Oaktree Capital Founder: One of the dumbest things in investing is "waiting to buy at the bottom"

Golden Finance reports that on April 23rd, Howard Marks, co-founder of Oak Tree Capital, recently appeared at his alma mater, Wharton School of Business. In an interview, he mentioned that one of the stupidest practices in investing is saying, “I’ll wait until the bottom to buy.”
From both a logical and operational perspective, this approach is invalid because you can never know if that point is truly the bottom. The only reasonable basis for buying is that the asset has already become cheap. You can judge whether something is cheap, but you can never determine if “today is the last day to fall.”
Good investing does not come from “buying good things,” but from “buying things well.” The difference between these two statements is not just grammatical. No asset is so good that it cannot be bought at a premium, nor so good that it remains safe after becoming expensive. Ultimately, everything depends on two things: whether you can objectively assess the quality of an asset itself, and whether you can buy it at an attractive price.
Truly great investment ideas, which are now often called “compound interest machines,” are actually very rare. You might not encounter many such opportunities in your lifetime. The biggest mistake you are most likely to make is to sell too early. (Dongxin News Agency)