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Benjamin Graham Quotes

• Wall Street people learn nothing and forget everything.

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

• The chief losses to investors come from the purchase of low-quality securities at times of favorable business conditions.

• Most of the time common stocks are subject to irrational and excessive price fluctuations in both directions as the consequence of the ingrained tendency of most people to speculate or gamble... to give way to hope, fear and greed.

• 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.

• I am no longer an advocate of elaborate techniques of security analysis in order to find superior value opportunities.

• You are neither right nor wrong because people agree with you.

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

• The fact that other people agree or disagree with you makes you neither right nor wrong. You will be right if your facts and your reasoning are correct.

• Confronted with the challenge to distil the secret of sound investment into three words, we venture the motto, Margin of Safety.

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

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

• Many sceptics, it is true, are inclined to dismiss the whole procedure [chart reading] as akin to astrology or necromancy; but the sheer weight of its importance in Wall Street requires that its pretensions be examined with some degree of care.

• The one principal that applies to nearly all these so-called "technical approaches" is that one should buy because a stock or the market has gone up and one should sell because it has declined. This is the exact opposite of sound business sense everywhere else, and it is most unlikely that it can lead to lasting success in Wall Street. In our own stock-market experience and observation, extending over 50 years, we have not known a single person who has consistently or lastingly made money by thus "following the market." We do not hesitate to declare that this approach is as fallacious as it is popular.

Benjamin Graham Bibliography

1934 - Security Analysis
1937 - Storage and Stability: A Modern Ever-normal Granary
1937 - The Interpretation of Financial Statements
1944 - World Commodities and World Currency
1949 - The Intelligent Investor
1996 - Benjamin Graham, the memoirs of the dean of Wall Street

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