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The investor’s primary interest lies in acquiring and holding suitable securities at suitable prices.

Benjamin Graham

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
Whether we like it or not, government intervention in the face of surplus is here to stay.
BENJAMIN GRAHAM

Faces Government Surplus
The stock market resembles a huge laundry in which institutions take in large blocks of each others washing … without rhyme or reason.
BENJAMIN GRAHAM

Block Investing Laundry
Speculators often prosper through ignorance; it is a cliché that in a roaring bull market knowledge is superfluous and experience is a handicap. But the typical experience of the speculator is one of temporary profit and ultimate loss
BENJAMIN GRAHAM

Ignorance Loss Typical
The utility, or intrinsic value of gold as a commodity is now considerably less than in the past; its monetary status has become extraordinarily ambiguous; and its future is highly uncertain.
BENJAMIN GRAHAM

Commodity Gold Past
Obvious prospects for physical growth in a business do not translate into obvious profits for investors.
BENJAMIN GRAHAM

Growth Investing Profit
If you are shopping for common stocks, choose them the way you would buy groceries, not the way you would buy perfume.
BENJAMIN GRAHAM

Intelligent Investing Shopping
Even the most conservative must realize that the recent transformation of surplus from an individual to a national disaster implies a scathing indictment of our capitalist system as it has now developed.
BENJAMIN GRAHAM

Conservative Realizing Transformation
I am more and more impressed with the possibilities of history’s repeating itself on many different counts. You don’t get very far in Wall Street with the simple, convenient conclusion that a given level of prices is not too high.
BENJAMIN GRAHAM

Different Simple Wall
The money cost of the reservoir plan literally fades into insignificance when it is compared with the financial burden which the great depression imposed on the nation.
BENJAMIN GRAHAM

Cost Depression Financial Great
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
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
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
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 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
Have the courage of your knowledge and experience. If you have formed a conclusion from the facts and if you know your judgment is sound, act on it – even though others may hesitate or differ.
BENJAMIN GRAHAM

Conclusion Facts Judgment May Sound
Both a priori reasoning and experience teach us that as as these funds grow larger the geometrical rate of growth by compound interest ultimately defeats itself.
BENJAMIN GRAHAM

Defeat Growth Teach
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
Wall Street people learn nothing and forget everything.
BENJAMIN GRAHAM

Forget Everything People Wall
Real investment risk is measured not by the percent that a stock may decline in price in relation to the general market in a given period, but by the danger of a loss of quality and earnings power through economic changes or deterioration in management.
BENJAMIN GRAHAM

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

Men Phrases Wise
The true investor… will do better if he forgets about the stock market and pays attention to his dividend returns and to the operation results of his companies.
BENJAMIN GRAHAM

Attention Investing Pay
People who invest make money for themselves; people who speculate make money for their brokers. And that, in turn, is why Wall Street perennially downplays the durable virtues of investing and hypes the gaudy appeal of speculation.
BENJAMIN GRAHAM

Hype People Wall
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
The memory of the financial community is proverbially and distressingly short.
BENJAMIN GRAHAM

Community Investing Memories
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
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

The investor’s primary interest lies in acquiring and holding suitable securities at suitable prices.

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The investor’s primary interest lies in acquiring and holding suitable securities at suitable prices.

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