Benjamin Graham Quotes

#1. investors. I have been a student of the philosophy of value investing, which of course was established, executed, and popularized by superinvestors Benjamin Graham, Warren Buffet, and Seth Klarman among

Sundeep Bajikar

#2. Benjamin Graham wrote, "Those with enterprise haven't the money, and those with money haven't the enterprise, to buy stocks when they are cheap."

Seth Klarman

#3. By investing at a discount, Benjamin Graham knew that he was unlikely to experience losses.

Seth Klarman

#4. Avoid second-quality issues in making up a portfolio unless they are demonstrable bargains.

Benjamin Graham

#5. 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

#6. There is no room in this philosophy for a middle ground, or a series of gradations, between the passive and aggressive status. Many,

Benjamin Graham

#7. Wall Street people learn nothing and forget everything.

Benjamin Graham

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

Benjamin Graham

#9. It requires strength of character in order to think and to act in opposite fashion from the crowd and also patience to wait for opportunities that may be spaced years apart.

Benjamin Graham

#10. You must never delude yourself into thinking that you're investing when you're speculating.

Benjamin Graham

#11. Why should the cotton growers suffer if there is shortage of wheat?

Benjamin Graham

#12. Investment must always consider the price as well as the quality of the security.

Benjamin Graham

#13. The intelligent investor should recognize that market panics can create great prices for good companies and good prices for great companies.

Benjamin Graham

#14. Abnormally good or abnormally bad conditions do not last forever.

Benjamin Graham

#15. 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

#16. 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

#17. There is a close logical connection between the concept of a safety margin and the principle of diversification.

Benjamin Graham

#18. At heart, "uncertainty" and "investing" are synonyms.

Benjamin Graham

#19. 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

#20. While enthusiasm may be necessary for great accomplishments elsewhere, on Wall Street it almost invariably leads to disaster

Benjamin Graham

#21. 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

#22. 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

#23. ... The soundness of the best investments must rest not upon legal rights or remedies but upon ample financial capacity of the enterprise.

Benjamin Graham

#24. Buy not on optimism, but on arithmetic.

Benjamin Graham

#25. While a trend shown in the past is a fact, a "future trend" is only an assumption.

Benjamin Graham

#26. Intelligent investment is more a matter of mental approach than it is of technique. A sound mental approach toward stock fluctuations is the touchstone of all successful investment under present-day conditions.

Benjamin Graham

#27. 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

#28. 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

#29. Obvious prospects for physical growth in a business do not translate into obvious profits for investors.

Benjamin Graham

#30. 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

#31. The market is always making mountains out of molehills and exaggerating ordinary vicissitudes into major setbacks.

Benjamin Graham

#32. If you are shopping for common stocks, choose them the way you would buy groceries, not the way you would buy perfume.

Benjamin Graham

#33. Individuals who cannot master their emotions are ill-suited to profit from the investment process.

Benjamin Graham

#34. 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

#35. The volume of credit depends upon three factors: the desire to borrow, the ability to lend and the desire to lend.

Benjamin Graham

#36. An intelligent investor gets satisfaction from the thought that his operations are exactly opposite to those of the crowd.

Benjamin Graham

#37. Always buy your straw hats in the Winter

Benjamin Graham

#38. An investor calculates what a stock is worth, based on the value of its businesses.

Benjamin Graham

#39. In February 2000, hedge-fund manager James J. Cramer proclaimed that Internet-related companies "are the only ones worth owning right now." These "winners of the new world," as he called them, "are the only ones that are going higher consistently in good days and bad.

Benjamin Graham

#40. You will be much more in control, if you realize how much you are not in control.

Benjamin Graham

#41. A speculator gambles that a stock will go up in price because somebody else will pay even more for it.

Benjamin Graham

#42. The essence of investment management is the management of risks, not the management of returns.

Benjamin Graham

#43. 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

#44. If fees consume more than 1% of your assets annually, you should probably shop for another adviser.

Benjamin Graham

#45. To achieve satisfactory investment results is easier than most people realize; to achieve superior results is harder than it looks.

Benjamin Graham

#46. The intelligent investor is likely to need considerable will power to keep from following the crowd.

Benjamin Graham

#47. Confronted with a challenge to distill the secret of sound investment into three words, we venture the motto, Margin of Safety.

Benjamin Graham

#48. The Reservoir plan is an engineering mechanism applied to the field of economics, and in its essence it has nothing to do with democracy or any other political philosophy.

Benjamin Graham

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

Benjamin Graham

#50. Mr. Market's job is to provide you with prices; your job is to decide whether it is to your advantage to act on them. You no not have to trade with hime just because he constantly begs you to.

Benjamin Graham

#51. 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

#52. ... Bond selection is primarily a negative art. It is a process of exclusion and rejection, rather than of search and acceptance.

Benjamin Graham

#53. 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

#54. 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

#55. The psychologists Daniel Kahnerman and Amos Tversky have shown when humans estimate the likelihood or frequency of an event, we make that judgment based not on how often the event has actually occurred, but on how vivid the past examples are.

Benjamin Graham

#56. The intelligent investor gets interested in big growth stocks not when they are at their most popular - but when something goes wrong.

Benjamin Graham

#57. Knowledge is only one ingredient on arriving at a stock's proper price. The other ingredient, fully as important as information, is sound judgment.

Benjamin Graham

#58. ... the value of the pledged property is vitally dependent on the earning power of the enterprise.

Benjamin Graham

#59. Never buy a stock because it has gone up or sell one because it has gone down.

Benjamin Graham

#60. 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

#61. 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

#62. 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

#63. A defensive investor can always prosper by looking patiently and calmly through the wreckage of a bear market.

Benjamin Graham

#64. Successful investing professionals are disciplined and consistent and they think a great deal about what they do and how they do it.

Benjamin Graham

#65. 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

#66. 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

#67. ... generally speaking there can be no high-grade obligations of a weak enterprise.

Benjamin Graham

#68. A great company is not a great investment if you pay too much for the stock.

Benjamin Graham

#69. It's nonsensical to derive a price/earnings ratio by dividing the known current price by unknown future earnings.

Benjamin Graham

#70. 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

#71. Stocks can be dynamite.

Benjamin Graham

#72. It should be remembered that a decline of 50% fully offsets a preceding advance of 100%.

Benjamin Graham

#73. 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

#74. 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

#75. 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

#76. 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

#77. The investor's chief problem - and even his worst enemy - is likely to be himself.

Benjamin Graham

#78. Price statistics show clearly that instability in raw-material prices is a prime cause of instability of other prices.

Benjamin Graham

#79. 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

#80. An investment operation is one which, upon thorough analysis, promises safety of principal and an adequate return.

Benjamin Graham

#81. 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

#82. Buy cheap and sell dear.

Benjamin Graham

#83. Investing is most intelligent when it is most businesslike.

Benjamin Graham

#84. 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

#85. Cartels have spread and will spread as long as the world lacks an effective mechanism by which balanced expansion may be achieved without a resulting disruption of prices.

Benjamin Graham

#86. The modern world is not geared properly to the storage of goods.

Benjamin Graham

#87. Buy when most people, including experts, are pessimistic, and sell when they are actively optimistic,

Benjamin Graham

#88. We shall dismiss these with the observation that their work does not concern "investors" as the term is used in this book.

Benjamin Graham

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

Benjamin Graham

#90. 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

#91. In an ideal world, the intelligent investor would hold stocks only when they are cheap and sell them when they become overpriced, then duck into the bunker of bonds and cash until stocks again become cheap enough to buy.

Benjamin Graham

#92. The thing that I have been emphasizing in my own work for the last few years has been the group approach. To try to buy groups of stocks that meet some simple criterion for being undervalued-regardless of the industry and with very little attention to the individual company.

Benjamin Graham

#93. The analyst's conclusions must always rest upon the figures and upon established tests and standards.

Benjamin Graham

#94. The determining trait of the enterprising (or active, or aggressive) investor is his willingness to devote time and care to the selection of securities that are both sound and more attractive than the average.

Benjamin Graham

#95. 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

#96. 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

#97. Wall Street has a few prudent principles; the trouble is that they are always forgotten when they are most needed.

Benjamin Graham

#98. 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

#99. we advised the readers to buy their stocks as they bought their groceries, not as they bought their perfume.

Benjamin Graham

#100. 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