Benjamin Graham quotes: wise famous quotes, sayings and quotations by Benjamin Graham

Benjamin Graham Famous Quotes & Sayings

Discover top inspirational quotes from Benjamin Graham on Wise Famous Quotes.

Knowledge is only one ingredient on arriving at a stock's proper price. The other ingredient, fully as important as information, is sound judgment.

The distinction between investment and speculation in common stocks has always been a useful one and its disappearance is cause for concern.

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

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

The intelligent investor is likely to need considerable will power to keep from following the crowd.

Confronted with a challenge to distill the secret of sound investment into three words, we venture the motto, Margin of Safety.

Investing is most intelligent when it is most businesslike.

Astute observers of corporate balance sheets are often the first to see business deterioration

Buy not on optimism, but on arithmetic.

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

Buy cheap and sell dear.

The intelligent investor should recognize that market panics can create great prices for good companies and good prices for great companies.

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

Confusing speculation with investment is always a mistake.

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

... generally speaking there can be no high-grade obligations of a weak enterprise.

Individuals who cannot master their emotions are ill-suited to profit from the investment process.

Calculate a stock's price/earnings ratio yourself, using Graham's formula of current price divided by average earnings over the past three years.

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

Why should the cotton growers suffer if there is shortage of wheat?

It's nonsensical to derive a price/earnings ratio by dividing the known current price by unknown future earnings.

The chief losses to investors come from the purchase of low-quality securities at times of favorable business conditions.

An intelligent investor gets satisfaction from the thought that his operations are exactly opposite to those of the crowd.

In the world of securities, courage becomes the supreme virtue after adequate knowledge and a tested judgment are at hand.

The memory of the financial community is proverbially and distressingly short.

We must recognize, however, that intrinsic value is an elusive concept.

The stock investor is neither right or wrong because others agreed or disagreed with him; he is right because his facts and analysis are right.

At heart, "uncertainty" and "investing" are synonyms.

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

Never buy a stock immediately after a substantial rise or sell one immediately after a substantial drop.

Investment must always consider the price as well as the quality of the security.

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

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

Obvious prospects for physical growth in a business do not translate into obvious profits for investors.

Never mingle your speculative and investment operations in the same account nor in any part of your thinking.

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

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

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

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

Abnormally good or abnormally bad conditions do not last forever.

An investor calculates what a stock is worth, based on the value of its businesses.

The volume of credit depends upon three factors: the desire to borrow, the ability to lend and the desire to lend.

Wall Street people learn nothing and forget everything.

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

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

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

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

Investing isn't about beating others at their game. It's about controlling yourself at your own game.

Diversification is an established tenet of conservative investment.

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".

what Graham called "quotational" values

For 99 issues out of 100 we could say that at some price they are cheap enough to buy and at some price they would be so dear that they would be sold.

Avoid second-quality issues in making up a portfolio unless they are demonstrable bargains.

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

we advised the readers to buy their stocks as they bought their groceries, not as they bought their perfume.

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

It is a misfortune of the times that all of us must needs be amateur economists-including, and perhaps especially, the professionals.

An investment operation is one that can be justified on both qualitative and quantitative grounds.

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.

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

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

Price statistics show clearly that instability in raw-material prices is a prime cause of instability of other prices.

... investors are constitutionally averse to buying into a troubled situation.

Analysis is concerned primarily with values which are supported by the facts and not with those which depend largely upon expectations.

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

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

As in roulette, same is true of the stock trader, who will find that the expense of trading weights the dice heavily against him.

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

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

I am no longer an advocate of elaborate techniques of security analysis in order to find superior value opportunities.

Always buy your straw hats in the Winter

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

plant trees that other men will sit under.

Both individual skill (art) and chance are important factors in determining success or failure.

While a trend shown in the past is a fact, a "future trend" is only an assumption.

The intelligent investor is a realist who sells to optimists and buys from pessimists.

Every corporate security may be best viewed, in the first instance, as an ownership interest in, or a claim against, a specific business enterprise.

Do not let anyone else run your business

Successful investing professionals are disciplined and consistent and they think a great deal about what they do and how they do it.

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

There is no room in this philosophy for a middle ground, or a series of gradations, between the passive and aggressive status. Many,

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

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

A great company is not a great investment if you pay too much for the stock.

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

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

You will be much more in control, if you realize how much you are not in control.

The modern world is not geared properly to the storage of goods.

The genuine investor in common stocks does not need a great equipment of brain and knowledge, but he does need some unusual qualities of character

Stocks can be dynamite.

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

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).

Nothing important on Wall Street can be counted on to occur exactly in the same way as it happened before.

The stock market resembles a huge laundry in which institutions take in large blocks of each others washing ... without rhyme or reason.

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

It should be remembered that a decline of 50% fully offsets a preceding advance of 100%.

invest only if you would be comfortable owning a stock even if you had no way of knowing its daily share price.3

Thousands of people have tried, and the evidence is clear: The more you trade, the less you keep.

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

We shall dismiss these with the observation that their work does not concern "investors" as the term is used in this book.