Howard Marks does not mind signing other people’s books. “I am not Benjamin Graham!” he scribbles, playfully, on a copy of The Intelligent Investor that an over-eager London School of Economics student has inserted into a pile of Marks’ own work, Mastering the Market Cycle.
The case of mistaken identity is understandable. Alongside Warren Buffett, Marks is the preeminent exponent of value investing — the “buy low, sell high” strategy pioneered by Graham in the 1930s and ’40s.