An article for Yahoo! Finance disseminates the 5 most valuable investing takeaways from legendary investor Howard Marks’ book, The Most Important Thing. Marks is the founder of Oaktree Capital Management,…
Tag: risk
The Elusive Definition of Risk – And Some Practical Ways to Measure It (Ep. 71)
Risk is one of the most difficult concepts in investing to define. Part of that is because we face many risks as investors that come from many different directions. But…
What is Risk?
By Jack Forehand, CFA (@practicalquant) There might not be a term that is the subject of more debate in the investment industry than risk. If you asked ten different investors to define…
The Probability Theory in Finance and Radical Uncertainty
The first in a three-part series of CFA Institute articles explores “how we came to forget how to live with real uncertainty, the “profound consequences this has had on finance…
Gambling Not a Great Investment Strategy
Older investors focused on landing fat returns by taking on more risk might be putting their retirement in harm’s way, according to a recent article in The New York Times.…
A Different Definition of Risk
By Jack Forehand (@practicalquant) — Investment professionals like to use a myriad of fancy terms to measure risk. The problem with almost all of them is that they are in no…
Morgan Housel: Discomfort the Key to Investing Success
A key component of becoming a successful investor, writes Morgan Housel of the Collaborative Fund, is the “ability to be comfortable being uncomfortable.” Investors, he says, “have a fascination with no-brainers,…
Max Drawdown a Good Indicator of Fund Volatility
When evaluating an equity fund’s volatility, more attention should be paid to “max drawdown”—the maximum decline a fund has experienced from peak to trough over a given period—than to standard…
Marks: Be Selective in a Heated Market
Last month, Bloomberg’s Erick Schatzker sat down with Howard Marks, co-chairman of Oaktree Capital, to discuss the fund manager’s investment approach. With respect to whether the now-stretched equity valuations…
Marks: The Future Is Unknowable, So How Should We Invest?
Howard Marks, Oaktree’s CEO, recently wrote an article for Barron’s on investment risk, and how to quantify it. His answer: you simply can’t. (more…)