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Investing is most intelligent when it is most businesslike.

Benjamin Graham

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
The thing that I have been emphasizing in my own work for the last few years has been the group approach. To try to buy groups of stocks that meet some simple criterion for being undervalued-regardless of the industry and with very little attention to the individual company.
BENJAMIN GRAHAM

Simple Trying Years
In the old legend the wise men finally boiled down the history of mortal affairs into a single phrase: ‘This too will pass.’
BENJAMIN GRAHAM

Men Phrases Wise
There is a close logical connection between the concept of a safety margin and the principle of diversification.
BENJAMIN GRAHAM

Investing Principles Safety
Successful investment may become substantially a matter of techniques and criteria that are learnable, rather than the product of unique and incommunicable mental powers.
BENJAMIN GRAHAM

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

Intelligent Investing Realist
Individuals who cannot master their emotions are ill-suited to profit from the investment process.
BENJAMIN GRAHAM

Emotion Investing Investment
We urge the beginner in security buying not to waste his efforts and his money in trying to beat the market. Let him study security values and initially test out his judgment on price versus value with the smallest possible sums.
BENJAMIN GRAHAM

Beginner Effort Trying
The memory of the financial community is proverbially and distressingly short.
BENJAMIN GRAHAM

Community Investing Memories
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.
BENJAMIN GRAHAM

Common Sense Ideas Thinking
Buy when most people, including experts, are pessimistic, and sell when they are actively optimistic.
BENJAMIN GRAHAM

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

Investing Investment Pay
The investor’s chief problem – and even his worst enemy – is likely to be himself.
BENJAMIN GRAHAM

Enemy Greed Money Worst
Most of the time common stocks are subject to irrational and excessive price fluctuations in both directions as the consequence of the ingrained tendency of most people to speculate or gamble… to give way to hope, fear and greed.
BENJAMIN GRAHAM

Hope Money Time
In security analysis the prime stress is laid upon protection against untoward events. We obtain this protection by insisting upon margins of safety, or values well in excess of the price paid.
BENJAMIN GRAHAM

Events Safety Stress
The intelligent investor gets interested in big growth stocks not when they are at their most popular – but when something goes wrong.
BENJAMIN GRAHAM

Growth Intelligent Investing
There is something paradoxical in the fact that by establishing an export market we subject our entire domestic production to the vagaries of that market.
BENJAMIN GRAHAM

Facts Paradoxical Subjects
The people of the United States will not tolerate another deep depression that arises not from any lack of natural resources, productive capacity or man and brain power, but solely from imperfections in the functioning of the system of finance capitalism.
BENJAMIN GRAHAM

Imperfection Men People
A speculator gambles that a stock will go up in price because somebody else will pay even more for it.
BENJAMIN GRAHAM

Investing Pay Speculators
Even defensive portfolios should be changed from time to time, especially if the securities purchased have an apparently excessive advance and can be replaced by issues much more reasonable priced.
BENJAMIN GRAHAM

Investing Issues Portfolio Purchase
… the loss of public confidence in the financial community growing out of its own conduct in recent years. I insist that more damage has been done to stock values and to the future of equities from inside Wall Street than from outside Wall Street.
BENJAMIN GRAHAM

Loss Wall Years
THERE is widespread agreement among economists that abuse of credit constitutes one of the chief unwholesome elements in business booms and is mainly responsible for the ensuing crash and depression.
BENJAMIN GRAHAM

Abuse Agreement Credit
The volume of credit depends upon three factors: the desire to borrow, the ability to lend and the desire to lend.
BENJAMIN GRAHAM

Credit Desire Three
We define a bargain issue as one which, on the basis of facts established by analysis, appears to be worth considerably more that it is selling for.
BENJAMIN GRAHAM

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

Mountain Ordinary Vicissitudes
Unusually rapid growth cannot keep up forever; when a company has already registered a brilliant expansion, its very increase in size makes a repetition of its achievement more difficult.
BENJAMIN GRAHAM

Achievement Forever Growth
Rather should we say that the market is a voting machine, whereon countless individuals register choices which are the product partly of reason and partly of emotion.
BENJAMIN GRAHAM

Countless Emotion Party Rather

Investing is most intelligent when it is most businesslike.

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Investing is most intelligent when it is most businesslike.

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