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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
When somebody asserts that a stock has an earning power of so much, I am sure that the person who hears him doesn’t know what he means, and there is a good chance that the man who uses it doesn’t know what it means.
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”.
