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

Benjamin Graham

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
Intelligent investment is more a matter of mental approach than it is of technique. A sound mental approach toward stock fluctuations is the touchstone of all successful investment under present-day conditions.
BENJAMIN GRAHAM

Intelligent Successful Technique
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
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
In the financial markets, hindsight is forever 20/20, but foresight is legally blind. And thus, for most investors, market timing is a practical and emotional impossibility.
BENJAMIN GRAHAM

Emotional Forever Investing
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 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
Always remember that market quotations are there for convenience, either to be taken advantage of or to be ignored.
BENJAMIN GRAHAM

Ignored Investing Taken
The only thing you should do with pro forma earnings is ignore them.
BENJAMIN GRAHAM

Earning Investing Should
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
Experience teaches that the time to buy stocks is when their price is unduly depressed by temporary adversity. In other words, they should be bought on a bargain basis or not at all.
BENJAMIN GRAHAM

Adversity Should Teach
Diversification is an established tenet of conservative investment.
BENJAMIN GRAHAM

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

Intelligent Investing Realist
Nearly everyone interested in common stocks wants to be told by someone else what he thinks the market is going to do. The demand being there, it must be supplied.
BENJAMIN GRAHAM

Demand Thinking Want
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
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.
BENJAMIN GRAHAM

Investing Permit Worried

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

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

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Popular Authors

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