The Most Important Thing Illuminated

In May of 2011, Columbia Business School Publishing published Howard Marks's The Most Important Thing. Distilling the wisdom of Marks's celebrated client memos into a single volume and, for the first time, making his time-tested investing philosophy available to general readers, the book was widely acclaimed by professional, casual, aspiring, and armchair investors-and became a business bestseller.

Columbia Business School Publishing is proud to announce an innovative digital edition (with a print version to come in 2013) of Marks's volume that allows readers to read the author's words alongside the comments, insights, and counterpoints of four renowned investors and investment educators: Christopher C. Davis (Davis Funds), Joel Greenblatt (Gotham Capital), Paul Johnson (Nicusa Capital), and Seth A. Klarman (Baupost Group). These experts lend insight into such concepts as "second-level thinking," the price/value relationship, patient opportunism, and defensive investing. Marks also adds his own annotations, expanding on the book's original themes and issues. This digital edition includes a new, twenty-first chapter on the importance of reasonable expectations, as well as a foreword by Bruce C. Greenwald, called "a guru to Wall Street's gurus" by the New York Times and a leading authority on value investing, productivity, and the economics of information.

Howard Marks is chairman and cofounder of Oaktree Capital Management, a Los Angeles-based investment firm with seventy-five billion dollars under management. He holds a Bachelor's Degree in finance from the Wharton School and an MBA in accounting and marketing from the University of Chicago. He is the author of The Most Important Thing: Uncommon Sense for the Thoughtful Investor.

Bruce C. Greenwald holds the Robert Heilbrunn Professorship of Finance and Asset Management at Columbia Business School and is the academic director of the Heilbrunn Center for Graham & Dodd Investing. He is the coauthor of The Curse of the Mogul: What's Wrong with the World's Leading Media Companies.