Quote

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

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Benjamin Graham
Age: 82 †
Born: 1894
Born: May 8
Died: 1976
Died: September 21
Economist
Financier
Investor
University Teacher
Writer
London
England
Also
Opposites
Character
Requires
Spaced
May
Wait
Crowd
Years
Strength
Crowds
Think
Fashion
Opposite
Thinking
Waiting
Opportunities
Opportunity
Patience
Order
Apart

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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.
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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.
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The ideal form of common stock analysis leads to a valuation of the issue which can be compared with the current price to determine whether or not the security is an attractive purchase.
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It should be remembered that a decline of 50% fully offsets a preceding advance of 100%.
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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.
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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.
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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.
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The investor's chief problem - and even his worst enemy - is likely to be himself.
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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).
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It's nonsensical to derive a price/earnings ratio by dividing the known current price by unknown future earnings.
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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.
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An investment operation is one which, upon thorough analysis, promises safety of principal and an adequate return.
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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.
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The beauty of periodic rebalancing is that it forces you to base your investing decisions on a simple, objective standard.
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... 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.
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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.
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Always remember that market quotations are there for convenience, either to be taken advantage of or to be ignored.
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