Howard Marks: The BIGGEST Investment Opportunity in 40 Years

53 years in your investing career, there have been three sea changes, and we are in one of them. What does that mean? Howard Marks, he is a billionaire and one of the most highly respected investors in the world. Marks has been investing for over 50 years, meaning he knows a thing or two when it comes to investing. In a recent interview, he talked about a recent shift in the stock market and economy that you need to know about. He said this is the first time in over 40 years he has seen this happen, making it a truly once in a generation opportunity.

In this video, we're going to talk about what exactly Howard Marks is seeing, why the shift in the market is occurring, and how you can avoid being left behind as the quote unquote "C" starts to change. But first, make sure to hit that like button and subscribe to the channel because it's my goal to make you a better investor by studying the world's greatest investors. Now, let's listen to what Howard Marks had to say.

So let's start with the sea change. That was the big headline from your report. It's how you kicked off your memo. You said, "53 years in your investing career, there have been three sea changes and we are in one of them." What does that mean?

Well, a sea change is a major transformation of the environment, a complete change in attitudes, etc. And I suspect that we may be at the beginning of one. The first one was the fall of interest rates from 20 to zero between 1980 and 2020, which had very, very positive effects. The second was the opening of investors' minds to what we call risk-return analysis. Before the 70s, the job of the investor was to avoid risk. After the 70s, it was to intelligently take risk. That was a big change, and I think that we may be on the doorstep of the third.

So what is the sea change? Well, you know, since that's happening, since the Fed, central banks around the world, and the treasury took strong action to solve the global financial crisis in '08-'09, we have been living in a highly stimulated, very positive, easy money environment for roughly 14 years. I think that, you know, a lot of people began to invest or came into the business in those 14 years. Not too many have a perspective on the period before the global financial crisis, and they may think that the last 14 years was normalcy. I don't think so. I think it was the best imaginable period for borrowers and for asset owners, and I don't think that it's necessarily going to continue.

So do you characterize the past 14 years post-financial crisis as a bubble, and now that that is popping, we return to some sort of normality or even a crash? Well, a bubble—most people take a bubble to mean irrational appreciation, and the asset appreciation in that period was not terribly positive. It wasn't an unusual 14-year period in terms of asset returns, etc. It wasn't the result of unrealistically optimistic thinking.

So, I think a bubble has a specific use, but it was a hyped, unusually positive period when everything was easy for certain classes of people. As I said before, borrowers and asset owners in particular. It isn't normalcy, and I don't think it's gonna be the norm going forward.

To truly appreciate Howard Marks' comments, you first have to understand the relationship between interest rates and asset values. Asset values are just a fancy way of saying things people own as investments. Think of stocks, bonds, and real estate as the most common types of assets the average investor owns in their portfolio. The value of an asset is based on the cash it will generate for you as the owner, discounted back to the present day using an interest rate.

While this may sound super complicated, it's actually a relatively straightforward equation. Let's say you buy a stock that produces twenty dollars a year in cash for you every year for 10 years. At the end of that 10 years, you can then sell the stock for two hundred dollars. You know how much cash the stock will produce, so the last step is to determine the interest rate used to discount those cash flows back to the present day.

The reason you have to discount the cash flows is because a dollar today is not worth the same as a dollar 10 years from now. If you had to choose between receiving a thousand dollars today or one thousand dollars ten years from now, you would obviously want that money today. This is referred to in investing as the time value of money.

For the sake of this example, I'm going to start out by using a 15% interest rate. Using that 15% interest rate gives us a stock price of a hundred and fifty dollars per share. But let's see what happens as we decrease that interest rate. Bringing that interest rate down to 12% gives us a new stock price of one hundred and seventy-seven dollars. If we decrease that interest rate even further down to 9%, the stock price continues to rise all the way to two hundred and thirteen dollars. If we bring the interest rate all the way down to 6%, the stock continues to skyrocket, with the price hitting 259 dollars per share.

Notice how the amount of cash the stock produces stays exactly the same. The only thing that changed was the interest rate. The declining interest rate was powerful enough to push our stock price up from 150 a share at a 15% rate all the way to 259 dollars per share at a 6% rate. This is an increase in the value of the stock of 73%, all of which occurred while the stock didn't make a single additional dollar of cash flow.

As Howard Marks mentioned in the video, this is what's been happening in the stock market and the economy for the last 40 years. Take a look at this chart of the U.S. federal funds rate, which is a measure of the interest rates in the economy. In 1980, the funds rate was upwards of 15%. Over the last 40 years, interest rates have been on a downward trajectory. Sure, there are multiple temporary spikes throughout the decades, but clearly the trend was down. This trend continued until interest rates literally could not go down any further.

So, in the aftermath of the great financial crisis, interest rates hit essentially zero percent and stayed there for years. 40 years of declining interest rates provided quite a tailwind for stock prices. The S&P 500 hit a low in the 1980s of 325. It finished 2021 at over 5,000. This is an increase of more than 15 times over a 40-year period. The last 40 years have been amazing for investors in the U.S. stock market.

That brings us to the point Howard Marks made in the interview: the stock market and the economy is experiencing a once-in-a-generation sea change. The last 40 years was marked by continuously declining interest rates. We're now entering a period of time where investors are going to have to contend with rising interest rates. This sea change from a declining interest rate environment to a rising interest rate environment will likely be the defining theme for investors in future years.

As Warren Buffett likes to say, rising interest rates are like gravity on stocks. As interest rates rise, this puts downward pressure on stock prices. Put simply, higher interest rates equal lower stock prices. Here's what Howard Marks had to say when asked what the future interest rate environment would look like.

So is your bottom line that stimulative rates are a thing of the past, and now we should just get used to higher rates for longer, even though the market is sort of thinking that they might go down next year? Well, you know, I don't think that we should expect—I don't think it's prudent to expect to have stimulative rates all the time. You know, I describe that as taking a shot of adrenaline every morning. I don't think it's very viable.

We'll see lower rates. Well, first of all, when the battle against inflation is won, I think rates will—the Fed will bring the Fed funds rate back down. And we'll see very low rates again if there's a recession that has to be cured over time. But I just think that, you know, people got so used to zero rates of interest. You know, the Fed brought the Fed funds rate to zero late '08 to fight the global financial crisis and left it there for seven years, and had a Dickens of a time raising it because it thought it shouldn't—thought that we shouldn't permanently be at zero. But the markets had tantrums and resisted.

I don't think that, you know, what I say in the memo—I don't make many predictions. I don't believe in predictions, including my own. We don't bet on predictions at Oak Tree. But what I said in the memo is I think that for the next several years, the Fed funds rate is more likely to average between two and four than between zero and two. That's as far as I can go. What happens with interest rates will ultimately be dependent on what happens with inflation.

It's no secret that inflation is incredibly high currently, the highest it's been in 40 years. In order to get this under control, the Federal Reserve, the government body responsible for influencing interest rates, had no choice but to raise rates. Going back to our chart of interest rates, we can see that the Fed was forced to raise interest rates at likely the fastest pace ever to reel in the runaway inflation. These rising interest rates weighed heavily on the stock market.

Remember from our earlier example, as interest rates rise, stocks become less valuable—all else being equal. 2022 is one of the worst years ever for the stock market. The market fell 18% in 2022, making it the seventh worst year ever in the history of the U.S. stock market. 2022 is up there with some pretty historical moments such as the dot-com bubble bursting in 2002 when the stock market was down 22%. There was also the great financial crisis of 2008 when stocks fell nearly 37% that year. Just for the cherry on top, three of the years were actually during the Great Depression, the biggest economic slump in the history of capitalism.

The Fed is committed to raising interest rates until inflation normalizes. Here is a simplistic example of how rising interest rates can hopefully cool inflation. The price of any good or service is determined by supply and demand. On this graph, we have the supply line here and our demand side here. The point at which these lines cross is the price for that good or service. Low and declining interest rates cause demand to increase. This is because it becomes less costly to borrow money to make purchases.

The perfect example of this is buying a house. A four hundred thousand dollar 30-year mortgage at a seven percent interest rate has a monthly payment of two thousand six hundred and sixty-one dollars. That same mortgage at a three percent interest rate only has a monthly payment of one thousand six hundred and eighty-six dollars. That's just one example, but the main takeaway here is that lower interest rates cause demand to increase. We can see on our graph that as demand increases, it causes the price of goods and services to rise, assuming a stable supply of those goods and services. This increase in prices is known as inflation.

However, rising interest rates have the opposite effect. As interest rates rise, demand decreases because it's more expensive for people and companies to borrow money to make big purchases. Imagine if you're the CEO of a company and you're planning to build a brand new factory. You're probably going to have to borrow the money in order to have the cash to spend the millions of dollars required to build that factory.

When interest rates are higher, it becomes more expensive for you to borrow that money. This means you'll likely have to build a smaller factory or maybe not build it at all. This causes demand for all the products involved in building that factory—things like equipment, machines, shingles for the roof, etc.—to decrease. We can see in our graph here that when demand decreases, that causes prices to come down. This is deflation, the opposite of inflation.

Now, of course, this is obviously a simplistic example, but it demonstrates why the Fed is aggressively raising interest rates in order to try to bring inflation down to a more normalized level. If it turns out that the Fed is able to get inflation under control without raising interest rates to levels as seen in the 1980s, this will be a huge win for investors. Only time will tell, but this is what Howard Marks thinks will happen based on what he wrote in the memo he referenced in the interview.

The underlying causes of today's inflation will probably abate as relief swollen savings are spent and as supply catches up with demand. The Fed appears likely to slow the pace of its interest rate increases. I believe that the base interest rate over the next several years is more likely to average two to four percent, i.e., not far from where it is now, than zero to two percent. The bottom line is that highly stimulative rates are likely not on the cards for the next several years, barring a serious recession from which we need rescuing.

What Howard Marks is saying here is that he believes the Fed will be able to get inflation under control. As a result, the Fed will be able to stop raising interest rates so aggressively. However, that doesn't mean that interest rates are going back to zero percent like they were for the better part of the last 15 years. Instead, the quote-unquote "New Normal" will be somewhere in between the high interest rates of the 1980s and the zero percent interest rates of the 2010s.

This brings us to the question I want to answer in this video: what does all of this mean for us as investors? Thankfully, Marks went on to shed some light about how investors should be approaching the sea change. "We've gone from the low return world of 2009 to 2021 to a full return world, and it may become more so in the near term. Investors can now potentially get solid returns from credit instruments, meaning they no longer have to rely as heavily on riskier investments to achieve their overall return targets."

Lenders and bargain hunters face much better prospects in this changed environment than they did in 2009-2021. And importantly, if you grant that the environment is and may continue to be very different from what it was over the last 13 years and most of the last 40 years, it should follow that the investment strategies that worked best over those periods may not be the ones that outperform in the years ahead. That's the sea change I'm talking about.

This last line is the most powerful: the investment strategies that worked best over those periods may not be the ones that outperform in the years ahead. So, what exactly should investors be doing now that things have changed? Here are three pieces of advice from Howard Marks himself.

Number one is that you can now buy bonds instead of purely just stocks. If you invest, your goal is to obviously maximize the return your money generates for you. Typically, investors will include both stocks and bonds in their portfolios. However, until very recently, you almost had to invest entirely in the stock market in order to generate any return at all because interest rates were so low. If you bought a 10-year government bond in the summer of 2020, your yield—or just a fancy way of saying interest rate—was just 0.5% a year. That is way below the inflation rate, and it would be virtually impossible to build wealth at such a minuscule return.

However, the yield on a 10-year government bond recently surpassed four percent, the first time this has happened in nearly 15 years. While four percent is by no means an incredibly high return, it is more than eight times higher than the lows it hit in summer 2020.

This brings us to point number two: you can take less risk and still generate good returns. When interest rates are low, investors tend to make more risky investments in the hopes of generating a return high enough to meet their goals. This is why you saw things like Bitcoin's spikes and meme stocks become so popular in 2020 and 2021. For large institutional investors like pension funds, this meant investing in things like private equity, venture capital, and real estate assets that are generally considered a little bit more risky than a vanilla portfolio of stocks and bonds.

Let's say you're in a pension fund that needs to generate a seven percent annual return in order to pay the living expenses of the retired workers the pension fund supports. Traditionally, the pension fund would invest in a portfolio of stocks and bonds. In this example, let's say the fund splits 50/50 stocks and 50 bonds. When stocks are returning 10% a year and bonds are returning zero percent, this gets you a combined annual return of 5%, well below that goal of seven percent. So, in order to meet that goal, the manager of the pension fund would likely have to take some of the money out of bonds and instead put it in things like private equity and venture capital where the expected returns are higher.

But let's see what happens when the return of bonds increases from zero to four percent. That higher return from bonds causes the total return of the portfolio to jump from five to seven percent. The pension fund is now meeting its return goals without having to invest in riskier things. This is what Howard Marks meant when he said that due to higher interest rates, investors no longer have to rely on risky investments to hit their return targets.

Number three is to build a cash position as there will be opportunities over the next 12 to 24 months. Until recently, the money that you had sitting in your bank account was earning you an interest rate of zero percent. After factoring in the impacts of inflation, your money was becoming worth less and less the longer you had your cash sitting in a bank account and not invested.

In investing lingo, this is referred to as your opportunity cost—the investment return that you are missing out on by having your money sit in a savings account waiting for a good opportunity to come along. Here's one way to think about opportunity cost: let's say the average annual return of the stock market is seven percent. In recent years, the return you would get from holding cash would be zero percent. The difference between the average return of the stock market and your return for holding cash is one measure of your opportunity cost.

In this case, your opportunity cost of holding cash when interest rates are zero percent is seven percent. However, now interest rates are much higher and your cash sitting in a savings account actually generates a better return. My high-yield savings account generates a three percent annual return. This means the opportunity cost of me holding cash decreases to just four percent. While this is still obviously not ideal, higher interest rates result in a lower opportunity cost of holding cash.

The longer the opportunity cost, the less you are penalized for holding cash. Howard Marks mentioned in his memo that now would be a good time to start building a large cash position to take advantage of any attractive investment opportunities that may become available over the next year or two.

So there you have it. I hope you enjoyed the video. Make sure to hit that like button and subscribe to the channel because it's my goal to make you a better investor by studying the world's greatest investors. Talk to you again soon.