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Speculators often prosper through ignorance it is a cliché that in a roaring bull market knowledge is superfluous and experience is a handicap. But the typical experience of the speculator is one of temporary profit and ultimate loss

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
Profit
Roaring
Market
Bull
Ultimate
Clich
Ignorance
Superfluous
Speculator
Loss
Bulls
Speculators
Knowledge
Typical
Handicap
Often
Temporary
Handicaps
Experience
Investing
Prosper

More quotes by Benjamin Graham

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High valuations entail high risks.
Benjamin Graham
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No matter how careful you are, the one risk no investor can ever eliminate is the risk of being wrong. Only by insisting on what Graham called the margin of safety - never overpaying, no matter how exciting an investment seems to be - can you minimize your odds of error.
Benjamin Graham
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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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Price statistics show clearly that instability in raw-material prices is a prime cause of instability of other prices.
Benjamin Graham
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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
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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.
Benjamin Graham
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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
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Price fluctuations have only one significant meaning for the true investor. They provide him with an opportunity to buy wisely when prices fall sharply and to sell wisely when they advance a great deal.
Benjamin Graham
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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
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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.
Benjamin Graham
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The best values today are often found in the stocks that were once hot and have since gone cold.
Benjamin Graham
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The market is always making mountains out of molehills and exaggerating ordinary vicissitudes into major setbacks.
Benjamin Graham
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Every corporate security may be best viewed, in the first instance, as an ownership interest in, or a claim against, a specific business enterprise.
Benjamin Graham
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It always seemed, and still seems, ridiculously simple to say that if one can acquire a diversified group of common stocks at a price less than the applicable net current assets alone - after deducting all prior claims, and counting as zero the fixed and other assets - the results should be quite satisfactory.
Benjamin Graham
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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.
Benjamin Graham
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The investor's chief problem - and even his worst enemy - is likely to be himself.
Benjamin Graham
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The beauty of periodic rebalancing is that it forces you to base your investing decisions on a simple, objective standard.
Benjamin Graham
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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
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In other words, the market is not a weighing machine, on which the value of each issue is recorded by an exact and impersonal mechanism, in accordance with its specific qualities. Rather should we say that the market is a voting machine, whereon countless individuals register choices which are the product partly of reason and partly of emotion.
Benjamin Graham
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It should be remembered that a decline of 50% fully offsets a preceding advance of 100%.
Benjamin Graham