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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

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
Never mingle your speculative and investment operations in the same account nor in any part of your thinking.
BENJAMIN GRAHAM

Investing Investment Thinking
To enjoy a reasonable chance for continued better than average results, the investor must follow policies which are (1) inherently sound and promising, and (2) not popular on Wall Street.
BENJAMIN GRAHAM

Average Sound Wall
Confronted with a challenge to distill the secret of sound investment into three words, we venture the motto, Margin of Safety.
BENJAMIN GRAHAM

Challenges Intelligent Safety
In the short run, the market is a voting machine, but in the long run it is a weighing machine.
BENJAMIN GRAHAM

Business Intelligent Running
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
The investor should be aware that even though safety of its principal and interest may be unquestioned, a long term bond could vary widely in market price in response to changes in interest rates.
BENJAMIN GRAHAM

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

Investing Investment Pay
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
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
It is a misfortune of the times that all of us must needs be amateur economists-including, and perhaps especially, the professionals.
BENJAMIN GRAHAM

Economist Including Needs Profession
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
It is a fact worth pondering that four centuries ago the evil of “an abundance or surplus” arose from its being kept off the market, while today the evil of surplus lies in its being thrown upon the market.
BENJAMIN GRAHAM

Evil Four Lying
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
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
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

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.

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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.

Related Topics

Popular Authors

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