As you might know, I reviewed Howard Marks’ excellent book The Most Important Thing, and its enhanced version, The Most Important Thing Illuminated.? Some PR flacks are more tenacious, and some less so.? Some come to me prior to publication, and some after.? Some represent an amazing author and book, others less so.

Even though the PR flack came to me after publication, she was tenacious, and offered me an interview with Howard Marks, Chairman of Oaktree Capital.? How could I refuse?

Now, I need to offer one apology before providing the link to the half hour audio interview.? If you read Howard Marks’ newsletters you know that he runs a shop that focuses on bonds, particularly high yield, convertible, and distressed debt.? But almost all of the principles that he puts forth apply to equity value investing as well, and so I assumed that he did some of that as well.? I should have looked at Oaktree’s strategies, and seen that they do little in vanilla asset classes like domestic US equities.

That invalidated a number of questions that I asked Mr. Marks via e-mail, but I had enough good questions to fill out a good half hour.? One final note: during the interview, he needed to take phone calls twice, and I edited those out of the audio file.? They took place near minutes eight and twenty-one.

With no further ado, here is my interview with Howard Marks:

Howard Marks Interview