"We don’t expect to be able to hit the bottom. All we care about is that we’re buying cheap. If it gets cheaper, we buy more. Eventually, it’ll work out - so long as we are right.”

HOWARD MARKS is chairman of private equity firm Oaktree Capital, which he co-founded and grew into the biggest distressed-debt investor in the world.

Oaktree's assets under management amounted to about US$83 billion, according to an entry in Wikipedia a few years ago.

Oaktree employs approximately 600 people in Los Angeles (headquarters), New York, Stamford (Connecticut), Amsterdam, Frankfurt, London, Luxembourg, Paris, Beijing, Hong Kong, Seoul, Singapore and Tokyo.

Mr Marks has just put out a 'memo to clients' in which he asserts that in the stock market, history often repeats itself and investors should learn and take advantage of such situations.

Distilling from his decades of investing experience, the 66-year-old shared a particularly interesting view on how to sport bargains (see screenshot below).

There are more insights contained in his entire memo, which is 10 pages long, and which you can read on the Oaktree website.

And if you want more, there is an excellent 2011 Bloomberg article on Mr Marks and his investment philosophy here.