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

Benjamin Graham

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

Investing Investment Pay
When somebody asserts that a stock has an earning power of so much, I am sure that the person who hears him doesn’t know what he means, and there is a good chance that the man who uses it doesn’t know what it means.
BENJAMIN GRAHAM

Earning Mean Men Power Sure Use
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
The distinction between investment and speculation in common stocks has always been a useful one and its disappearance is cause for concern.
BENJAMIN GRAHAM

Causes Common Investing
The investor’s primary interest lies in acquiring and holding suitable securities at suitable prices.
BENJAMIN GRAHAM

Interest Lying Market Timing
Successful investing is about managing risk, not avoiding it.
BENJAMIN GRAHAM

Investing Risk Successful
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
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
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
For 99 issues out of 100 we could say that at some price they are cheap enough to buy and at some price they would be so dear that they would be sold.
BENJAMIN GRAHAM

Investing Issue Issues Price Some
Instead of passing blithely over into that Promised Land, flowing almost literally with milk and honey, it may be our destiny to wander a full 40 years or more in the wilderness of doubt and divided sentiments.
BENJAMIN GRAHAM

Destiny Honey Milk Years
It’s nonsensical to derive a price/earnings ratio by dividing the known current price by unknown future earnings.
BENJAMIN GRAHAM

Earning Investing Ratios
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
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

Emotional Long Running
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

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

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

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