The Most Important Thing
Marks, co-founder of Oaktree Capital, distills decades of his famous memos into a philosophy of risk, contrarianism, and second-level thinking. First-level thinking says it's a good company, let's buy. Second-level thinking says everyone thinks it's great, so it's overpriced, let's sell. Buffett opens Marks's memos before anything else on his desk. That should tell you something.
Marks restates the same handful of concepts within and across chapters, and reviewers say individual sections could be cut to a quarter of their length. Readers already fluent in Graham, Buffett, and Klarman find nothing new here, and more than one calls the whole thing a “clumsy cut-and-paste job performed on the Oaktree shareholder letters,” arguing the originals, free on Oaktree’s site and anchored to a specific market moment, read better, since “the memos themselves are significantly better.” One pointed critique accuses Marks of dismissing technical analysis in the text while effectively using it himself, noting he “does not understand the practical use of technical analysis” he’s implicitly applying. The book leans heavily on memos from 2004 to 2009, and the Illuminated edition’s added commentary strikes some readers as filler, “like it has a piped in applause track.”
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
