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At heart, uncertainty and investing are synonyms.

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
Heart
Synonyms
Synonym
Uncertainty
Investing

More quotes by Benjamin Graham

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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.
Benjamin Graham
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Abnormally good or abnormally bad conditions do not last forever.
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We urge the beginner in security buying not to waste his efforts and his money in trying to beat the market. Let him study security values and initially test out his judgment on price versus value with the smallest possible sums.
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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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The individual investor should act consistently as an investor and not as a speculator. This means ... that he should be able to justify every purchase he makes and each price he pays by impersonal, objective reasoning that satisfies him that he is getting more than his money's worth for his purchase.
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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.
Benjamin Graham
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Before you invest, you must ensure that you have realistically assessed your probability of being right and how you will react to the consequences of being wrong.
Benjamin Graham
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The intelligent investor is a realist who sells to optimists and buys from pessimists.
Benjamin Graham
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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.
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.
Benjamin Graham
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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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It is a fact worth pondering that four centuries ago the evil of an abundance or surplus arose from its being kept off the market, while today the evil of surplus lies in its being thrown upon the market.
Benjamin Graham
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Thousands of people have tried, and the evidence is clear: The more you trade, the less you keep.
Benjamin Graham
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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.
Benjamin Graham
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The sillier the market's behavior, the greater the opportunity for the business like investor.
Benjamin Graham
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The stock market resembles a huge laundry in which institutions take in large blocks of each others washing ... without rhyme or reason.
Benjamin Graham
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The essence of investment management is the management of risks, not the management of returns.
Benjamin Graham
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Every corporate security may be best viewed, in the first instance, as an ownership interest in, or a claim against, a specific business enterprise.
Benjamin Graham
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High valuations entail high risks.
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The investor should be aware that even though safety of its principal and interest may be unquestioned, a long term bond could vary widely in market price in response to changes in interest rates.
Benjamin Graham