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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
Failure
Chance
Success
Individual
Art
Determining
Important
Skill
Factors
Skills

More quotes by Benjamin Graham

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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.
Benjamin Graham
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The best way to measure your investing success is not by whether you're beating the market but by whether you've put in place a financial plan and a behavioral discipline that are likely to get you where you want to go.
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The essence of investment management is the management of risks, not the management of returns.
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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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The market is always making mountains out of molehills and exaggerating ordinary vicissitudes into major setbacks.
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An investor calculates what a stock is worth, based on the value of its businesses.
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Successful investing is about managing risk, not avoiding it.
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.
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Speculators often prosper through ignorance it is a cliché that in a roaring bull market knowledge is superfluous and experience is a handicap. But the typical experience of the speculator is one of temporary profit and ultimate loss
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Only in the exceptional case, where the integrity and competence of the advisers have been thoroughly demonstrated, should the investor act upon the advice of others without understanding and approving the decision made.
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No matter how careful you are, the one risk no investor can ever eliminate is the risk of being wrong. Only by insisting on what Graham called the margin of safety - never overpaying, no matter how exciting an investment seems to be - can you minimize your odds of error.
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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.
Benjamin Graham
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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.
Benjamin Graham
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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.
Benjamin Graham
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The only thing you should do with pro forma earnings is ignore them.
Benjamin Graham
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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.
Benjamin Graham
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It must be fundamentally wrong to reduce production of food and fiber while one-third of our population is still ill fed and ill clothed.
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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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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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.
Benjamin Graham