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

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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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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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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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The chief losses to investors come from the purchase of low-quality securities at times of favorable business conditions.
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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.
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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.
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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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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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The best way to measure your investing success is not by whether you're beating the market but by whether you've put in place a financial plan and a behavioral discipline that are likely to get you where you want to go.
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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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Mr. Market does not always price stocks the way an appraiser or a private buyer would value a business. Instead, when stocks are going up, he happily pays more than their objective value and, when they are going down, he is desperate to dump them for less than their true worth.
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Cartels have spread and will spread as long as the world lacks an effective mechanism by which balanced expansion may be achieved without a resulting disruption of prices.
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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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The beauty of periodic rebalancing is that it forces you to base your investing decisions on a simple, objective standard.
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Buy when most people, including experts, are pessimistic, and sell when they are actively optimistic.
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Successful investing is about managing risk, not avoiding it.
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The only thing you should do with pro forma earnings is ignore them.
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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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Stocks can be dynamite.
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The intelligent investor should recognize that market panics can create great prices for good companies and good prices for great companies.
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