Billionaire investor Howard Marks touts bargain assets, trumpets China, and warns against trying to time the market. Here are his 9 best quotes from a new interview.

• Howard Marks framed the market downturn as a rich opportunity for bargain hunters.
• The billionaire investor said he pounces on deals instead of waiting and trying to time the market.

Howard Marks trumpeted the bargains available in the current downturn, touted beaten-down Chinese assets, and warned against trying to time the market in a recent Bloomberg Surveillance interview.

The billionaire investor and Oaktree Capital Management cofounder also cautioned against relying on macroeconomic forecasts, underlined the peculiarity of the current market backdrop, and asserted that skill matters far more in the alternative-investment space than in the stock and bond markets.

Here are Marks' 9 best quotes, lightly edited for length and clarity:

1. "When there's euphoria, when there's optimism, when there's greed — that's a very difficult climate for the value investor to find bargains. We're happier today than we were six months ago. I don't know if we're going to be happier six months from now. The bargains will be more pronounced, but at least the bloom is off the rose."

2. "We're not market timers. We never sell to raise cash to prepare for a decline. And we never say, 'It's cheap today, but it will be cheaper in six months, so we'll wait.' If it's cheap today, we buy it. If it's cheaper in six months, we buy more."

3. "Everybody gets concerned when prices decline. But the flip side of price deterioration is that the prospective returns on many asset
 classes are higher than they were just a little while ago. Again, a much better climate for the bargain hunter
."

4. "Macro forecasts are very important. The only problem is they're rarely right."

5. "From time to time, other parts of the world offer better bargains. We have the best in the US, but the best usually doesn't come cheap."

6. "I've made my living for the last 50 years investing in the things other people said were uninvestable: high-yield bonds, distressed debt, emerging markets in 1998. When I hear people say that China's uninvestable, to me that says maybe there are some bargains there, if everybody else is boycotting that sector
."

7. "In the public asset classes like stocks and bonds, most of the return is determined by the performance of the market. Which manager you have means a little plus or a little minus. In the alternative markets, there isn't that gravitational pull toward the market return. What really matters is whether your manager is highly skilled and disciplined or not." (Marks listed private equity, distressed debt, and real estate as examples of alternative investments.)

8. "These conditions are not reminiscent of any that I've lived through." (Marks pointed to the pandemic, Russia's invasion of Ukraine, America's economic rivalry with China, and historically low interest rates as four key drivers of the current market.)

9. "Buffett always puts it best: When the tide goes out, we find out who was swimming without a bathing suit. When economic and financial conditions become more difficult, we find out who made good credit decisions, and who made bad ones. We'll see."

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