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In the short-run, the market is a voting machine – reflecting a voter-registration test that requires only money, not intelligence or emotional stability – but in the long- run, the market is a weighing machine.

Benjamin Graham

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

Intelligent Investing Realist
The intelligent investor is likely to need considerable will power to keep from following the crowd.
BENJAMIN GRAHAM

Crowd Following Intelligent Needs
It is no difficult trick to bring a great deal of energy, study, and native ability into Wall Street and to end up with losses instead of profits. These virtues, if channeled in the wrong directions, become indistinguishable from handicaps.
BENJAMIN GRAHAM

Energy Loss Wall
The purpose of this book is to supply, in the form suitable for laymen, guidance in the adoption and execution of an investment policy.
BENJAMIN GRAHAM

Adoption Book Purpose
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
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.
BENJAMIN GRAHAM

Analysis Determine Investing Issues Valuation
Good managements produce a good average market price, and bad managements produce bad market prices.
BENJAMIN GRAHAM

Average Good Man Management
You must never delude yourself into thinking that you’re investing when you’re speculating.
BENJAMIN GRAHAM

Investing Speculating Thinking
The qualitative factors upon which most stress is laid are the nature of the business and the character of the management. These elements are exceedingly important, but they are also exceedingly difficult to deal with intelligently.
BENJAMIN GRAHAM

Character Important Stress
It is worth pointing out that assuredly not more than one person out of a hundred who stayed in the market after after 1925 emerged from it with a net profit and that the speculative losses taken were appalling.
BENJAMIN GRAHAM

Hundred Loss Taken
Price statistics show clearly that instability in raw-material prices is a prime cause of instability of other prices.
BENJAMIN GRAHAM

Causes Materials Raw Statistics
Calculate a stock’s price/earnings ratio yourself, using Graham’s formula of current price divided by average earnings over the past three years.
BENJAMIN GRAHAM

Average Current Past Price Years
While enthusiasm may be necessary for great accomplishments elsewhere, on Wall Street it almost invariably leads to disaster
BENJAMIN GRAHAM

Accomplishment Investing Wall
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.
BENJAMIN GRAHAM

Approach Investing Making Money
Investing isn’t about beating others at their game. It’s about controlling yourself at your own game.
BENJAMIN GRAHAM

Controlling Games Investing
The investor should be aware that even though safety of its principal and interest may be unquestioned, a long term bond could vary widely in market price in response to changes in interest rates.
BENJAMIN GRAHAM

Investing Long Safety

In the short-run, the market is a voting machine – reflecting a voter-registration test that requires only money, not intelligence or emotional stability – but in the long- run, the market is a weighing machine.

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In the short-run, the market is a voting machine – reflecting a voter-registration test that requires only money, not intelligence or emotional stability – but in the long- run, the market is a weighing machine.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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