Benjamin Graham famous quotes

04-17-2025

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

#Fear #People #Giving
In the world of securities, courage becomes the supreme virtue after adequate knowledge and a tested judgment are at hand.
-- Benjamin Graham

#Hands #World #Adequate
If you are shopping for common stocks, choose them the way you would buy groceries, not the way you would buy perfume.
-- Benjamin Graham

#Intelligent #Shopping #Investing
An investment operation is one which, upon thorough analysis, promises safety of principal and an adequate return.
-- Benjamin Graham

#Safety #Promise #Analysis
Individuals who cannot master their emotions are ill-suited to profit from the investment process.
-- Benjamin Graham

#Emotion #Investment #Individual
To be an investor you must be a believer in a better tomorrow.
-- Benjamin Graham

#Tomorrow #Better Tomorrow #Believer
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

#Safety #Body #Investment
In the short run, the market is a voting machine, but in the long run it is a weighing machine.
-- Benjamin Graham

#Running #Business #Intelligent
Buy not on optimism, but on arithmetic.
-- Benjamin Graham

#Intelligent #Optimism #Investing
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

#Thinking #Trying #Matter
The chief losses to investors come from the purchase of low-quality securities at times of favorable business conditions.
-- Benjamin Graham

#Loss #Quality #Lows
Those with the enterprise lack the money and those with the money lack the enterprise to buy stocks when they are cheap.
-- Benjamin Graham

#Investing #Enterprise
The individual investor should act consistently as an investor and not as a speculator. This means ... that he should be able to justify every purchase he makes and each price he pays by impersonal, objective reasoning that satisfies him that he is getting more than his money's worth for his purchase.
-- Benjamin Graham

#Mean #Pay #Able
The investor with a portfolio of sound stocks should expect their prices to fluctuate and should neither be concerned by sizable declines nor become excited by sizable advances. He should always remember that market quotations are there for his convenience, either to be taken advantage of or to be ignored.
-- Benjamin Graham

#Taken #Sound #Portfolios
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
It is absurd to think that the general public can ever make money out of market forecasts.
-- Benjamin Graham

#Thinking #Making Money #Absurd
To achieve satisfactory investment results is easier than most people realize; to achieve superior results is harder than it looks.
-- Benjamin Graham

#People #Looks #Realizing
The intelligent investor is likely to need considerable will power to keep from following the crowd.
-- Benjamin Graham

#Intelligent #Needs #Following The Crowd
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

#Loss #Views #Years
Buy when most people, including experts, are pessimistic, and sell when they are actively optimistic,
-- Benjamin Graham

#Optimistic #People #Experts
The market is a pendulum that forever swings between unsustainable optimism (which makes stocks too expensive) and unjustified pessimism (which makes them too cheap). The intelligent investor is a realist who sells to optimists and buys from pessimists.
-- Benjamin Graham

#Intelligent #Swings #Optimism
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

#Keys #Littles #Economic
there is a tendency in part of Wall Street people to pay excessive attention to the most recent figures and the present financial picture.
-- Benjamin Graham

#Wall #People #Attention
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

#Important #Arriving #Information
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

#Real #Loss #Risk

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