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

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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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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.
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Buy when most people, including experts, are pessimistic, and sell when they are actively optimistic.
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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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Before you place your financial future in the hands of an adviser, it's imperative that you find someone who not only makes you comfortable but whose honesty is beyond reproach.
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Stocks can be dynamite.
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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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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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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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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.
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The investor's primary interest lies in acquiring and holding suitable securities at suitable prices.
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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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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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It is worth pointing out that assuredly not more than one person out of a hundred who stayed in the market after after 1925 emerged from it with a net profit and that the speculative losses taken were appalling.
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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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It is absurd to think that the general public can ever make money out of market forecasts.
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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 only thing you should do with pro forma earnings is ignore them.
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The money cost of the reservoir plan literally fades into insignificance when it is compared with the financial burden which the great depression imposed on the nation.
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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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