“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).”

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

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

Buy not on optimism, but on arithmetic.

To have a true investment, there must be a true margin of safety. And a true margin of safety is one that can be demonstrated by figures, by persuasive reasoning, and by reference to a body of actual experience.

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.

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.

High valuations entail high risks.

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.

It requires strength of character in order to think and to act in opposite fashion from the crowd and also patience to wait for opportunities that may be spaced years apart.

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

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.

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.

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

The value of any investment is, and always must be, a function of the price you pay for it.

Whatever men attempt, they seem driven to overdo. When hopes are soaring, I always repeat to myself that two and two still make four.

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

The ideal form of common stock analysis leads to a valuation of the issue which can be compared with the current price to determine whether or not the security is an attractive purchase.

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