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The intelligent investor is a realist who sells to optimists and buys from pessimists.

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
Realist
Pessimist
Optimist
Investors
Pessimists
Investing
Optimists
Sells
Pendulums
Intelligent
Buys
Investor

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The essence of investment management is the management of risks, not the management of returns.
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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.
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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.
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If you are shopping for common stocks, choose them the way you would buy groceries, not the way you would buy perfume.
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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.
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High valuations entail high risks.
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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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Wall Street has a few prudent principles the trouble is that they are always forgotten when they are most needed.
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you may take it as an axiom that you cannot profit in Wall Street by continuously doing the obvious or the popular thing
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Abnormally good or abnormally bad conditions do not last forever.
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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.
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At heart, uncertainty and investing are synonyms.
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There is a close logical connection between the concept of a safety margin and the principle of diversification.
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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.
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Knowledge is only one ingredient on arriving at a stock's proper price. The other ingredient, fully as important as information, is sound judgment.
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The investor has a right to expect good results to flow from a consistent and courageous application of the principle of buying after the market has declined substantially and selling after it has had a spectacular rise. But he cannot expect to reduce this principle to a simple and foolproof formula, with profits guaranteed and no anxious periods.
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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.
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You must never delude yourself into thinking that you're investing when you're speculating.
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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.
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It should be remembered that a decline of 50% fully offsets a preceding advance of 100%.
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