Howard Marks: Waiting For The Bottom To Buy Is A Terrible Idea!

In this interview with Chosun Ilbo, Howard Marks explains why waiting for the bottom to buy is a terrible idea. Here’s an excerpt from the interview:

Marks: I don’t believe that we can say oh that’s cheap, that’s not cheap with certainty, all we can say for sure is that it’s a lot cheaper than it used to be.

Is this is a reasonable time to do some buying, yeah. I mean the last thing I would say is that this is the bottom, it’s not going to go down anymore, you have to spend all your money here.

But I also don’t think that it would be appropriate to spend no money here. I think investors should spend some of their money here… we’ve been rather cautious except for March/April/May of ’20, we’ve been pretty cautious, and now I would say we’re less cautious because if you think about your readers they go to the department stores when there’s a sale.

Well all I know for sure is that the prices have been reduced, there’s a sale going on.

We say in the United States there could be further markdowns. If during the sales well there could be further markdowns in the market too.

But the important thing in that article was the idea of saying we’re not going to buy anything until we get to the bottom. That’s a terrible idea! Because you never know when you’re at the bottom. And the bottom comes about because everybody achieves maximum pessimism and at that time very few people are capable of buying all right.

So what I believe is you buy a little here, it gets cheaper, you buy a little more.

You can watch the entire interview here (click on the link below to watch on YouTube):

https://youtu.be/oDi8X2XmoLQ?t=547