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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.

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
Hold
Investors
Bunker
Become
Cash
Bunkers
Enough
Ideal
Investor
Would
Investing
Duck
World
Sell
Stocks
Sells
Bonds
Ideals
Ducks
Intelligent
Cheap
Overpriced

More quotes by Benjamin Graham

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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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Have the courage of your knowledge and experience. If you have formed a conclusion from the facts and if you know your judgment is sound, act on it – even though others may hesitate or differ.
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The investor's chief problem - and even his worst enemy - is likely to be himself.
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Successful investing is about managing risk, not avoiding it.
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Even the most conservative must realize that the recent transformation of surplus from an individual to a national disaster implies a scathing indictment of our capitalist system as it has now developed.
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Confronted with a challenge to distill the secret of sound investment into three words, we venture the motto, Margin of Safety.
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Successful investing professionals are disciplined and consistent and they think a great deal about what they do and how they do it.
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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.
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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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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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Abnormally good or abnormally bad conditions do not last forever.
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The intelligent investor is a realist who sells to optimists and buys from pessimists.
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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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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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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.
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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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Mr. Market's job is to provide you with prices your job is to decide whether it is to your advantage to act on them. You no not have to trade with hime just because he constantly begs you to.
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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.
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Nothing important on Wall Street can be counted on to occur exactly in the same way as it happened before.
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Only in the exceptional case, where the integrity and competence of the advisers have been thoroughly demonstrated, should the investor act upon the advice of others without understanding and approving the decision made.
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