So, another Wall Street guru is taking a victory lap.
I saw the headline today—Howard Marks reflects on 35 years of writing market memos loved by Buffett and others on Wall Street - CNBC.
Give me a break.
That's the seal of approval, isn't it? The holy benediction. Once Warren Buffett—the patron saint of folksy capitalism—anoints you, your words are no longer just opinions. They become gospel. We're expected to sit down, shut up, and absorb the wisdom from on high, grateful that a man with a ten-figure net worth is sharing his thoughts with us mortals. It’s a tired ritual, this deification of the ultra-rich, and honestly, I'm bored of it.
The Cult of the Memo
Let's be real about what these memos are. They aren't charity. They aren't public service. They are, and always have been, a branding exercise. A brilliant one, at that. For 35 years, Marks has cultivated this persona of the wise, seen-it-all market sage. He’s not just a guy moving capital; he’s a philosopher of capital.
The whole thing is like a carefully constructed piece of theater. I can just picture it: the glow of a Bloomberg terminal lighting up a junior analyst's face at 2 a.m., treating a new memo from Marks like a sacred text. He’s not just reading a market commentary; he’s receiving a transmission from the oracle. This is how a cult of personality is built. It’s not just a memo. No, 'memo' doesn't cover it—it's a stone tablet handed down from the mountain, and the first commandment is "Don't Bet Against the House."
The Buffett endorsement is just the cherry on top. It’s the ultimate insider validation, a signal to everyone else in the club that this is one of our guys. It transforms an opinion piece into an artifact of the financial elite. But does anyone ever stop to ask what any of this actually means for someone who doesn't manage a fund the size of a small country's GDP? Is there a single piece of advice in 35 years of these memos that would have helped a regular person pay their rent or afford groceries? Or is it all just high-level strategic chatter for the 0.1%?
35 Years of What, Exactly?
Thirty-five years. That’s a long time to be right. Or, more accurately, it’s a long time to be successful enough that your wrong calls get forgotten and your right calls get carved into legend.
This is the classic survivorship bias narrative that Wall Street sells better than anyone. We get the retrospective from the guy who made it. We celebrate the wisdom of the winner because, well, he won. It’s offcourse easy to look smart in hindsight when you’re sitting on a mountain of cash. For every Howard Marks, there are a thousand guys who wrote memos predicting the exact opposite, who made one wrong bet on interest rates or a housing market, and now they're selling insurance or something, and we just…
We never hear from them, do we? Their memos are digital dust. Their "reflections" don't get a glossy feature article. We only listen to the winners, which creates a dangerous feedback loop where we assume winning is a direct result of unique genius, and not a chaotic mix of timing, luck, and, yes, some genuine skill.
It reminds me of the absolute garbage fire that is the "thought leader" economy on LinkedIn, where every mid-level manager with a podcast suddenly thinks they’re Steve Jobs. It’s a firehose of unsolicited advice and self-congratulatory nonsense. Marks is just the original, analog version of this—an influencer for the private jet class.
Then again, who am I to talk? I'm just a guy banging on a keyboard in a messy apartment. Marks is a billionaire. Maybe he really does have it all figured out, and I’m just the cynic yelling from the cheap seats. Maybe I'm the idiot.
But I doubt it.
It Ain't That Deep
When you strip away all the mystique, the fawning praise from other billionaires, and the 35-year legacy, what are you left with? A rich guy writing down his thoughts on the market. That's it.
The content of the memos is almost irrelevant. The "wisdom" isn't in the words themselves; it's in the fact that they're written by a man who has already won the game so decisively. If your plumber wrote the exact same sentences about market cycles and risk assessment, you’d throw it in the trash. But because it comes from Howard Marks, it’s treated as profound.
This whole spectacle isn't about sharing knowledge. It's about reinforcing a hierarchy. It’s a reminder that there are people who know, and then there’s the rest of us who are supposed to listen. It’s just rich-guy podcasting before podcasts were a thing. And I, for one, am not subscribing.
