Howard Marks’ 2024 memo, “Easy Money,” delves beyond investing to explore the irrationality of soaring prices and peculiar investor behaviour.
Leveraging his profound financial expertise, Marks scrutinizes the allure of easily accessible money, its impact on investment strategies, and the concealed risks that emerge when markets become excessively exuberant.
Marks initiates his exploration by delving into historical contexts, referencing Edward Chancellor’s books, ‘Devil Take the Hindmost: A History of Financial Speculation’ and ‘The Price of Time: The Real Story of Interest.’
These narratives recount instances when individuals succumbed to the allure of wealth, abandoned rationality, and encountered significant financial crashes.
Marks serves as a reminder of past colossal mistakes in the stock market, such as the dot-com bubble and the housing crisis, illustrating how the temptation of easy money can deceive individuals and pave the way for substantial problems.
RISK AND OVERCONFIDENCE
Risk and overconfidence are likened to the experience of climbing a huge mountain while consuming copious amounts of energy drinks and feeling overly assured - a perilous scenario emblematic of the hazards easy money poses for investors. Howard Marks illustrates how markets, inherently characterized by fluctuations, transform into tumultuous roller-coasters when fuelled by easy money.
He references the 1987 Black Monday as a stark example, where risky leveraging led to a 23% plunge in the Dow Jones in a single day. The 1980s witnessed frequent instances of such high-stakes, precarious business dealings culminating in adverse outcomes, highlighting that easy money can lead to big falls, not just big successes.
BIG BUBBLES
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