“If I have noticed anything over these 60 years on Wall Street, it is that people do not succeed in forecasting what`s going to happen to the stock market.”

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

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.

While enthusiasm may be necessary for great accomplishments elsewhere, on Wall Street it almost invariably leads to disaster

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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

Stocks can be dynamite.

I quickly convinced myself that the true key to material happiness lay in a modest standard of living which could be achieved with little difficulty under almost all economic conditions.

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.

Every corporate security may be best viewed, in the first instance, as an ownership interest in, or a claim against, a specific business enterprise.

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