard for the individual investor to: A] get a diversified portfolio of alternative investments, 'cause most of them have a substantial minimum and B] they're illiquid, so there's no eraser on the pencil. Once you get in, there are either very strict restrictions on getting out or you can't. So there's no free lunch. Especially in a low-return environment like todays, there's no magic potion that'll give you a high return without risk. And in the introductory remarks, you said Howard Marks' going to tell us how to have a high return without high risk, and it's very difficult. Most people can't say, "I don't want to take risk." They have to say, "I can take so much risk, and I'm okay on this kind of

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risk," 'cause there are lots of different kinds of risk. But you can't make money, and especially today, without taking substantial risk.

LT: Before I ask you for the three key takeaways you'd like to leave the audience with, is there anything else you'd like to discuss that you haven't already touched upon?

HM: Oh, there's so much. Investing is so multi-faceted. I would say that the people listening to your podcast probably don't do their own legal work, their own dental work, their own medical work, they may not even do their yard work. We hire professionals. Nobody can fix their own cars anymore. But most people believe... And the advertising tries to get people to believe that they can do their own investing, and there's no reason to think that's true. If you want to have an average result, go ahead and run it yourself. And in the investment business, it's extremely easy to be average. There are even funds that exist for the purposes of giving you average performance, they're called index funds. They emulate the index and they assure you that you won't do worse than the index, but of course they also assure you you won't do better.

HM: If you want to be average, that's easy. Buy index funds. If you want to be above average, that's hard. There's a lot of smart and highly motivated and computer-literate people out there trying to find the bargains. And if you're not an expert, what makes you think that it's you who's going to get them? For most people, rather than say, "I think that this is going up and that's going down, and economy is heating up and inflation is going down, and I think the Fed's going to do this, or a company is going to do that," most people should find some good investments, in good solid companies, and hold them for the long run. Most trading, I think is unsuccessful. There have been many studies done of mutual funds, that say that the average fund does better than the average investor. Well, how can that be, how can the average fund do better than the average investor in funds? And the answer is, that the investors tend to get into the thing that's going up and get out of the thing that's gone down. My mother taught me buy low, sell high, but most investors tend to buy high, sell low. So if you can just keep yourself from being the common investor in that regard, you'll be a long way forward, long-term holding of good, solid and sensible investments.

LT: Howard, what are the three key takeaways you'd like to leave the audience with today?

HM: First of all, everybody should realize, and hopefully the vagueness of my answers indicated, that the market is not some kind of machine that works in a predictable way that can be ascertained. It's reaction to things in the environment changes all the time, and the things that worked yesterday may not work tomorrow, so don't ever be over-confident about the market. The second is that you generally can't get higher returns without higher risk. This is just axiomatic. If you could, that would be a free lunch and markets exist largely to eliminate free lunches. So if you see something where they say you can double your money, you have to assume that there are some risks and you have to find out what they are. And by the way, you can't make money without bearing risk. But that doesn't mean that just bearing risk will make you money, it doesn't work in reverse.

HM: And the final thing is that if you want to do better than the herd, better than the whole investing community, you have to think differently because if you think the way they do, you'll behave the way they do, you'll emulate them. You'll buy at the top of things that have been doing well, you'll sell at the bottom of things that have been doing poorly, and you'll have conventional behavior, whether it's conventional good or conventional bad. If you want to be superior, you have to diverge from the herd, and that's why this is a hard business for non-professionals because they

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have other things to do than be thinking about how to diverge from the herd.

LT: Howard, thank you. This has been terrific. Thank you for your insights.

HM: It's my pleasure.

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