Benjamin Graham Quotes

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

The defensive (or passive) investor will place chief emphasis on the avoidance of serious mistakes or losses. His second aim will be freedom from effort, annoyance, and the need for making frequent decisions.

Successful investing is about managing risk, not avoiding it.

The intelligent investor is a realist who sells to optimists and buys from pessimists.

Investing isn't about beating others at their game. It's about controlling yourself at your own game.

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.

In the short run, the market is a voting machine, but in the long run it is a weighing machine.

Losing some money is an inevitable part of investing, and there's nothing you can do to prevent it. But to be an intelligent investor, you must take responsibility for ensuring that you never lose most or all of your money.

Thousands of people have tried, and the evidence is clear: The more you trade, the less you keep.

The essence of investment management is the management of risks, not the management of returns.

Successful investing professionals are disciplined and consistent and they think a great deal about what they do and how they do it.

Buy not on optimism, but on arithmetic.

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

To have a true investment, there must be a true margin of safety. And a true margin of safety is one that can be demonstrated by figures, by persuasive reasoning, and by reference to a body of actual experience.

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

An intelligent investor gets satisfaction from the thought that his operations are exactly opposite to those of the crowd.

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.

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

Individuals who cannot master their emotions are ill-suited to profit from the investment process.

The intelligent investor should recognize that market panics can create great prices for good companies and good prices for great companies.

It should be remembered that a decline of 50% fully offsets a preceding advance of 100%.

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

If I have noticed anything over these 60 years on Wall Street, it is that people do not succeed in forecasting what`s going to happen to the stock market.

Never buy a stock immediately after a substantial rise or sell one immediately after a substantial drop.

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.