Benjamin Graham
Benjamin Graham
Benjamin Grahamwas a British-born American economist and professional investor. Graham is considered the father of value investing, an investment approach he began teaching at Columbia Business School in 1928 and subsequently refined with David Dodd through various editions of their famous book Security Analysis. Graham had many disciples in his lifetime, a number of whom went on to become successful investors themselves. Graham's most well-known disciples include Warren Buffett, William J. Ruane, Irving Kahn and Walter J. Schloss, among others...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionEntrepreneur
Date of Birth8 May 1894
CountryUnited States of America
Benjamin Graham quotes about
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.
The investor is neither smart not richer when he buys in an advancing market and the market continues to rise. That is true even when he cashes in a goodly profit, unless either (a) he is definitely through with buying stocks an unlikely story or (b) he is determined to reinvest only at considerably lower levels. In a continuous program no market profit is fully realized until the later reinvestment has actually taken place, and the true measure of the trading profit is the difference between the previous selling level and the new buying level.
The best way to measure your investing success is not by whether you're beating the market but by whether you've put in place a financial plan and a behavioral discipline that are likely to get you where you want to go.
A price decline is of no real importance to the bona fide investor unless it is either very substantial say, more than a third from cost or unless it reflects a known deterioration of consequence in the company's position. In a well-defined bear market many sound common stocks sell temporarily at extraordinary low prices. It is possible that the investor may then have a paper loss of fully 50 per cent on some of his holdings, without any convincing indication that the underlying values have been permanently affected.
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.
The investor has the benefit of the stock market's daily and changing appraisal of his holdings, for whatever that appraisal may be worth , and, second, that the investor is able to increase or decrease his investment at the market's daily figure if he chooses . Thus the existence of a quoted market gives the investor certain options which he does not have if his security is unquoted. But it does not impose the current quotation on an investor who prefers to take his idea of value from some other source.
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.
Wall Street has a few prudent principles; the trouble is that they are always forgotten when they are most needed.
Even defensive portfolios should be changed from time to time, especially if the securities purchased have an apparently excessive advance and can be replaced by issues much more reasonable priced.
Mathematics is ordinarily considered as producing precise and dependable results; but in the stock market the more elaborate and abstruse the mathematics the more uncertain and speculative are the conclusions we draw there from. Whenever calculus is brought in, or higher algebra, you could take it as a warning that the operator was trying to substitute theory for experience, and usually also to give to speculation the deceptive guise of investment.
The investor's primary interest lies in acquiring and holding suitable securities at suitable prices.
Always remember that market quotations are there for convenience, either to be taken advantage of or to be ignored.
Buy when most people, including experts, are pessimistic, and sell when they are actively optimistic,