Graham Benjamin Quotes & Sayings

The investor has a right to expect good results to flow from a consistent and courageous application of the principle of buying after the market has declined substantially and selling after it has had a spectacular rise. But he cannot expect to reduce this principle to a simple and foolproof formula, with profits guaranteed and no anxious periods. — Benjamin Graham

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. — Benjamin Graham

Do not let anyone else run your business — Benjamin Graham

To be an investor you must be a believer in a better tomorrow. — Benjamin Graham

Individual security bargains may be located by the process of security analysis practically at any time. They can be bought with good overall results at all periods except when the general market itself is clearly in a selling range for investors. They show up to best advantage during the years in which the market remains in a relatively narrow and neutral area. — Benjamin Graham

The sillier the market's behavior, the greater the opportunity for the business like investor. — Benjamin Graham

The investor should be aware that even though safety of its principal and interest may be unquestioned, a long term bond could vary widely in market price in response to changes in interest rates. — Benjamin Graham

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. — Benjamin Graham

The underlying factor here is the tendency of the security markets to undervalue issues that are involved in any sort of complicated legal proceedings. An old Wall Street motto has been: "Never buy into a lawsuit." This may be sound advice to the speculator seeking quick action on his holdings. But the adoption of this attitude by the general public is bound to create bargain opportunities in the securities affected by it, since the prejudice against them holds their prices down to unduly low levels.* — Benjamin Graham

Intelligent investment is more a matter of mental approach than it is of technique. A sound mental approach toward stock fluctuations is the touchstone of all successful investment under present-day conditions. — 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. — Benjamin Graham

While enthusiasm may be necessary for great accomplishments elsewhere, on Wall Street it almost invariably leads to disaster — Benjamin Graham

The existence of such a war chest might go far to strengthen our prestige and frighten off any would be assailant. — Benjamin Graham

You must never delude yourself into thinking that you're investing when you're speculating. — Benjamin Graham

Nearly everyone interested in common stocks wants to be told by someone else what he thinks the market is going to do. The demand being there, it must be supplied. — Benjamin Graham

investors. I have been a student of the philosophy of value investing, which of course was established, executed, and popularized by superinvestors Benjamin Graham, Warren Buffet, and Seth Klarman among — Sundeep Bajikar

It is absurd to think that the general public can ever make money out of market forecasts. — Benjamin Graham

Even with a margin of safety in the investor's favor, an individual security may work out badly. For the margin guarantees only that he has a better chance for profit than for loss - not that loss is impossible. But as the number of such commitments is increased the more certain does it become that the aggregate of the profits will exceed the aggregate of the losses. — Benjamin Graham

She felt dirty, ugly and tired. She felt like a marshmallow heading into a house fire armed with chocolate and graham crackers. — Benjamin R. Smith

By refusing to pay too much for an investment, you minimize the chances that your wealth will ever disappear or suddenly be destroyed. — Benjamin Graham

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. — Benjamin Graham

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". — Benjamin Graham

There is a close logical connection between the concept of a safety margin and the principle of diversification. — Benjamin Graham

In the old legend the wise men finally boiled down the history of mortal affairs into a single phrase: 'This too will pass.' — Benjamin Graham

In an ideal world, the intelligent investor would hold stocks only when they are cheap and sell them when they become overpriced, then duck into the bunker of bonds and cash until stocks again become cheap enough to buy. — Benjamin Graham

Wall Street has a few prudent principles; the trouble is that they are always forgotten when they are most needed. — Benjamin Graham

... investors are constitutionally averse to buying into a troubled situation. — Benjamin Graham

In the short run, the market is a voting machine, but in the long run it is a weighing machine. — Benjamin Graham

And back in the spring of 1720, Sir Isaac Newton owned shares in the South Sea Company, the hottest stock in England. Sensing that the market was getting out of hand, the great physicist muttered that he "could calculate the motions of the heavenly bodies, but not the madness of the people." Newton dumped his South Sea shares, pocketing a 100% profit totaling £7,000. But just months later, swept up in the wild enthusiasm of the market, Newton jumped back in at a much higher price - and lost £20,000 (or more than $3 million in today's money). For the rest of his life, he forbade anyone to speak the words "South Sea" in his presence. 4 — Benjamin Graham

As a rule of thumb, investors should spend the bulk of their time on the disclosures of the security under study, and they should spend significant time on the reports of competitors. — Benjamin Graham^David L.Dodd

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. — Benjamin Graham

Wall Street people learn nothing and forget everything. — Benjamin Graham

The schoolteacher asks Billy Bob: "If you have 12 sheeps and one jumps over the fence, how many sheeps do you have left?"

Billy Bob answers, "None."

"Well" says the teacher, "you sure don't know your subtraction."

"Maybe not," Billy Bob replies, "but i darn sure know my sheeps. — Benjamin Graham

The longer the bull market lasts the more severely investors will be affected with amnesia; after five years or so, many people no longer believe that bear markets are possible. — Benjamin Graham

Whether we like it or not, government intervention in the face of surplus is here to stay. — Benjamin Graham

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. — Benjamin Graham

A defensive investor can always prosper by looking patiently and calmly through the wreckage of a bear market. — Benjamin Graham

Buy cheap and sell dear. — Benjamin Graham

In all of these instances he appears to be concerned with the intrinsic value of the security and more particularly with the discovery of discrepancies between the intrinsic value and the market price. — Benjamin Graham

There is a tendency in part of Wall Street people to pay excessive attention to the most recent figures and the present financial picture. — Benjamin Graham

I feel grateful to the Milesian wench who, seeing the philosopher Thales continually spending his time in contemplation of the heavenly vault and always keeping his eyes raised upward, put something in his way to make him stumble, to warn him that it would be time to amuse his thoughts with things in the clouds when he had seen to those at his feet. Indeed she gave him or her good counsel, to look rather to himself than to the sky. - Michel de Montaigne — Benjamin Graham

The investment world nevertheless has enough liars, cheaters, and thieves to keep Satan's check-in clerks frantically busy for decades to come. — Benjamin Graham

The investor who permits himself to be stampeded or unduly worried by unjustified market declines in his holdings is perversely transforming his basic advantage into a basic disadvantage. — Benjamin Graham

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. — Benjamin Graham

The best values today are often found in the stocks that were once hot and have since gone cold. — Benjamin Graham

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. — Benjamin Graham

I quickly convinced myself that the true key to material happiness lay in a modest standard of living which could be achieved with little difficulty under almost all economic conditions. — Benjamin Graham

We have complaints that institutional dominance of the stock market has put 'the small investor at a disadvantage because he can't compete with the trust companies' huge resources, etc. The facts are quite the opposite. It may be that the institutions are better equipped than the individual to speculate in the market.But I am convinced that an individual investor with sound principles, and soundly advised, can do distinctly better over the long pull than large institutions. — Benjamin Graham

The essence of investment management is the management of risks, not the management of returns. — Benjamin Graham

It is our argument that a sufficiently low price can turn a security of mediocre quality into a sound investment opportunity - provided that the buyer is informed and experienced and he practices adequate diversification. For, if the price is low enough to create a substantial margin of safety, the security thereby meets our criterion of investment. — Benjamin Graham

The only thing you should do with pro forma earnings is ignore them. — Benjamin Graham

To achieve satisfactory investment results is easier than most people realize; to achieve superior results is harder than it looks. — Benjamin Graham

... Bond selection is primarily a negative art. It is a process of exclusion and rejection, rather than of search and acceptance. — Benjamin Graham

I am more and more impressed with the possibilities of history's repeating itself on many different counts. You don't get very far in Wall Street with the simple, convenient conclusion that a given level of prices is not too high. — Benjamin Graham

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. — Benjamin Graham

The intelligent investor gets interested in big growth stocks not when they are at their most popular - but when something goes wrong. — Benjamin Graham

In nine companies out of ten the factor of fluctuation has been a more dominant and important consideration in the matter of investment than has the factor of long-term growth or decline — Benjamin Graham

The determining trait of the enterprising (or active, or aggressive) investor is his willingness to devote time and care to the selection of securities that are both sound and more attractive than the average. — Benjamin Graham

The beauty of periodic rebalancing is that it forces you to base your investing decisions on a simple, objective standard. — Benjamin Graham

An investment operation is one which, upon thorough analysis, promises safety of principal and an adequate return. — Benjamin Graham

To see how much a company is truly earning on the capital it deploys in its businesses, look beyond EPS to Return on Invested Capital (ROIC). — Benjamin Graham

You may take it as an axiom that you cannot profit in Wall Street by continuously doing the obvious or the popular thing — Benjamin Graham

The investor's chief problem - and even his worst enemy - is likely to be himself. — Benjamin Graham

The art of investment has one characteristic that is not generally appreciated. A creditable, if unspectacular, result can be achieved by the lay investor with a minimum of effort and capability; but to improve this easily attainable standard requires much application and more than a trace of wisdom. If you merely try to bring just a little extra knowledge and cleverness to bear upon your investment program, instead of realizing a little better than normal results, you may well find that you have done worse. — Benjamin Graham

On the other hand, investing is a unique kind of casino - one where you cannot lose in the end, so long as you play only by the rules that put the odds squarely in your favor. — Benjamin Graham

Never buy a stock because it has gone up or sell one because it has gone down. — Benjamin Graham

We define a bargain issue as one which, on the basis of facts established by analysis, appears to be worth considerably more that it is selling for. — Benjamin Graham

The world has not learned the technique of balanced expansion without the resultant commercial and financial congestion. — Benjamin Graham

The essence of proper bond selection consists, ... in obtaining specific and convincing factors of safety in compensation for the surrender of participation in profits. — Benjamin Graham

The quantitative factors lend themselves far better to thoroughgoing analysis than do the qualitative factors. The former are fewer in number, more easily obtainable, and much better suited to the forming of definite and dependable conclusions. — Benjamin Graham

The punches you miss are the ones that wear you out. - Boxing trainer Angelo Dundee — Benjamin Graham

By investing at a discount, Benjamin Graham knew that he was unlikely to experience losses. — Seth Klarman

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. — Benjamin Graham

If you are shopping for common stocks, choose them the way you would buy groceries, not the way you would buy perfume. — Benjamin Graham

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. — Benjamin Graham

Although there are good and bad companies, there is no such thing as a good stock; there are only good stock prices, which come and go. — Benjamin Graham

Benjamin Graham wrote, "Those with enterprise haven't the money, and those with money haven't the enterprise, to buy stocks when they are cheap." — Seth Klarman

Security analysis does not assume that a past average will be repeated, but only that it supplies a rough index to what may be expected of the future. A trend, however, cannot be used as a rough index; it represents a definite prediction of either better or poorer results, and it must be either right or wrong. — Benjamin Graham

Both a priori reasoning and experience teach us that as as these funds grow larger the geometrical rate of growth by compound interest ultimately defeats itself. — Benjamin Graham

Mathematics is ordinarily considered as producing precise and dependable results; but in the stock market the more elaborate and abstruse the mathematics the more uncertain and speculative are the conclusions we draw there from. Whenever calculus is brought in, or higher algebra, you could take it as a warning that the operator was trying to substitute theory for experience, and usually also to give to speculation the deceptive guise of investment. — Benjamin Graham

The function of the margin of safety is, in essence, that of rendering unnecessary an accurate estimate of the future. — Benjamin Graham

Good managements produce a good average market price, and bad managements produce bad market prices. — Benjamin Graham

The history of the past fifty years, and longer, indicates that a diversified holding of representative common stocks will prove more profitable over a stretch of years than a bond portfolio, with one important provisio that the shares must be purchased at reasonable market levels, that is, levels that are reasonable in the light of fairly well-defined standards derived from past experience. — Benjamin Graham

If fees consume more than 1% of your assets annually, you should probably shop for another adviser. — Benjamin Graham

The purpose of this book is to supply, in the form suitable for laymen, guidance in the adoption and execution of an investment policy. — Benjamin Graham

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. — Benjamin Graham

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. — Benjamin Graham

... The soundness of the best investments must rest not upon legal rights or remedies but upon ample financial capacity of the enterprise. — Benjamin Graham

The trend is, in fact, a statement of future prospects in the form of an exact prediction. — Benjamin Graham

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. — Benjamin Graham

The Interborough issues are an example of a rather special group of situations in which analysis may reach more definite conclusions respecting intrinsic value than in the ordinary case. These situations may involve a liquidation or give rise to technical operations known as "arbitrage" or "hedging. — Benjamin Graham

... the value of the pledged property is vitally dependent on the earning power of the enterprise. — Benjamin Graham

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. — Benjamin Graham

The market is always making mountains out of molehills and exaggerating ordinary vicissitudes into major setbacks. — Benjamin Graham

The underlying principles of sound investment should not alter from decade to decade, but the application of these principles must be adapted to significant changes in the financial mechanisms and climate. — Benjamin Graham

A speculator gambles that a stock will go up in price because somebody else will pay even more for it. — Benjamin Graham

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. — Benjamin Graham

Buy when most people, including experts, are pessimistic, and sell when they are actively optimistic, — Benjamin Graham

In February 2000, hedge-fund manager James J. Cramer proclaimed that Internet-related companies "are the only ones worth owning right now." These "winners of the new world," as he called them, "are the only ones that are going higher consistently in good days and bad. — Benjamin Graham

Traditionally the investor has been the man with patience and the courage of his convictions who would buy when the harried or disheartened speculator was selling. — Benjamin Graham