Benjamin Graham Quotes

I am no longer an advocate of elaborate techniques of security analysis in order to find superior value opportunities.
BENJAMIN GRAHAM

Opportunity Order Technique
The idea of storage as a solution of economic problems at least has the support of common sense.It is diametrically opposed to the topsy-turvy Alice-in-Wonderland reasoning that has marked so much of our depression thinking and policy.
BENJAMIN GRAHAM

Common Sense Ideas Thinking
In the financial markets, hindsight is forever 20/20, but foresight is legally blind. And thus, for most investors, market timing is a practical and emotional impossibility.
BENJAMIN GRAHAM

Emotional Forever Investing
… the loss of public confidence in the financial community growing out of its own conduct in recent years. I insist that more damage has been done to stock values and to the future of equities from inside Wall Street than from outside Wall Street.
BENJAMIN GRAHAM

Loss Wall Years
It is no difficult trick to bring a great deal of energy, study, and native ability into Wall Street and to end up with losses instead of profits. These virtues, if channeled in the wrong directions, become indistinguishable from handicaps.
BENJAMIN GRAHAM

Energy Loss Wall
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
The market is always making mountains out of molehills and exaggerating ordinary vicissitudes into major setbacks.
BENJAMIN GRAHAM

Mountain Ordinary Vicissitudes
There is a close logical connection between the concept of a safety margin and the principle of diversification.
BENJAMIN GRAHAM

Investing Principles Safety
You must never delude yourself into thinking that you’re investing when you’re speculating.
BENJAMIN GRAHAM

Investing Speculating Thinking
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
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
Thousands of people have tried, and the evidence is clear: The more you trade, the less you keep.
BENJAMIN GRAHAM

Evidence Investing People
In security analysis the prime stress is laid upon protection against untoward events. We obtain this protection by insisting upon margins of safety, or values well in excess of the price paid.
BENJAMIN GRAHAM

Events Safety Stress
The investor’s primary interest lies in acquiring and holding suitable securities at suitable prices.
BENJAMIN GRAHAM

Interest Lying Market Timing
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
We have not known a single person who has consistently or lastingly make money by thus “following the market”. We do not hesitate to declare this approach is as fallacious as it is popular.
BENJAMIN GRAHAM

Approach Investing Making Money
An intelligent investor gets satisfaction from the thought that his operations are exactly opposite to those of the crowd.
BENJAMIN GRAHAM

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

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

Assets Fees Investing
Never buy a stock immediately after a substantial rise or sell one immediately after a substantial drop.
BENJAMIN GRAHAM

Drop Sells Stock Substantial
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
A defensive investor can always prosper by looking patiently and calmly through the wreckage of a bear market.
BENJAMIN GRAHAM

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

Faces Government Surplus
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 modern world is not geared properly to the storage of goods.
BENJAMIN GRAHAM

Goods Modern World
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

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