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
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.
Abnormally good or abnormally bad conditions do not last forever.
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.
The value of any investment is, and always must be, a function of the price you pay for it.
Successful investing professionals are disciplined and consistent and they think a great deal about what they do and how they do it.
A speculator gambles that a stock will go up in price because somebody else will pay even more for it.
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.
Confusing speculation with investment is always a mistake.
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".
The beauty of periodic rebalancing is that it forces you to base your investing decisions on a simple, objective standard.
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.
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.
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.
The existence of such a war chest might go far to strengthen our prestige and frighten off any would be assailant.