1장
The Pendulum That Shapes Our Financial World
Howard Marks didn't set out to write another book after his acclaimed "The Most Important Thing," but he found himself drawn to a subject that has fascinated him throughout his investment career: cycles. As co-founder of Oaktree Capital Management, which manages over $120 billion in assets, Marks has observed how cycles profoundly affect investment outcomes. The book has become required reading for investment professionals worldwide, with Warren Buffett himself stating, "When I see memos from Howard Marks in my mail, they're the first thing I open and read." Beyond Wall Street, the book has garnered praise from business leaders and academics for its clear-eyed analysis of how markets really work. What makes cycles so important? They're the invisible force that can make seemingly sound investments fail catastrophically or transform risky bets into spectacular successes-not because the investment itself changed, but because the cycle did.
2장
The Knowable Future: Why Cycles Matter More Than Predictions
Investing requires preparing for an uncertain future by making decisions today that will benefit from tomorrow's events. While achieving average market performance is relatively simple through index funds, outperforming consistently is extraordinarily difficult. Why? Because superior performance requires having better information, interpreting it more insightfully, knowing what actions to take, or possessing the emotional fortitude to act-advantages few consistently maintain regarding macro events.
Rather than attempting to predict unpredictable macro events, superior investors focus on three areas where they can gain an edge: knowing more about "the knowable" (industry and company fundamentals), maintaining discipline about appropriate prices, and understanding the current investment environment to position portfolios strategically. The greatest opportunity for portfolio optimization comes from calibrating the balance between aggressive and defensive positioning based on where various cycles stand.
Risk isn't merely volatility as academic finance suggests-it's primarily the likelihood of permanent capital loss combined with opportunity risk (missing potential gains). As Peter Bernstein noted, "Risk means we don't know what's going to happen." The future should be viewed not as a single fixed outcome but as a probability distribution reflecting tendencies. Superior investors develop a better sense of these tendencies-they understand what "tickets are in the bowl" and whether participating in the "lottery" is worthwhile.
By understanding cycles and making judgments about where we stand in them, we can tilt probability distributions in our favor. When cycles are positioned favorably, gains become more likely and losses less so; when cycles reach dangerous extremes, the odds turn against us. The questions that matter most are: Are we near the beginning or end of an upswing? Has a cycle gone too far? Are investors driven by greed or fear? Is the market overheated or frigid? These assessments help determine whether to emphasize defensiveness or aggressiveness.
Think of it like weather forecasting-you can't predict exactly when rain will fall, but you can recognize the conditions that make it more likely and prepare accordingly.
3장
The Nature of Cycles: More Than Just Ups and Downs
Cycles aren't merely random fluctuations-they're interconnected patterns with their own internal logic. They oscillate around a midpoint or secular trend, with each event in the cycle causing the next. While economies and markets grow over time, their performance is heavily influenced by human psychology, creating oscillations that follow identifiable phases.
These oscillations don't merely follow each other-they cause each other. As a phenomenon swings toward an extreme, it stores energy until it can go no further, then gravity pulls it back toward the midpoint with momentum that causes it to overshoot in the opposite direction. Imagine a pendulum that never stops at the center but always swings past it.
Though I describe cycles as separate for clarity, in reality they're entangled-economic cycles influence profit cycles, which affect investor attitudes, which impact markets and credit availability, creating a complex web of interrelated phenomena. This explains why market movements often seem to have a life of their own, independent of the news that supposedly drives them.
Cycles are inevitable, self-correcting, often symmetrical in direction (though not necessarily in timing or magnitude), and frequently misunderstood due to investors' short financial memories. As Mark Twain supposedly said, "History doesn't repeat itself, but it does rhyme"-the details differ, but the underlying themes recur.
Unlike scientific cycles that follow regular, predictable patterns like radio waves or sine waves, market cycles don't exhibit this degree of consistency. They're less predictable but potentially more profitable for those who see them better than others. Human emotion, psychology, and randomness contribute to both their existence and their inconsistency. While we'll never know exactly when markets will turn, how far they'll go, or how fast they'll move, understanding even a little about cycle timing gives us an advantage over investors who pay less attention to them.
4장
The Economic Engine: How Growth Drives Everything Else
The economic cycle provides the foundation for cyclical events in business and markets. As the economy rises, companies are more likely to expand profits and stock markets tend to rise. GDP growth in the U.S. typically starts with an assumption of 2-3% annually, with specific circumstances adding or subtracting from there. The starting point is invariably positive, with recessions being relatively rare occurrences.
While many investors focus on year-to-year economic growth, long-term considerations ultimately prove more significant. Most cycles that attract investors' attention consist of oscillations around a secular trend. These short-term oscillations matter greatly to companies and markets temporarily but eventually cancel out. Changes in the underlying trend itself make the biggest difference to long-term experience.
In my 2009 memo "The Long View," I described several "salutary secular trends" that markets had been riding for decades: favorable macro environment, corporate growth, borrowing mentality, popularization of investing, and positive investor psychology. These developments created a strong tailwind behind the economy and markets. Despite this uptrend, the economy and markets experienced cyclical fluctuations every few years, with some periods like the 1970s bringing economic stagnation, high inflation, and significant stock losses.
Short-term economic fluctuations occur largely because of human psychology and behavior. Economic forecasters typically focus on GDP growth rates in the coming year or two, particularly concerned with whether growth might turn negative for two quarters (signaling recession). These short-term variations happen despite relatively stable long-term factors like birth rates and productivity growth.
People's willingness to work isn't constant, and consumption varies independently of income due to changes in the "marginal propensity to consume." Spending can fluctuate because of favorable headlines, election results, credit availability, asset appreciation creating a "wealth effect," or even something as trivial as sports outcomes. Economic expectations can be self-fulfilling-if people believe the future will be good, they'll spend and invest more, making it good.
Inventory management also contributes to short-term variation, as businesses adjust production to match demand and maintain desired inventory levels. These factors aren't mechanical but stem from human behavior, making them uncertain and unpredictable. The Brexit vote exemplifies how a single event can potentially alter both short-term economic performance and long-term growth trajectories.
5장
Managing the Unmanageable: Government's Role in Economic Cycles
Extreme economic cyclicality is undesirable-too much strength can trigger inflation and inevitable recession, while too much weakness hurts profits and employment. Central bankers and Treasury officials therefore attempt to manage these cycles with counter-cyclical tools, though managing cycles effectively remains challenging.
Central banks have evolved from simply issuing currency to primarily managing economic cycles. Their focus shifted to controlling inflation after periods of hyperinflation like Germany's post-WWI Weimar Republic. Inflation generally results from economic strength through demand-pull (when demand exceeds supply), cost-push (when production inputs increase in price), or currency devaluation effects, though psychological factors make inflation's behavior inconsistent and sometimes mysterious.
To control inflation, central banks can reduce money supply, raise interest rates, and sell securities-all actions that restrain economic growth. However, many central banks now have dual mandates: controlling inflation while supporting employment, which thrives with stronger economic growth. This creates opposing responsibilities requiring a delicate balance.
"Hawks" prioritize inflation control through restrictive measures, while "doves" favor employment support through stimulative actions like decreasing rates and quantitative easing. Central bankers must behave counter-cyclically, restraining prosperity to control inflation while stimulating during slowdowns to support employment-a challenging task given the uncertainties in predicting economic cycles.
Governments have broader responsibilities than central banks, with economic management being just one component. Like central banks, treasuries work to regulate economic cycles through fiscal tools-taxing and spending. When stimulating economies, they can cut taxes, increase spending or distribute stimulus checks. To cool overheating economies, they can increase taxes or cut spending.
National deficits arise when governments spend more than they collect in taxes. While once controversial, government debt is now widely accepted, though questions about prudent debt levels occasionally surface. Keynesian economics advocates using deficits during weak economic periods to stimulate demand, and surpluses during strong periods to cool the economy-though surpluses have become rare as politicians prefer spending programs that attract votes.
Despite these tools, effectively managing economic cycles remains challenging, which explains why we continue to see economic extremes. The interaction between political incentives and economic management often creates its own cyclical patterns.
6장
Corporate Rollercoaster: How Profits Amplify Economic Cycles
While U.S. GDP typically grows at 2-3% annually, with fluctuations usually between +5% and -2%, corporate profits experience much wider swings. This profit cycle is influenced by the economic cycle but demonstrates greater volatility due to several key factors.
Different industries show varying degrees of sensitivity to economic cycles. Industrial raw materials and components respond directly to GDP expansion or contraction. Everyday necessities like food and medicine remain relatively stable regardless of economic conditions, though consumers may trade up or down based on prosperity. Low-cost consumer items show minimal volatility, while luxury goods fluctuate significantly. Big-ticket durables (cars, homes, factory equipment) are highly responsive to economic cycles since they're expensive, replaceable over time, and their purchase can be deferred.
Profits don't change proportionally with sales due to two types of leverage. Operating leverage occurs because businesses have fixed costs (like office space), semi-fixed costs (like equipment), and variable costs (like fuel). When sales increase, fixed costs remain constant while revenues grow, causing profit margins to expand and profits to increase by a greater percentage than sales. This works in reverse during downturns.
Financial leverage magnifies these effects further. Companies with debt must make interest payments regardless of performance. When operating profits decline, equity holders absorb all losses until wiped out. For example, a company with $15,000 debt and $15,000 equity would see a 33% decline in operating profit translate to a 67% decline in net income after interest payments.
Beyond economic cycles, company profits are affected by management decisions, technological advancements, regulatory changes, and external events like weather or war. Technology particularly disrupts established business models, as seen with newspapers. Once considered defensive investments with impregnable market positions, newspapers have been dramatically impacted by the internet and digital communication in less than twenty years. This demonstrates how technological cycles can override traditional economic and profit cycles, creating an environment where nothing seems unchanging and many industries face potential disruption.
Think about how a small change in the economic environment can cascade through this system-a 2% decline in GDP might cause a 10% drop in sales for certain industries, which combined with operating and financial leverage could result in a 30-40% profit decline, potentially triggering a 50% stock price collapse if investors become pessimistic about the future.
7장
The Emotional Investor: How Psychology Drives Market Extremes
The pendulum of investor psychology swings between extremes, rarely spending time at the midpoint. These emotional swings strongly influence economic cycles and investment outcomes, especially in the short run. The pendulum oscillates between euphoria and depression, celebrating positives and obsessing over negatives, causing markets to swing between being overpriced and underpriced.
Market returns rarely match their "normal" average. In 47 years from 1970-2016, the S&P 500 returned between 8-12% (the "normal" range) only three times. More dramatically, returns deviated by over 20 percentage points from normal more than a quarter of the time, with these extreme years often clustered together. These fluctuations aren't explained by changing company fortunes but by investors' persistent mood swings that continue until they stop.
Markets fluctuate between greed and fear because people do. When feeling positive, investors become greedy, competing to buy assets and driving prices up. When negative, fear takes over-they worry about losses rather than gains, stop buying, and often sell, pushing prices down. In balanced markets, optimists and pessimists create a tug-of-war, but at crucial moments, sentiment shifts dramatically to one side. The tech bubble of 1999 exemplified pure greed with no fear, while its 2000 burst showed how quickly fear can replace greed without obvious cause.
Several interrelated emotional continuums drive market behavior. Underlying greed and fear is the swing between euphoria and depression-euphoric investors expect profit while depressed ones cannot feel greedy. Similarly, optimism and pessimism influence expectations and behavior. Investors also swing between credulousness and skepticism, sometimes eagerly accepting stories about future developments and other times rejecting even reasonable projections.
The telecom industry in 1999-2001 demonstrated this cycle perfectly, as investors went from paying handsomely for potential to refusing to value future prospects at all. This cycle in investors' willingness to value the future is one of the most powerful cycles that exists-like an empty building that's either seen as a cash drain or envisioned full of tenants generating profits.
The superior investor is mature, rational, analytical, objective and unemotional. They thoroughly analyze investment fundamentals, calculate intrinsic value, and buy when price discounts suggest good opportunities. Most importantly, they maintain balance between fear and greed. Few people consistently achieve this balance-instead, most investors swing between greed when optimistic and fear when pessimistic, typically at exactly the wrong times.
Investors rarely maintain objective, rational positions. Their perception of events fluctuates wildly between rosy and dark, colored by psychological swings. This manifests in two primary forms: selective perception (noticing only positive or negative events) and skewed interpretation (viewing the same events through either positive or negative lenses). When psychology is positive, everything gets interpreted favorably-strong data means economic strength, weak data means Fed easing, banks' profits show favorable conditions, banks' losses mean bad news is out of the way. The same applies in reverse during negative periods.
8장
Risk Attitudes: The Hidden Driver of Market Cycles
Risk attitudes swing dramatically between market extremes. The rational investor remains diligent, skeptical and appropriately risk-averse at all times while seeking opportunities where potential return compensates for risk. However, most investors oscillate between embracing risk during good times ("Risk? What risk? The more risk I take, the more money I'll make") and complete risk aversion during bad times ("I don't care if I ever make another penny; I just don't want to lose any more").
At its core, investing means bearing risk in pursuit of profit, with superior investors doing this better than others. While some believe they can predict the future with certainty, the smarter investors understand future events aren't knowable with certainty. Risk in investing stems directly from this uncertainty-if events were predictable, investing would be easy.
The fundamental relationship between risk and return is often misinterpreted. The positive slope of the risk/return graph doesn't mean "riskier assets produce higher returns" but rather "investments that seem riskier must appear to promise higher returns, or else no one will make them." This distinction matters because risk and potential return can only be estimated, not guaranteed.
Risk aversion is essential to healthy markets. Because most investors disprefer risk, they approach investing cautiously, perform careful analysis, incorporate conservative assumptions, demand margins of safety, insist on risk premiums, and refuse nonsensical investments. These behaviors keep markets "safe and sane."
When risk attitudes fluctuate, the capital market line's slope changes dramatically. In risk-tolerant times, the line flattens as investors demand smaller risk premiums, meaning less return per unit of risk. This process follows a clear pattern: positive events increase optimism, which increases risk tolerance, causing lower risk premiums, lower demanded returns, higher asset prices, and paradoxically, greater actual risk.
The greatest investment risk emerges when investors believe no risk exists-widespread comfort with risk reliably precedes market declines. Conversely, when investors become excessively risk-averse after painful losses, they avoid all risk, demand enormous premiums, and sell at market bottoms. This creates opportunities where expected returns per unit of risk become unusually generous precisely when investors refuse to accept any risk.
The Global Financial Crisis of 2007-08 exemplifies what happens when risk aversion disappears. Contributing factors included government policies expanding home ownership, the Fed pushing interest rates down, banks packaging and selling mortgage loans rather than holding them, unquestioning extrapolation of low historic default rates, declining lending standards, novel untested securities promising high returns with low risk, relaxed regulations, and media claims that risk had been eliminated through Fed management, global liquidity flows, and financial innovations that "sliced and diced" risk.
When risk aversion becomes excessive, investors subject potential investments to unreasonable scrutiny and endlessly negative assumptions. During panics, people spend 100% of their time making sure there can be no losses... at just the time that they should be worrying instead about missing out on great opportunities. This is when prices are likely at their lowest, making further losses unlikely and risk minimal.
The key question about any investment is: "How much optimism is factored into the price?" When optimism is absent, prices are low, expectations modest, and even slight improvements can lead to appreciation. Understanding investor attitudes toward risk is perhaps the most important cycle to track, as excessive risk tolerance creates danger while excessive risk aversion creates buying opportunities.
9장
The Credit Cycle: The Window That Opens and Slams Shut
The credit cycle is one of the most powerful and influential cycles in finance, characterized by extreme volatility and profound impact on economies and markets. Marks considers it paramount in importance, describing it as a "window" that opens wide and slams shut, often in an instant. While economic growth typically deviates from trendlines by only a few percentage points, corporate profits fluctuate more dramatically due to leverage effects, and securities markets soar and collapse even more drastically due to psychological factors that profoundly influence capital availability.
The credit cycle operates through a clear pattern of expansion and contraction. When the economy enters prosperity, capital providers thrive and expand their capital base. As bad news becomes scarce, perceived lending risks shrink and risk aversion disappears. Financial institutions compete for market share by lowering interest rates, reducing credit standards, providing more capital per transaction, and easing covenants. Eventually, capital flows to unworthy borrowers and projects where the cost of capital exceeds returns, leading to capital destruction.
This reverses the cycle-losses discourage lenders, risk aversion rises along with interest rates and restrictions, and capital becomes scarce. Companies struggle to roll over debts, leading to defaults and bankruptcies, reinforcing economic contraction. At the trough, only the most qualified borrowers receive funding, but the potential for high returns eventually draws capital back in, fueling recovery. As I've summarized it: "Prosperity brings expanded lending, which leads to unwise lending, which produces large losses, which makes lenders stop lending, which ends prosperity, and on and on."
The credit cycle profoundly influences other cycles and markets. Over-permissive capital providers frequently enable financial bubbles, as seen in real estate (1989-92), emerging markets (1994-98), Long-Term Capital Management (1998), movie exhibition (1999-2000), and telecommunications (2000-01). When capital is cheap and plentiful, companies borrow, buy and build-often without discipline, with negative consequences.
The Global Financial Crisis was fundamentally a financial phenomenon driven by credit cycle extremes. Investment banks eagerly transformed sub-prime mortgages into securities with artificially high credit ratings through financial engineering. They often retained the riskiest equity tranches to facilitate issuance or to hold high-yielding assets, while other banks used leverage to buy these risky tranches.
The GFC was primarily a financial phenomenon resulting from easy capital availability, lack of prudence, financial engineering, separation of lending from loan retention, and greed. This was abetted by politicians eager to expand home ownership. When the cycle reached its extreme, it began correcting under its own weight, starting with widespread sub-prime mortgage defaults in 2006. This triggered a cascade of downgradings, price collapses, liquidity crises, and bank failures, culminating in Lehman Brothers' bankruptcy and market panic.
The credit cycle reaches its apex when things have been going well, news is good, and investors are eager. This makes financing cheap with low credit standards and weak deals, putting power in borrowers' hands rather than lenders'. Conversely, at the nadir, when developments are unpleasant and risk aversion high, the credit market freezes, giving leverage to capital providers. Superior investing doesn't come from buying high-quality assets, but from buying when the deal is good, price is low, potential return substantial, and risk limited-conditions that exist when credit markets are stringent rather than euphoric.
10장
Navigating Market Cycles: The Art of Positioning
Our job as investors is to assess asset prices today and judge how they'll change in the future. Prices are affected primarily by fundamentals (earnings, cash flow and their outlook) and psychology (how investors feel about fundamentals). These elements combine in repeating, understandable patterns that cause market behavior.
Markets fluctuate far more than company fundamentals due to psychological and emotional factors. The cycle typically follows a pattern: positive economic events feed investor psychology, lowering risk aversion and return requirements, causing prices to rise. Eventually, events fail to meet expectations, psychology softens, and prices fall until they reach levels that set the stage for recovery.
The "three stages of a bull market" capture this progression perfectly: first, when only a few perceptive people believe things will improve; second, when most realize improvement is occurring; and third, when everyone concludes things will improve forever. Those who buy in the first stage get bargains; those who buy in the third stage pay for excessive enthusiasm and lose money.
Not every significant market rise constitutes a bubble. True bubbles have specific psychological characteristics, primarily the conviction that "there's no such thing as a price too high" for certain assets. This irrational belief abandons the fundamental principle of intelligent investing: buying something for less than it's worth.
The investor's goal is to position capital to benefit from future developments by having more invested when markets rise than when they fall. While some rely on forecasting, I don't believe most people can consistently predict events accurately enough to enhance returns. Instead, understanding where the market stands in its cycle provides crucial insight.
When markets reach cyclical lows, a predictable pattern emerges: prices hit new lows, media fixates on negative trends, investors become depressed, security holders feel foolish, abstainers feel validated, and many give up and sell at depressed prices. Paradoxically, this is precisely when risk is lowest, prospective returns are highest, and investors should be aggressive. The reverse occurs at market tops.
The key to navigating market cycles is understanding where we stand in them. This requires two forms of assessment: quantitative valuation metrics and qualitative observation of investor behavior. Look for signs like optimism versus pessimism in media coverage, acceptance of novel investment schemes, treatment of securities offerings, availability of capital, and historical context of P/E ratios and yield spreads.
The most important indicators are valuations (which depart from norms at cycle extremes) and investor psychology (which often justifies these departures with "it's different this time" reasoning). While these assessments can't tell us exactly what will happen next, they reveal the probabilities. When markets are high in their cycle, downward corrections become more likely than continued gains, and vice versa.
The subprime mortgage bubble emerged from a series of interconnected factors: federal promotion of home ownership, declining interest rates making mortgages more affordable, rising home prices reinforcing the belief that "home prices only go up," and Wall Street's creation of mortgage-backed securities as the "next high-return, low-risk thing."
When the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy triggered widespread panic in 2008, the subprime crisis metastasized from a small corner of the financial world to global markets. The error-making machine reversed: greed became fear, optimism turned to pessimism, risk tolerance vanished, and investors could only see negatives. At this extreme, I recognized that while the news was genuinely negative, the pessimism had become overdone, making assets too cheap.
The cardinal sin in investing is exiting after a decline and missing the rebound. Understanding cycles and having the emotional fortitude to live through them is essential for investment success.
11장
The Cycle of Success: Why Nothing Works Forever
Success itself follows a cyclical pattern, largely driven by human nature. As I explain, "success carries within itself the seeds of failure, and failure the seeds of success." When investors experience success, they often grow overconfident, believing they're smarter than they are. They become less disciplined, worry less about risk, and no longer insist on the margin of safety that produced their earlier successes.
Success teaches dangerous lessons: that making money is easy and risk isn't worth worrying about. Meanwhile, strategies that work attract capital until they become overcrowded and cease to outperform. Nothing works forever-not approaches, rules, or processes. When everyone becomes convinced something will keep working, that's precisely when it won't.
Investment success often fails to repeat because of increased popularity. Bargains typically exist because they haven't been discovered by the herd, while assets that have performed well become popular and high-priced. No approach can outperform indefinitely-strategies work until they don't. When small-cap stocks outperform large-caps, people notice and buy them until they're fully priced, causing interest to rotate back to large-caps.
Good results attract more money to "hot" managers and strategies, and excessive capital eventually ruins performance. As I explain, "everything that produces unusual profitability will attract incremental capital until it becomes overcrowded," while things that perform poorly eventually become so cheap they're primed to outperform.
Companies, like investors, experience cycles of success and failure. Xerox exemplifies this pattern. In the late 1960s, Xerox dominated office copying with a monopoly on "dry" copying technology, commanding high prices and profits through a rental-only model. This success made Xerox a "Nifty Fifty" stock in 1968-companies considered so strong that "nothing bad could happen." But success carried the seeds of failure. A 1975 antitrust consent decree forced Xerox to license its patents, allowing competitors to undercut its prices. By the early 2000s, Xerox's market share had plummeted from nearly 100% to the low teens.
Companies often respond to success by becoming complacent, bureaucratic, slow to defend their positions, less innovative, or by venturing beyond their competence. Yet failure also carries the seeds of success-by 2002, a restructured Xerox had cut costs, eliminated 13,600 positions, sold underperforming operations, and returned to profitability with more competitive products.
Timing plays a crucial role in success. My career benefited from entering nascent markets: first high-yield bonds in 1978 when the universe was less than $3 billion and most institutions refused to buy "junk bonds," and later distressed debt when it was still undiscovered. "There's little that can make investing as easy as having a market largely to oneself," versus trying to extract returns from crowded, mature markets. The latecomer to a crowded field isn't "the wise man in the beginning" but likely "the fool in the end."
Throughout my career, I've repeatedly heard claims that economic cycles have ended. Whether attributed to economic vitality, financial innovation, corporate management, or central bankers' supposed omniscience, pundits have declared that fluctuations in economic or profit cycles would disappear. Yet these proclamations are invariably followed by recessions and market crashes that demonstrate cycles remain very much alive.
