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

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A stock is not just a ticker symbol or an electronic blip it is an ownership interest in an actual business, with an underlying value that does not depend on its share price.
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The ideal form of common stock analysis leads to a valuation of the issue which can be compared with the current price to determine whether or not the security is an attractive purchase.
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The market is always making mountains out of molehills and exaggerating ordinary vicissitudes into major setbacks.
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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 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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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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Individuals who cannot master their emotions are ill-suited to profit from the investment process.
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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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An intelligent investor gets satisfaction from the thought that his operations are exactly opposite to those of the crowd.
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An investment operation is one which, upon thorough analysis, promises safety of principal and an adequate return.
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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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It always seemed, and still seems, ridiculously simple to say that if one can acquire a diversified group of common stocks at a price less than the applicable net current assets alone - after deducting all prior claims, and counting as zero the fixed and other assets - the results should be quite satisfactory.
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Stocks can be dynamite.
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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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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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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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High valuations entail high risks.
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Avoid second-quality issues in making up a portfolio unless they are demonstrable bargains.
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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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It should be remembered that a decline of 50% fully offsets a preceding advance of 100%.
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