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In the financial markets, hindsight is forever 20/20, but foresight is legally blind. And thus, for most investors, market timing is a practical and emotional impossibility.

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
Financial
Timing
Blind
Markets
Emotional
Investors
Forever
Practicals
Practical
Legally
Investing
Foresight
Thus
Hindsight
Market
Impossibility

More quotes by Benjamin Graham

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The chief obstacle to success lies in the stubborn fact that if the favorable prospects of a concern are clearly apparent they are almost always reflected already in the current price of the stock. Buying such an issue is like betting on a topheavy favorite in a horse race. The chances may be on your side, but the real odds are against you.
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It's nonsensical to derive a price/earnings ratio by dividing the known current price by unknown future earnings.
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The essence of investment management is the management of risks, not the management of returns.
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Avoid second-quality issues in making up a portfolio unless they are demonstrable bargains.
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The value of the security analyst to the investor depends largely on the investor's own attitude. If the investor asks the analyst the right questions, he is likely to get the right or at least valuable answers.
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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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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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The investor's primary interest lies in acquiring and holding suitable securities at suitable prices.
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In other words, the market is not a weighing machine, on which the value of each issue is recorded by an exact and impersonal mechanism, in accordance with its specific qualities. Rather should we say that the market is a voting machine, whereon countless individuals register choices which are the product partly of reason and partly of emotion.
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The distinction between investment and speculation in common stocks has always been a useful one and its disappearance is cause for concern.
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The qualitative factors upon which most stress is laid are the nature of the business and the character of the management. These elements are exceedingly important, but they are also exceedingly difficult to deal with intelligently.
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Do not let anyone else run your business
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Always buy your straw hats in the Winter
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Abnormally good or abnormally bad conditions do not last forever.
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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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Always remember that market quotations are there for convenience, either to be taken advantage of or to be ignored.
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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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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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There is a close logical connection between the concept of a safety margin and the principle of diversification.
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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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