Howard Marks, one of the most respected value investors out there, warned on Thursday about inflated financial markets and the growing risk of passive investing in the infamous technology ‘FANG’ stocks.
“The willingness of people to say, ‘I love the FANGs, there is no price too high,'” is worrisome, he said Thursday on CNBC’s “Halftime Report” referring to the soaring heights this year in shares of Facebook, Amazon, Netflix and Google-parent Alphabet.
“Several times in my career, which spans almost fifty years, I’ve seen one group of stocks anointed as super stocks. The companies are so great that nothing can go wrong. Because they are so great there is no price too high … [But] the key to understand the markets, everything of value or truth eventually gets overdone.”
The investor is also concerned the rise of passive investing is making FANG stock investing a “dangerous place.”
If index funds “buy the FANGs regardless of price then that’s a risk. There’s nobody sitting at the index funds saying let’s not buy that today because it’s too expensive. They have to buy it,” Marks said. “And anytime people buy because they have to, then the world is a dangerous place.”
“There’s nothing that’s cheap today,” Marks added, referring to all financial markets today.
After his investment memo got so much attention two weeks ago, Marks wanted to clarify that he doesn’t know the timing of when the market will drop.
“P/E ratios are higher than usual … prices are high,” the investor added. “That is not a position that warrants a full ration of risk.”
Marks believes the credit market is even more overvalued than the stock market.
“We’re in a bond bubble … bonds yield the least they’ve ever had,” Marks said.
The co-chairman of Oaktree Capital is famous for his prescient investment memos, which predicted the financial crisis and the dot-com bubble implosion.
Oaktree Capital has $99 billion of assets under management as of June 2017, according to its website.
Source: Investment Cnbc
Billionaire investor Howard Marks: Passive investing making certain tech stocks a 'dangerous place'