Howard Marks

Howard Marks’s Oaktree Capital Management filed a first-quarter 13F that reads less like a distressed-debt playbook and more like a concentrated bet on cyclical shipping and energy, with a defensive hedge in gold. The fund’s largest position, TORM PLC, a product tanker operator, accounts for roughly 10.7 percent of the portfolio at $675 million. That is a heavy single-name weight for any manager, let alone one known for value discipline. Oaktree also holds $575 million in Expand Energy, a natural gas producer, as its second-largest stake. Together, the two positions make up about a fifth of the fund’s disclosed equity assets. The rest of the top holdings diverge sharply from typical value peers. Oaktree owns $329 million in the Invesco QQQ Trust, a Nasdaq-100 tracker, which is an unusual passive growth overlay for a firm built on active, contrarian credit. It also holds $314 million in AngloGold Ashanti, a gold miner. That combination suggests Oaktree is not making a single macroeconomic call. Instead, it is pairing cyclical freight and energy exposure with a growth index and a gold hedge, a structure that looks more like a balanced barbell than a classic deep-value portfolio. Oaktree’s total disclosed equity AUM sits at $6.28 billion, a modest figure relative to the firm’s overall credit assets. The 13F only captures long-only public equities, so the filing understates the firm’s true footprint. But within that window, the message is clear: Oaktree is willing to hold concentrated, illiquid-style positions in niche sectors, and it is not afraid to own a broad market ETF alongside them. That is a pragmatic, not dogmatic, application of value investing.