Benjamin Graham - Investment Quotes

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Successful investment may become substantially a matter of techniques and criteria that are learnable, rather than the product of unique and incommunicable mental powers.

Benjamin Graham
The value of any investment is, and always must be, a function of the price you pay for it.

Benjamin Graham
It is our argument that a sufficiently low price can turn a security of mediocre quality into a sound investment opportunity - provided that the buyer is informed and experienced and he practices adequate diversification. For, if the price is low enough to create a substantial margin of safety, the security thereby meets our criterion of investment.

Benjamin Graham
Never mingle your speculative and investment operations in the same account nor in any part of your thinking.

Benjamin Graham
By refusing to pay too much for an investment, you minimize the chances that your wealth will ever disappear or suddenly be destroyed.

Benjamin Graham
The distinction between investment and speculation in common stocks has always been a useful one and its disappearance is cause for concern.

Benjamin Graham
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.

Benjamin Graham
A great company is not a great investment if you pay too much for the stock.

Benjamin Graham
By developing your discipline and courage, you can refuse to let other people's mood swings govern your financial destiny. In the end, how your investments behave is much less important than how you behave.

Benjamin Graham
Diversification is an established tenet of conservative investment.

Benjamin Graham
Real investment risk is measured not by the percent that a stock may decline in price in relation to the general market in a given period, but by the danger of a loss of quality and earnings power through economic changes or deterioration in management.

Benjamin Graham
The underlying principles of sound investment should not alter from decade to decade, but the application of these principles must be adapted to significant changes in the financial mechanisms and climate.

Benjamin Graham
All the real money in investment will have to be made—as most of it has been in the past— not out of buying and selling but out of owning and holding securities, receiving interests and dividends therein, and benefiting from their long-term increases in value. Hence stockholder's major energies and wisdom as investors should be directed toward assuring themselves of the best operating results from their corporations. This in turn means assuring themselves of fully honest and competent managements.

Benjamin Graham
An investment operation is one which, upon thorough analysis, promises safety of principal and an adequate return.

Benjamin Graham
Certain common-sense consideration relate to the criterion of normal or standard results mentioned above. Our basic thesis is this: If the investor is to rely chiefly on the advice of others in handling his funds, then either (a) he must limit himself and his advisers strictly to standard, conservative, and even un imaginative forms of investment or (b) he must have an unusually intimate and favorable knowledge of the person who is going to direct his funds into other channels; for only to the extent that the investor himself grows in knowledge and competence and therefore becomes qualified to pass independent judgement on the recommendations of others can he be receptive to less conventional suggestions from his advisers.

Benjamin Graham
Investment is most intelligent when it is most businesslike.

Benjamin Graham
Intelligent investment is more a matter of mental approach than it is of technique. A sound mental approach toward stock fluctuations is the touchstone of all successful investment under present-day conditions.

Benjamin Graham
To achieve satisfactory investment results is easier than most people realize; to achieve superior results is harder than it looks.

Benjamin Graham
In nine companies out of ten the factor of fluctuation has been a more dominant and important consideration in the matter of investment than has the factor of long-term growth or decline.

Benjamin Graham
Though business conditions may change, corporations and securities may change, and financial institutions and regulations may change, human nature remains the same. Thus the important and difficult part of sound investment, which hinges upon the investor's own temperament and attitude, is not much affected by the passing years.

Benjamin Graham
Why could the typical investor expect any better success in trying to buy at low levels and sell at high levels than in trying to forecast what the market is going to do? Because if he does the former he acts only after the market has moved down into buying levels or up into selling levels. His role is not that of a prophet but of a businessman seizing clearly evident investment opportunities. He is not trying to be smarter than his fellow investors but simply trying to be less irrational than the mass of speculators who insist on buying after the market advances and selling after it goes down. If the market persists in behaving foolishly, all he seems to need is ordinary common sense in order to exploit its foolishness.

Benjamin Graham
The reader can test his own psychology by asking himself whether he would consider, in retrospect, the selling at 156 in 1925 and buying back at 109 in 1931 was a satisfactory operation. Some may think that an intelligent investor should have been able to sell out much closer to the high of 381 and to buy back nearer the low of 41. If that is your own view you are probably a speculator at heart and will have trouble keeping to true investment precepts while the market rushes up and down.

Benjamin Graham
The investor has the benefit of the stock market's daily and changing appraisal of his holdings, for whatever that appraisal may be worth, and, second, that the investor is able to increase or decrease his investment at the market's daily figure—if he chooses. Thus the existence of a quoted market gives the investor certain options which he does not have if his security is unquoted. But it does not impose the current quotation on an investor who prefers to take his idea of value from some other source.

Benjamin Graham