Benjamin Graham - The Intelligent Investor (1949)

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Investment is most intelligent when it is most businesslike.

Benjamin Graham
It is no difficult trick to bring a great deal of energy, study, and native ability into Wall Street and to end up with losses instead of profits. These virtues, if channeled in the wrong directions, become indistinguishable from handicaps.

Benjamin Graham
The investor's primary interest lies in acquiring and holding suitable securities at suitable prices.

Benjamin Graham
It is absurd to think that the general public can ever make money out of market forecasts.

Benjamin Graham
Nearly everyone interested in common stocks wants to be told by someone else what he thinks the market is going to do. The demand being there, it must be supplied.

Benjamin Graham
The genuine investor in common stocks does not need a great equipment of brain and knowledge, but he does need some unusual qualities of character

Benjamin Graham
Basically, 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. At other times he will do better if he forgets about the stock market and pays attention to his dividend returns and to the operating results of his companies.

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
Wall Street has a few prudent principles; the trouble is that they are always forgotten when they are most needed.

Benjamin Graham
Have the courage of your knowledge and experience. If you have formed a conclusion from the facts and if you know your judgment is sound, act on it – even though others may hesitate or differ.

Benjamin Graham
The function of the margin of safety is, in essence, that of rendering unnecessary an accurate estimate of the future.

Benjamin Graham
While enthusiasm may be necessary for great accomplishments elsewhere, on Wall Street it almost invariably leads to disaster

Benjamin Graham
The intelligent investor is likely to need considerable will power to keep from following the crowd.

Benjamin Graham
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.

Benjamin Graham
In the world of securities, courage becomes the supreme virtue after adequate knowledge and a tested judgment are at hand.

Benjamin Graham
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
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
To be an investor you must be a believer in a better tomorrow.

Benjamin Graham
If General Motors is worth $60 a share to an investor it must be because the full common-stock ownership of this gigantic enterprise as a whole is worth 43 million (shares) times $60, or no less than $2,600 million.

Benjamin Graham
Buy when most people, including experts, are pessimistic, and sell when they are actively optimistic,

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
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
The investor would not be far wrong if this motto read more simply: "Never buy a stock immediately after a substantial rise or sell one immediately after a substantial drop".

Benjamin Graham
We have not known a single person who has consistently or lastingly make money by thus "following the market". We do not hesitate to declare this approach is as fallacious as it is popular.

Benjamin Graham
Before you place your financial future in the hands of an adviser, it's imperative that you find someone who not only makes you comfortable but whose honesty is beyond reproach.

Benjamin Graham
Calculate a stock's price/earnings ratio yourself, using Graham's formula of current price divided by average earnings over the past three years.

Benjamin Graham
The only thing you should do with pro forma earnings is ignore them.

Benjamin Graham
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
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
Most businesses change in character and quality over the years, sometimes for the better, perhaps more often for the worse. The investor need not watch his companies' performance like a hawk; but he should give it a good, hard look from time to time.

Benjamin Graham