The Most Important Thing Illuminated: Uncommon Sense for the Thoughtful Investor
Howard Marks
Abstract
In The Most Important Thing investing insight of this book’s author’s celebrated client memos was distilled into a single text and made his philosophy available to general readers. In this book, this wisdom is joined by the comments, insights, and counterpoints of four renowned investors and investment educators. These experts lend insight into the most important concepts in successful investing, such as “second-level thinking,” the price/value relationship, patient opportunism, and defensive investing. The author also adds his own annotations, expanding on his book’s original themes and issue ... More
In The Most Important Thing investing insight of this book’s author’s celebrated client memos was distilled into a single text and made his philosophy available to general readers. In this book, this wisdom is joined by the comments, insights, and counterpoints of four renowned investors and investment educators. These experts lend insight into the most important concepts in successful investing, such as “second-level thinking,” the price/value relationship, patient opportunism, and defensive investing. The author also adds his own annotations, expanding on his book’s original themes and issues. A new chapter addresses the importance of reasonable expectations, and a foreword by Bruce C. Greenwald, called “a guru to Wall Street’s gurus” by the New York Times, speaks on value investing, productivity, and the economics of information. The book provides valuable lessons for critical thinking, risk assessment, and investment strategy. Encouraging investors to be “contrarian,” he judges market cycles and achieves returns through aggressive yet measured action. Which element is the most essential? Successful investing requires thoughtful attention to many separate aspects, and each of the book’s subjects proves to be the most important thing.
Keywords:
second-level thinking,
price/value relationship,
value investing,
investment strategy,
productivity,
defensive investing,
patient opportunism,
reasonable expectations
Bibliographic Information
| Print publication date: 2013 |
Print ISBN-13: 9780231162845 |
| Published to Columbia Scholarship Online: November 2015 |
DOI:10.7312/columbia/9780231162845.001.0001 |
