Top 100 Benjamin Graham Quotes
#1. Avoid second-quality issues in making up a portfolio unless they are demonstrable bargains.
Benjamin Graham
#2. 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
#3. I am no longer an advocate of elaborate techniques of security analysis in order to find superior value opportunities.
Benjamin Graham
#4. Why should the cotton growers suffer if there is shortage of wheat?
Benjamin Graham
#5. Investment must always consider the price as well as the quality of the security.
Benjamin Graham
#6. Abnormally good or abnormally bad conditions do not last forever.
Benjamin Graham
#7. The investment world nevertheless has enough liars, cheaters, and thieves to keep Satan's check-in clerks frantically busy for decades to come.
Benjamin Graham
#9. The essence of proper bond selection consists, ... in obtaining specific and convincing factors of safety in compensation for the surrender of participation in profits.
Benjamin Graham
#10. While enthusiasm may be necessary for great accomplishments elsewhere, on Wall Street it almost invariably leads to disaster
Benjamin Graham
#11. Observation over many years has taught us that the chief losses to investors come from the purchase of low-quality securities at times of good business conditions. The purchasers view the good current earnings as equivalent to 'earning power' and assume that prosperity is equivalent to safety.
Benjamin Graham
#12. ... The soundness of the best investments must rest not upon legal rights or remedies but upon ample financial capacity of the enterprise.
Benjamin Graham
#13. While a trend shown in the past is a fact, a "future trend" is only an assumption.
Benjamin Graham
#14. To establish the right price for a stock, the market must have adequate information, but it by no means follows that is the market has this information it will thereupon establish the right price.
Benjamin Graham
#15. There is no reason to feel any shame in hiring someone to pick stocks or mutual funds for you. But there's one responsibility that you must never delegate. You, and no one but you, must investigate whether an adviser is trustworthy and charges reasonable fees.
Benjamin Graham
#16. Obvious prospects for physical growth in a business do not translate into obvious profits for investors.
Benjamin Graham
#17. Traditionally the investor has been the man with patience and the courage of his convictions who would buy when the harried or disheartened speculator was selling.
Benjamin Graham
#18. If you are shopping for common stocks, choose them the way you would buy groceries, not the way you would buy perfume.
Benjamin Graham
#19. 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
#20. An intelligent investor gets satisfaction from the thought that his operations are exactly opposite to those of the crowd.
Benjamin Graham
#21. An investor calculates what a stock is worth, based on the value of its businesses.
Benjamin Graham
#22. We are convinced that the public generally will derive far better results from fixed-value investments, if selected with exceeding care, than from speculative operations, even though these may be aided by considerable education in financial matters.
Benjamin Graham
#23. If fees consume more than 1% of your assets annually, you should probably shop for another adviser.
Benjamin Graham
#24. Confronted with a challenge to distill the secret of sound investment into three words, we venture the motto, Margin of Safety.
Benjamin Graham
#25. Never mingle your speculative and investment operations in the same account nor in any part of your thinking.
Benjamin Graham
#26. Instead of passing blithely over into that Promised Land, flowing almost literally with milk and honey, it may be our destiny to wander a full 40 years or more in the wilderness of doubt and divided sentiments.
Benjamin Graham
#27. ... Bond selection is primarily a negative art. It is a process of exclusion and rejection, rather than of search and acceptance.
Benjamin Graham
#28. Mr. Market does not always price stocks the way an appraiser or a private buyer would value a business. Instead, when stocks are going up, he happily pays more than their objective value; and, when they are going down, he is desperate to dump them for less than their true worth.
Benjamin Graham
#29. The most striking thing about Graham's discussion of how to allocate your assets between stocks and bonds is that he never mentions the word "age".
Benjamin Graham
#30. ... the value of the pledged property is vitally dependent on the earning power of the enterprise.
Benjamin Graham
#31. Never buy a stock because it has gone up or sell one because it has gone down.
Benjamin Graham
#32. Before you invest, you must ensure that you have realistically assessed your probability of being right and how you will react to the consequences of being wrong.
Benjamin Graham
#33. 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
#34. ... generally speaking there can be no high-grade obligations of a weak enterprise.
Benjamin Graham
#35. A great company is not a great investment if you pay too much for the stock.
Benjamin Graham
#36. 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
#38. Speculative stock movements are carried too far in both directions, frequently in the general market and at all times in at least some of the individual issues.
Benjamin Graham
#39. 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
#40. Price statistics show clearly that instability in raw-material prices is a prime cause of instability of other prices.
Benjamin Graham
#41. An investment operation is one which, upon thorough analysis, promises safety of principal and an adequate return.
Benjamin Graham
#42. By developing your discipline and courage, you can refuse to let other people's mood swings govern your financial destiny. In the end, how your investments behave is much less important than how you behave.
Benjamin Graham
#44. Investing is most intelligent when it is most businesslike.
Benjamin Graham
#45. Unusually rapid growth cannot keep up forever; when a company has already registered a brilliant expansion, its very increase in size makes a repetition of its achievement more difficult.
Benjamin Graham
#46. Buy when most people, including experts, are pessimistic, and sell when they are actively optimistic,
Benjamin Graham
#47. Whether we like it or not, government intervention in the face of surplus is here to stay.
Benjamin Graham
#48. The analyst's conclusions must always rest upon the figures and upon established tests and standards.
Benjamin Graham
#49. 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
#50. 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
#51. Wall Street has a few prudent principles; the trouble is that they are always forgotten when they are most needed.
Benjamin Graham
#52. 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
#53. we advised the readers to buy their stocks as they bought their groceries, not as they bought their perfume.
Benjamin Graham
#54. 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
#55. Whenever the investor sold out in an upswing as soon as the top level of the previous well-recognized bull market was reached, he had a chance in the next bear market to buy back at one third (or better) below his selling price.
Benjamin Graham
#56. There is something paradoxical in the fact that by establishing an export market we subject our entire domestic production to the vagaries of that market.
Benjamin Graham
#57. On the other hand, investing is a unique kind of casino - one where you cannot lose in the end, so long as you play only by the rules that put the odds squarely in your favor.
Benjamin Graham
#58. 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
#59. ... investors are constitutionally averse to buying into a troubled situation.
Benjamin Graham
#60. To have a true investment, there must be a true margin of safety. And a true margin of safety is one that can be demonstrated by figures, by persuasive reasoning, and by reference to a body of actual experience.
Benjamin Graham
#61. An investment operation is one that can be justified on both qualitative and quantitative grounds.
Benjamin Graham
#62. The Interborough issues are an example of a rather special group of situations in which analysis may reach more definite conclusions respecting intrinsic value than in the ordinary case. These situations may involve a liquidation or give rise to technical operations known as "arbitrage" or "hedging.
Benjamin Graham
#63. The intelligent investor is a realist who sells to optimists and buys from pessimists.
Benjamin Graham
#64. The chief losses to investors come from the purchase of low-quality securities at times of favorable business conditions.
Benjamin Graham
#65. Although there are good and bad companies, there is no such thing as a good stock; there are only good stock prices, which come and go.
Benjamin Graham
#66. Confusing speculation with investment is always a mistake.
Benjamin Graham
#67. 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
#68. Diversification is an established tenet of conservative investment.
Benjamin Graham
#69. Nothing important on Wall Street can be counted on to occur exactly in the same way as it happened before.
Benjamin Graham
#70. 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.
Benjamin Graham
#71. It is absurd to think that the general public can ever make money out of market forecasts.
Benjamin Graham
#72. The distinction between investment and speculation in common stocks has always been a useful one and its disappearance is cause for concern.
Benjamin Graham
#73. 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
#74. In the short run, the market is a voting machine, but in the long run it is a weighing machine.
Benjamin Graham
#75. 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
#76. 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
#77. A stock is not just a ticker symbol or an electronic blip; it is an ownership interest in an actual business, with an underlying value that does not depend on its share price.
Benjamin Graham
#78. The stock investor is neither right or wrong because others agreed or disagreed with him; he is right because his facts and analysis are right.
Benjamin Graham
#79. Good managements produce a good average market price, and bad managements produce bad market prices.
Benjamin Graham
#80. 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
#81. By refusing to pay too much for an investment, you minimize the chances that your wealth will ever disappear or suddenly be destroyed.
Benjamin Graham
#82. You may take it as an axiom that you cannot profit in Wall Street by continuously doing the obvious or the popular thing
Benjamin Graham
#83. 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
#84. The defensive (or passive) investor will place chief emphasis on the avoidance of serious mistakes or losses. His second aim will be freedom from effort, annoyance, and the need for making frequent decisions.
Benjamin Graham
#85. 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
#86. Analysis is concerned primarily with values which are supported by the facts and not with those which depend largely upon expectations.
Benjamin Graham
#87. 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
#88. The best values today are often found in the stocks that were once hot and have since gone cold.
Benjamin Graham
#89. 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
#90. 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
#91. Among the things that should make your antennae twitch are technical terms like "capitalized," "deferred," and "restructuring" - and plain-English words signaling that the company has altered its accounting practices, like "began," "change," and
Benjamin Graham
#92. The stock market resembles a huge laundry in which institutions take in large blocks of each others washing ... without rhyme or reason.
Benjamin Graham
#93. Both individual skill (art) and chance are important factors in determining success or failure.
Benjamin Graham
#94. 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
#95. 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
#96. The sillier the market's behavior, the greater the opportunity for the business like investor.
Benjamin Graham
#97. In nine companies out of ten the factor of fluctuation has been a more dominant and important consideration in the matter of investment than has the factor of long-term growth or decline
Benjamin Graham
#98. The world has not learned the technique of balanced expansion without the resultant commercial and financial congestion.
Benjamin Graham
#99. Every corporate security may be best viewed, in the first instance, as an ownership interest in, or a claim against, a specific business enterprise.
Benjamin Graham
#100. Only in the exceptional case, where the integrity and competence of the advisers have been thoroughly demonstrated, should the investor act upon the advice of others without understanding and approving the decision made.
Benjamin Graham
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