Stay focused on the big picture

Stay focused on the big picture. Howard Marks of Oaktree Capital Management, speaking at the Goldman Sachs Financial Services conference this week said I think that the most important single question that any fund manager or portfolio strategist has to answer at any point in time is whether to be on offense or defense and how aggressive, how defensive. And I believe that if you get that question right, then you don't have to get security selection and selection of strategies and managers exactly right. And vice versa, if you get that wrong all the security selection you do in the world isn't going to help you, probably. So, I tend to spend my time on the big picture. And while one of the tenets of our philosophy is that you can't see the future, we believe that by judging from what's going on around us at the present time we can make some appropriate adjustments. And I think that we have gotten the bullish/bearish, offense/defense decision essentially right over time and we're always endeavoring to keep doing that.