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

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

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 memory of the financial community is proverbially and distressingly short.

The value of the security analyst to the investor depends largely on the investor’s own attitude. If the investor asks the analyst the right questions, he is likely to get the right or at least valuable answers.

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

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 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.

Speculators often prosper through ignorance; it is a cliché that in a roaring bull market knowledge is superfluous and experience is a handicap. But the typical experience of the speculator is one of temporary profit and ultimate loss

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

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

In other words, the market is not a weighing machine, on which the value of each issue is recorded by an exact and impersonal mechanism, in accordance with its specific qualities.

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

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.

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

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.

The intelligent investor shouldn’t ignore Mr. Market entirely. Instead, you should do business with him- but only to the extent that it serves your interests.

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

Even in cerebral roles that are seemingly intelligent and nothing else, I think it’s so important to wrap your characterization in a physical form as well.

The press is like any business. Its a group of really intelligent individuals that ends up being one slathering, one-eyed, drooling monster.

You know, I’m fairly intelligent, but I don’t think my grades reflected that.