Howard Marks shares his fascinating experience using Claude AI, first for writing investment memos and later for stock analysis, ...
What Howard Marks said
Written from the verified transcript and checked against it. Every figure links to the moment it was said.
Howard Marks discussed how AI, particularly Claude, has served as a mentor to him, helping him update a memo he first wrote in December. He described how his son Andrew, a venture capitalist at TQ Ventures, suggested using Claude to learn about recent developments, and Marks found the AI's tutorial invaluable. Marks said AI currently helps marshal data with thoroughness and speed but has not changed the core credit analysis process, which still requires assessing a company's ability to pay debts. He noted Claude's weakness in analyzing brand new situations without established patterns, and that he would not make an investment commitment based solely on AI's hypothesis. Marks was impressed by Claude's personal, warm response to his memo, even joking about being 'hypercritical.' He predicted AI will advance indexation, raising the bar and weeding out investors who don't add value, but it won't replace the best.
Key takeaways
Marks used Claude as a mentor to update his December memo, learning a lot in a field not native to him.
Marks said AI is weakest at analyzing brand new things without established patterns, which is much of what his firm does.
Marks would not make an investment commitment based on AI's hypothesis alone; he would want people to check it.
Marks believes AI will advance indexation, raising the bar and weeding out investors who don't add value.
Marks said AI won't replace the best investors, but it will replace a lot of them.
Education that goes into becoming an investor and how that's changing. It feels like it's easier to learn without mentors because everything's been compacted into AI and open-sourced on the internet and you can watch great lectures and podcast interviews. What's changed and what's the same?
Well, my perception is that AI, number one, AI has a mentor. It reads everything that ever happened and digests it and remembers it and can find it. And then AI becomes a mentor, you know, how to think. It gives you examples of thought processes. Makes it so much easier to learn, you know? And I wrote a memo in December. I write memos to my clients that October was the 35th anniversary. And I talked about AI in a memo December 9th. And then I have a son named Andrew. He's in the tech world. He's a terrific venture capitalist. He's co-founder of a group called TQ Ventures. And given the recent events, he pushed me to revisit that memo and update it. And he had this great idea. He said, 'Why don't you ask Claude to tell you about what's been happening?' And so he and I developed a request which we input to Claude. And his help was invaluable, but of course he does this all day with all of his brilliant founders. And so Claude wrote me a tutorial which enabled me to update the memo. And I learned an incredible amount, you know, in a field that is not native to me through doing that. And so it was a mentor to me, and it can be a mentor to others. But as we know, you have to ask it the right questions. And Andrew and his buddies helped me do that.
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Marks, H. (2026, May 31). Can Claude AI Pick Winning Stocks in 2026? | Howard Marks | Investment [Interview transcript]. The Financial Economics. CEOInterviews.AI. https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/954503/
MLA
Howard Marks. "Can Claude AI Pick Winning Stocks in 2026? | Howard Marks | Investment." The Financial Economics, 31 May. 2026. Transcript, CEOInterviews.AI, https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/954503/.
BibTeX
@misc{marks2026_954503,
author = {Howard Marks},
title = {Can Claude AI Pick Winning Stocks in 2026? | Howard Marks | Investment},
howpublished = {Interview transcript, The Financial Economics. CEOInterviews.AI},
year = {2026},
month = {may},
url = {https://ceointerviews.ai/interview/954503/},
note = {Speaker-attributed transcript with timestamps}
}
