Benjamin Graham
The chief losses to investors come from the purchase of low-quality securities at times of favorable business conditions.Collection: Loss
While enthusiasm may be necessary for great accomplishments elsewhere, on Wall Street it almost invariably leads to disasterCollection: Wall
We have not known a single person who has consistently or lastingly make money by thus "following the market". We do not hesitate to declare this approach is as fallacious as it is popular.Collection: Investing
The intelligent investor gets interested in big growth stocks not when they are at their most popular - but when something goes wrong.Collection: Intelligent
To have a true investment, there must be a true margin of safety. And a true margin of safety is one that can be demonstrated by figures, by persuasive reasoning, and by reference to a body of actual experience.Collection: Safety
By refusing to pay too much for an investment, you minimize the chances that your wealth will ever disappear or suddenly be destroyed.Collection: Too Much
If I have noticed anything over these 60 years on Wall Street, it is that people do not succeed in forecasting what`s going to happen to the stock market.Collection: Wall
Mr. Market's job is to provide you with prices; your job is to decide whether it is to your advantage to act on them. You no not have to trade with hime just because he constantly begs you to.Collection: Jobs
By developing your discipline and courage, you can refuse to let other people's mood swings govern your financial destiny. In the end, how your investments behave is much less important than how you behave.Collection: Destiny
Investing is most intelligent when it is most businesslike.Collection: Intelligent
Never buy a stock because it has gone up or sell one because it has gone down.Collection: Gone
In the world of securities, courage becomes the supreme virtue after adequate knowledge and a tested judgment are at hand.Collection: Hands
Though business conditions may change, corporations and securities may change, and financial institutions and regulations may change, human nature remains the same. Thus the important and difficult part of sound investment, which hinges upon the investor's own temperament and attitude, is not much affected by the passing years.Collection: Attitude
Knowledge is only one ingredient on arriving at a stock's proper price. The other ingredient, fully as important as information, is sound judgment.Collection: Important
The best way to measure your investing success is not by whether you're beating the market but by whether you've put in place a financial plan and a behavioral discipline that are likely to get you where you want to go.Collection: Discipline
At heart, "uncertainty" and "investing" are synonyms.Collection: Heart
If you are shopping for common stocks, choose them the way you would buy groceries, not the way you would buy perfume.Collection: Intelligent
Always buy your straw hats in the WinterCollection: Winter
The true investor... will do better if he forgets about the stock market and pays attention to his dividend returns and to the operation results of his companies.Collection: Attention
In the old legend the wise men finally boiled down the history of mortal affairs into a single phrase: 'This too will pass.'Collection: Wise
An investment operation is one which, upon thorough analysis, promises safety of principal and an adequate return.Collection: Safety
No matter how careful you are, the one risk no investor can ever eliminate is the risk of being wrong. Only by insisting on what Graham called the "margin of safety" - never overpaying, no matter how exciting an investment seems to be - can you minimize your odds of error.Collection: Errors
The genuine investor in common stocks does not need a great equipment of brain and knowledge, but he does need some unusual qualities of characterCollection: Character
High valuations entail high risks.Collection: Risk
Real investment risk is measured not by the percent that a stock may decline in price in relation to the general market in a given period, but by the danger of a loss of quality and earnings power through economic changes or deterioration in management.Collection: Real
In security analysis the prime stress is laid upon protection against untoward events. We obtain this protection by insisting upon margins of safety, or values well in excess of the price paid.Collection: Stress
The purchase of a bargain issue presupposes that the market's current appraisal is wrong, or at least that the buyer's idea of value is more likely to be right than the market's. In this process the investor sets his judgement against that of the market. To some this may seem arrogant or foolhardy.Collection: Ideas
A speculator gambles that a stock will go up in price because somebody else will pay even more for it.Collection: Investing
We urge the beginner in security buying not to waste his efforts and his money in trying to beat the market. Let him study security values and initially test out his judgment on price versus value with the smallest possible sums.Collection: Effort
The idea of storage as a solution of economic problems at least has the support of common sense.It is diametrically opposed to the topsy-turvy Alice-in-Wonderland reasoning that has marked so much of our depression thinking and policy.Collection: Thinking
Whenever the investor sold out in an upswing as soon as the top level of the previous well-recognized bull market was reached, he had a chance in the next bear market to buy back at one third (or better) below his selling price.Collection: Bulls
No statement is more true and better applicable to Wall Street than the famous warning of Santayana: "Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it".Collection: Wall
Experience teaches that the time to buy stocks is when their price is unduly depressed by temporary adversity. In other words, they should be bought on a bargain basis or not at all.Collection: Adversity
There is a close logical connection between the concept of a safety margin and the principle of diversification.Collection: Safety
Never mingle your speculative and investment operations in the same account nor in any part of your thinking.Collection: Thinking
It is absurd to think that the general public can ever make money out of market forecasts.Collection: Thinking
It is no difficult trick to bring a great deal of energy, study, and native ability into Wall Street and to end up with losses instead of profits. These virtues, if channeled in the wrong directions, become indistinguishable from handicaps.Collection: Wall
The investor's primary interest lies in acquiring and holding suitable securities at suitable prices.Collection: Lying
Abnormally good or abnormally bad conditions do not last forever.Collection: Forever
The volume of credit depends upon three factors: the desire to borrow, the ability to lend and the desire to lend.Collection: Desire
Unusually rapid growth cannot keep up forever; when a company has already registered a brilliant expansion, its very increase in size makes a repetition of its achievement more difficult.Collection: Achievement
The function of the margin of safety is, in essence, that of rendering unnecessary an accurate estimate of the future.Collection: Essence
All the real money in investment will have to be made as most of it has been in the past not out of buying and selling but out of owning and holding securities, receiving interests and dividends therein, and benefiting from their long-term increases in value. Hence stockholder's major energies and wisdom as investors should be directed toward assuring themselves of the best operating results from their corporations. This in turn means assuring themselves of fully honest and competent managements.Collection: Real
To enjoy a reasonable chance for continued better than average results, the investor must follow policies which are (1) inherently sound and promising, and (2) not popular on Wall Street.Collection: Wall
The story of Joseph in Egypt and of the seven fat and the seven lean years has passed into the homely wisdom of the ages; but our economic thinking seems to have lost contact with so simple and basic approach to prudent management of a nations welfare.Collection: Simple
The margin of safety is always dependent on the price paid. It will be large at one price, small at some higher price, nonexistent at some still higher price.Collection: Safety
A price decline is of no real importance to the bona fide investor unless it is either very substantial say, more than a third from cost or unless it reflects a known deterioration of consequence in the company's position. In a well-defined bear market many sound common stocks sell temporarily at extraordinary low prices. It is possible that the investor may then have a paper loss of fully 50 per cent on some of his holdings, without any convincing indication that the underlying values have been permanently affected.Collection: Real
Nothing in finance is more fatuous and harmful, in our opinion, than the firmly established attitude of common stock investors regarding questions of corporate management. That attitude is summed up in the phrase: "If you don't like the management, sell your stock." ... The public owners seem to have abdicated all claim to control over the paid superintendents of their property.Collection: Attitude