black
grey
blue
red
brown
white

Successful investing is about managing risk, not avoiding it.

Benjamin Graham

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.
BENJAMIN GRAHAM

Intelligent Optimism Swings
Stock speculation is largely a matter of A trying to decide what B, C and D are likely to think-with B, C and D trying to do the same.
BENJAMIN GRAHAM

Matter Thinking Trying
Price fluctuations have only one significant meaning for the true investor. They provide him with an opportunity to buy wisely when prices fall sharply and to sell wisely when they advance a great deal.
BENJAMIN GRAHAM

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

Investing Principles Wall
Obvious prospects for physical growth in a business do not translate into obvious profits for investors.
BENJAMIN GRAHAM

Growth Investing Profit
Most businesses change in character and quality over the years, sometimes for the better, perhaps more often for the worse. The investor need not watch his companies’ performance like a hawk; but he should give it a good, hard look from time to time.
BENJAMIN GRAHAM

Character Giving Years
If you are shopping for common stocks, choose them the way you would buy groceries, not the way you would buy perfume.
BENJAMIN GRAHAM

Intelligent Investing Shopping
The market is always making mountains out of molehills and exaggerating ordinary vicissitudes into major setbacks.
BENJAMIN GRAHAM

Mountain Ordinary Vicissitudes
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

Ducks Intelligent Investing
High valuations entail high risks.
BENJAMIN GRAHAM

Investing Risk Valuation
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

Attention People Wall
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

Age Assets Investing
You must never delude yourself into thinking that you’re investing when you’re speculating.
BENJAMIN GRAHAM

Investing Speculating Thinking
The world has not learned the technique of balanced expansion without the resultant commercial and financial congestion.
BENJAMIN GRAHAM

Expansion Technique World
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.
BENJAMIN GRAHAM

Intelligent Investing Should
The function of the margin of safety is, in essence, that of rendering unnecessary an accurate estimate of the future.
BENJAMIN GRAHAM

Essence Safety Unnecessary

Successful investing is about managing risk, not avoiding it.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

Successful investing is about managing risk, not avoiding it.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

More Benjamin Graham Quotes