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The sillier the market's behavior, the greater the opportunity for the business like investor.

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
Business
Sillier
Like
Investor
Investors
Investing
Market
Behavior
Greater
Opportunity

More quotes by Benjamin Graham

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The correct attitude of the security analyst toward the stock market might well be that of a man toward his wife. He shouldn't pay too much attention to what the lady says, but he can't afford to ignore it entirely. That is pretty much the position that most of us find ourselves vis-à-vis the stock market.
Benjamin Graham
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Buy when most people, including experts, are pessimistic, and sell when they are actively optimistic.
Benjamin Graham
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Nothing important on Wall Street can be counted on to occur exactly in the same way as it happened before.
Benjamin Graham
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It must be fundamentally wrong to reduce production of food and fiber while one-third of our population is still ill fed and ill clothed.
Benjamin Graham
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A stock is not just a ticker symbol or an electronic blip it is an ownership interest in an actual business, with an underlying value that does not depend on its share price.
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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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
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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.
Benjamin Graham
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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.
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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Successful investment may become substantially a matter of techniques and criteria that are learnable, rather than the product of unique and incommunicable mental powers.
Benjamin Graham
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The only thing you should do with pro forma earnings is ignore them.
Benjamin Graham
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It is no difficult trick to bring a great deal of energy, study, and native ability into Wall Street and to end up with losses instead of profits. These virtues, if channeled in the wrong directions, become indistinguishable from handicaps.
Benjamin Graham
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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).
Benjamin Graham
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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
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We define a bargain issue as one which, on the basis of facts established by analysis, appears to be worth considerably more that it is selling for.
Benjamin Graham
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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.
Benjamin Graham
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Wall Street has a few prudent principles the trouble is that they are always forgotten when they are most needed.
Benjamin Graham
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Abnormally good or abnormally bad conditions do not last forever.
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