Oaktree Capital founder: One of the most failed practices in investing is

"I want to wait for the bottom before buying"

Howard Marks, co-founder of Oaktree Capital, recently appeared at his alma mater, the Wharton School. In an interview, he mentioned that one of the most failed practices in investing is saying, "I want to wait for the bottom before buying."

This is untenable both logically and operationally, because you can never know if that point is the bottom.

The only reasonable basis for buying can only be that something is already cheap.

You can judge whether something is cheap, but you can never judge "whether today is the last day it will fall."

Good investment does not come from "buying good things," but from "buying things well." The difference between these two statements is not just grammatical.

There is no asset so good that it cannot be bought too expensively, and there is no asset so good that it remains safe after becoming expensive.

So ultimately, everything depends on two things: whether you can objectively assess the quality of an asset itself, and whether you can buy it at an attractive price.

Truly great investment ideas, what people often call

"compounding machines," are actually very scarce. You won't encounter many such things in your lifetime, and the big mistake you are most likely to make is often getting off too early.