Howard Marks on Bloomberg Wealth with David Rubenstein

 

Why be an investment professional why not go into

um climate change work or something like

that ?

 

well I I wouldn't tell anybody what

they should do what I would say is this

investing is a fascinating field because

 there are so many variables that have

to be juggled  and so many

uncertainties that have to be dealt with

  it's stimulating  the solutions

are never static yesterday's solution

will not work tomorrow

 it keeps you on your toes

 on the other

hand because of the imprecision you fail

a lot and you know  Warren Buffett

always talks about Ted Williams who

batted 400 it means 60% of the time he

was out at the plate  the great

investor are right 60% 70% maybe 80% of

the time if you're the kind of person

who has to be right all the time you

shouldn't be in in investing

 

so if

somebody said to you what is the most

common investment mistake that the

average person makes what would you say?

 

I think the well can I do two sure

number one is that people believe in the

ability predict the

future  either their ability or others

that they can identify and in general uh

I agree with John Kenneth galbreth who

said There are two kinds of forecasters

the ones who don't know and the ones who

don't know they don't know so I think

the that the average person has to learn

that they don't know what the future

holds and nobody else does either the

other thing is people believe that

there's kind of a direct and mechanical

linkage if a company has a good event

the the Securities do well if they have

a bad event like earnings Securities do

poorly but that's not the case because

there's a intermediate step which is uh

 people's

reaction so it's not just whether the

event was positive it's how people

reacted to the event that determines the

impact on the security prices and that's

two different things so you can't forget

the the psychological and human factor