Howard Marks celebrates 35 years of writing his acclaimed memos. He wasn't sure anyone read them at first

Howard Marks didn't set out to become one of the most widely read thinkers in finance. When the Oaktree Capital co-founder wrote his first investment memo in 1990, he mailed it to a few dozen clients, and he heard nothing back for 10 years. That changed in January 2000 when he put out his memo titled "Bubble.com," with his warning that investors' blind faith in the internet was setting up a fall. "This was the first of my memos to engender any response from readers," Marks said. "It describes the psychology of market bubbles in the context of a dot-com boom that would shortly become a dot-com bust when equity valuations fueled by excessive belief in the 'the new, new thing' fell back to earth." Within months, the dot-com boom had collapsed, turning Marks into one of Wall Street's most resp