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No statement is more true and better applicable to Wall Street than the famous warning of Santayana: “Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it”.

Benjamin Graham

It requires strength of character in order to think and to act in opposite fashion from the crowd and also patience to wait for opportunities that may be spaced years apart.
BENJAMIN GRAHAM

Character Fashion Thinking
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
Many progressive economists insist that gold is now in essentially the same position as silver and that the arguments the simon-pure gold advocates use against the white metal can be directed with equal effect against their own fetish.
BENJAMIN GRAHAM

Arguments Gold Use White
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 modern world is not geared properly to the storage of goods.
BENJAMIN GRAHAM

Goods Modern World
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
An intelligent investor gets satisfaction from the thought that his operations are exactly opposite to those of the crowd.
BENJAMIN GRAHAM

Intelligent Investing Opposites
To see how much a company is truly earning on the capital it deploys in its businesses, look beyond EPS to Return on Invested Capital (ROIC).
BENJAMIN GRAHAM

Investing Looks Return
In the world of securities, courage becomes the supreme virtue after adequate knowledge and a tested judgment are at hand.
BENJAMIN GRAHAM

Adequate Hands Knowledge World
In other words, the market is not a weighing machine, on which the value of each issue is recorded by an exact and impersonal mechanism, in accordance with its specific qualities.
BENJAMIN GRAHAM

Choices Impersonal Issues Voting
To be an investor you must be a believer in a better tomorrow.
BENJAMIN GRAHAM

Believer Investing Tomorrow
Both individual skill (art) and chance are important factors in determining success or failure.
BENJAMIN GRAHAM

Art Important Skills
there is a tendency in part of Wall Street people to pay excessive attention to the most recent figures and the present financial picture.
BENJAMIN GRAHAM

Attention People Wall
Investing is most intelligent when it is most businesslike.
BENJAMIN GRAHAM

Intelligent Investing
It should be remembered that a decline of 50% fully offsets a preceding advance of 100%.
BENJAMIN GRAHAM

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

Mountain Ordinary Vicissitudes
The intelligent investor should recognize that market panics can create great prices for good companies and good prices for great companies.
BENJAMIN GRAHAM

Intelligent Investing Panic
Knowledge is only one ingredient on arriving at a stock’s proper price. The other ingredient, fully as important as information, is sound judgment.
BENJAMIN GRAHAM

Arriving Important Sound
Why should the cotton growers suffer if there is shortage of wheat?
BENJAMIN GRAHAM

Cotton Suffering Wheat
As in roulette, same is true of the stock trader, who will find that the expense of trading weights the dice heavily against him.
BENJAMIN GRAHAM

Intelligent Investing Weight
The beauty of periodic rebalancing is that it forces you to base your investing decisions on a simple, objective standard.
BENJAMIN GRAHAM

Decision Investing Simple
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
It must be fundamentally wrong to reduce production of food and fiber while one-third of our population is still ill fed and ill clothed.
BENJAMIN GRAHAM

Clothed Feds Fiber Population
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
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
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.
BENJAMIN GRAHAM

Economic Keys Littles

No statement is more true and better applicable to Wall Street than the famous warning of Santayana: “Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it”.

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No statement is more true and better applicable to Wall Street than the famous warning of Santayana: “Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it”.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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