Howard Marks' Oaktree Capital (NYSE: OAK) earned billions by investing heavily at the depths of the financial crisis. It may not surprise you to learn that Marks and his team made out huge by investing at a time when everyone else in the market was terrified. It might surprise you much more to know that these are no robots. They were actually quite terrified, too.

Marks' memos, which he has written since 1990, have long been priority reading for some of the best investors in the world -- Warren Buffett has famously said that whenever he sees one in his inbox, that's what he reads first. In 2011 Marks released his first book, The Most Important Thing, which, in direct contradiction with the title, listed 20 things to which the successful investor ought to pay attention. His second book, out this month, is titled Mastering the Market Cycle: Getting the Odds on Your Side.

In this wide-ranging interview with Bill Mann, Marks discussed the words that ought to be banned from an investor's vocabulary, whether who sits in the president's chair matters to investors, how his team prepared and steeled themselves during the financial collapse, and where we currently sit in the market cycle.

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