Benjamin Graham
Most of the time common stocks are subject to irrational and excessive price fluctuations in both directions as the consequence of the ingrained tendency of most people to speculate or gamble... to give way to hope, fear and greed.Collection: Fear
Wall Street people learn nothing and forget everything.
Successful investing is about managing risk, not avoiding it.Collection: Successful
The market is a pendulum that forever swings between unsustainable optimism (which makes stocks too expensive) and unjustified pessimism (which makes them too cheap). The intelligent investor is a realist who sells to optimists and buys from pessimists.Collection: Intelligent
The intelligent investor is a realist who sells to optimists and buys from pessimists.Collection: Intelligent
To be an investor you must be a believer in a better tomorrow.Collection: Investing
Investing isn't about beating others at their game. It's about controlling yourself at your own game.Collection: Games
In the short run, the market is a voting machine, but in the long run it is a weighing machine.Collection: Running
Thousands of people have tried, and the evidence is clear: The more you trade, the less you keep.Collection: People
Losing some money is an inevitable part of investing, and there's nothing you can do to prevent it. But to be an intelligent investor, you must take responsibility for ensuring that you never lose most or all of your money.Collection: Responsibility
The intelligent investor is likely to need considerable will power to keep from following the crowd.Collection: Intelligent
Buy not on optimism, but on arithmetic.Collection: Intelligent
The essence of investment management is the management of risks, not the management of returns.Collection: Essence
Successful investing professionals are disciplined and consistent and they think a great deal about what they do and how they do it.Collection: Successful
A great company is not a great investment if you pay too much for the stock.Collection: Investing
An intelligent investor gets satisfaction from the thought that his operations are exactly opposite to those of the crowd.Collection: Intelligent
Before you invest, you must ensure that you have realistically assessed your probability of being right and how you will react to the consequences of being wrong.Collection: Investing
Individuals who cannot master their emotions are ill-suited to profit from the investment process.Collection: Investing
It should be remembered that a decline of 50% fully offsets a preceding advance of 100%.Collection: Investing
Never buy a stock immediately after a substantial rise or sell one immediately after a substantial drop.Collection: Sells
The intelligent investor should recognize that market panics can create great prices for good companies and good prices for great companies.Collection: Intelligent
The value of any investment is, and always must be, a function of the price you pay for it.Collection: Investing
Buy when most people, including experts, are pessimistic, and sell when they are actively optimistic.Collection: Optimistic
The most realistic distinction between the investor and the speculator is found in their attitude toward stock-market movements. The speculator's primary interest lies in anticipating and profiting from market fluctuations. The investor's primary interest lies in acquiring and holding suitable securities at suitable prices. Market movements are important to him in a practical sense, because they alternately create low price levels at which he would be wise to buy and high price levels at which he certainly should refrain from buying and probably would be wise to sell.Collection: Wise
The defensive (or passive) investor will place chief emphasis on the avoidance of serious mistakes or losses. His second aim will be freedom from effort, annoyance, and the need for making frequent decisions.Collection: Mistake
The individual investor should act consistently as an investor and not as a speculator. This means ... that he should be able to justify every purchase he makes and each price he pays by impersonal, objective reasoning that satisfies him that he is getting more than his money's worth for his purchase.Collection: Money
It requires strength of character in order to think and to act in opposite fashion from the crowd and also patience to wait for opportunities that may be spaced years apart.Collection: Fashion
If General Motors is worth $60 a share to an investor it must be because the full common-stock ownership of this gigantic enterprise as a whole is worth 43 million (shares) times $60, or no less than $2,600 million.Collection: Common
If we assume that there are normal or standard income results to be obtained from investing money in securities, then the role of the adviser can be more readily established. He will use his superior training and experience to protect his clients against mistakes and to make sure that they obtain the results to which their money is entitled.Collection: Mistake
Cartels have spread and will spread as long as the world lacks an effective mechanism by which balanced expansion may be achieved without a resulting disruption of prices.Collection: Long
To establish the right price for a stock, the market must have adequate information, but it by no means follows that is the market has this information it will thereupon establish the right price.Collection: Mean
Good managements produce a good average market price, and bad managements produce bad market prices.Collection: Average
The most striking thing about Graham's discussion of how to allocate your assets between stocks and bonds is that he never mentions the word "age".Collection: Age
The qualitative factors upon which most stress is laid are the nature of the business and the character of the management. These elements are exceedingly important, but they are also exceedingly difficult to deal with intelligently.Collection: Stress
It is worth pointing out that assuredly not more than one person out of a hundred who stayed in the market after after 1925 emerged from it with a net profit and that the speculative losses taken were appalling.Collection: Taken
there is a tendency in part of Wall Street people to pay excessive attention to the most recent figures and the present financial picture.Collection: Wall
Instead of passing blithely over into that Promised Land, flowing almost literally with milk and honey, it may be our destiny to wander a full 40 years or more in the wilderness of doubt and divided sentiments.Collection: Destiny
Calculate a stock's price/earnings ratio yourself, using Graham's formula of current price divided by average earnings over the past three years.Collection: Past
The investor has the benefit of the stock market's daily and changing appraisal of his holdings, 'for whatever that appraisal may be worth', and, second, that the investor is able to increase or decrease his investment at the market's daily figure - 'if he chooses'. Thus the existence of a quoted market gives the investor certain options which he does not have if his security is unquoted. But it does not impose the current quotation on an investor who prefers to take his idea of value from some other source.Collection: Ideas
Even the most conservative must realize that the recent transformation of surplus from an individual to a national disaster implies a scathing indictment of our capitalist system as it has now developed.Collection: Conservative
Whether we like it or not, government intervention in the face of surplus is here to stay.Collection: Government
There is something paradoxical in the fact that by establishing an export market we subject our entire domestic production to the vagaries of that market.Collection: Facts
It is a fact worth pondering that four centuries ago the evil of "an abundance or surplus" arose from its being kept off the market, while today the evil of surplus lies in its being thrown upon the market.Collection: Lying
Every corporate security may be best viewed, in the first instance, as an ownership interest in, or a claim against, a specific business enterprise.Collection: May
... the loss of public confidence in the financial community growing out of its own conduct in recent years. I insist that more damage has been done to stock values and to the future of equities from inside Wall Street than from outside Wall Street.Collection: Wall
The money cost of the reservoir plan literally fades into insignificance when it is compared with the financial burden which the great depression imposed on the nation.Collection: Cost
It must be fundamentally wrong to reduce production of food and fiber while one-third of our population is still ill fed and ill clothed.Collection: Population
The Reservoir plan is an engineering mechanism applied to the field of economics, and in its essence it has nothing to do with democracy or any other political philosophy.Collection: Philosophy
The Reservoir system will function not only as an equalizer of business conditions, but also as a national store to meet further emergencies, such as war and drought, and-most important of all-as the concrete means of developing a steadily higher living standard for all.Collection: War
In the financial markets, hindsight is forever 20/20, but foresight is legally blind. And thus, for most investors, market timing is a practical and emotional impossibility.Collection: Emotional