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Both individual skill (art) and chance are important factors in determining success or failure.

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
Success
Individual
Art
Determining
Important
Skill
Factors
Skills
Failure
Chance

More quotes by Benjamin Graham

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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.
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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 intelligent investor is a realist who sells to optimists and buys from pessimists.
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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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Stock speculation is largely a matter of A trying to decide what B, C and D are likely to think-with B, C and D trying to do the same.
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Why should the cotton growers suffer if there is shortage of wheat?
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Abnormally good or abnormally bad conditions do not last forever.
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An investor calculates what a stock is worth, based on the value of its businesses.
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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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Never buy a stock immediately after a substantial rise or sell one immediately after a substantial drop.
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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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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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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.
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Price statistics show clearly that instability in raw-material prices is a prime cause of instability of other prices.
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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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The purchase of a bargain issue presupposes that the market's current appraisal is wrong, or at least that the buyer's idea of value is more likely to be right than the market's. In this process the investor sets his judgement against that of the market. To some this may seem arrogant or foolhardy.
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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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In the world of securities, courage becomes the supreme virtue after adequate knowledge and a tested judgment are at hand.
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The essence of investment management is the management of risks, not the management of returns.
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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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