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The underlying principles of sound investment should not alter from decade to decade, but the application of these principles must be adapted to significant changes in the financial mechanisms and climate.

Benjamin Graham

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

Ignored Investing Taken
Those with the enterprise lack the money and those with the money lack the enterprise to buy stocks when they are cheap.
BENJAMIN GRAHAM

Cheap Enterprise Enterprises Investing Stock
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.
BENJAMIN GRAHAM

Character Important Stress
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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Investing Past Wall
Diversification is an established tenet of conservative investment.
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Conservative Investing Investment
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
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
While enthusiasm may be necessary for great accomplishments elsewhere, on Wall Street it almost invariably leads to disaster
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Accomplishment Investing Wall
Good managements produce a good average market price, and bad managements produce bad market prices.
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Average Good Man Management
Thousands of people have tried, and the evidence is clear: The more you trade, the less you keep.
BENJAMIN GRAHAM

Evidence Investing People
A speculator gambles that a stock will go up in price because somebody else will pay even more for it.
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Investing Pay Speculators
Undervaluations caused by neglect or prejudice may persist for an inconveniently long time, and the same applies to inflated prices caused by over-enthusiasm or artificial stimulants.
BENJAMIN GRAHAM

Enthusiasm Long May Prejudice Time
Price fluctuations have only one significant meaning for the true investor. They provide him with an opportunity to buy wisely when prices fall sharply and to sell wisely when they advance a great deal.
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Fall Investing Opportunity
The investor’s chief problem – and even his worst enemy – is likely to be himself.
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Enemy Greed Money Worst
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
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
If General Motors is worth $60 a share to an investor it must be because the full common-stock ownership of this gigantic enterprise as a whole is worth 43 million (shares) times $60, or no less than $2,600 million.
BENJAMIN GRAHAM

Common Ownership Share
Wall Street has a few prudent principles; the trouble is that they are always forgotten when they are most needed.
BENJAMIN GRAHAM

Investing Principles 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
Rather should we say that the market is a voting machine, whereon countless individuals register choices which are the product partly of reason and partly of emotion.
BENJAMIN GRAHAM

Countless Emotion Party Rather
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
The intelligent investor should recognize that market panics can create great prices for good companies and good prices for great companies.
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Intelligent Investing Panic
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.
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Investing Permit Worried
Wall Street people learn nothing and forget everything.
BENJAMIN GRAHAM

Forget Everything People Wall
The intelligent investor is a realist who sells to optimists and buys from pessimists.
BENJAMIN GRAHAM

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

Investing Investment Pay
If fees consume more than 1% of your assets annually, you should probably shop for another adviser.
BENJAMIN GRAHAM

Assets Fees Investing

The underlying principles of sound investment should not alter from decade to decade, but the application of these principles must be adapted to significant changes in the financial mechanisms and climate.

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The underlying principles of sound investment should not alter from decade to decade, but the application of these principles must be adapted to significant changes in the financial mechanisms and climate.

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Popular Authors

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