"The stock market resembles a huge laundry in which institutions take in large blocks of each others washing ... without rhyme or reason."
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Quote collection
Benjamin Graham quotes (page 9 of 10)
197 quotes — follow a thought to its full quote page.
"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."
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"It's nonsensical to derive a price/earnings ratio by dividing the known current price by unknown future earnings."
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"Even the most conservative must realize that the recent transformation of surplus from an individual to a national disaster implies a scathing indictment of our capitalist system as it has now developed."
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"Both a priori reasoning and experience teach us that as as these funds grow larger the geometrical rate of growth by compound interest ultimately defeats itself."
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"The most striking thing about Graham's discussion of how to allocate your assets between stocks and bonds is that he never mentions the word "age"."
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"I am no longer an advocate of elaborate techniques of security analysis in order to find superior value opportunities."
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"Price statistics show clearly that instability in raw-material prices is a prime cause of instability of other prices."
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"When somebody asserts that a stock has an earning power of so much, I am sure that the person who hears him doesn't know what he means, and there is a good chance that the man who uses it doesn't know what it means."
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"We have been trying to point out that this concept of an indefinitely favorable future is dangerous, even if it is true; because even if it is true you can easily overvalue the security, since you make it worth anything you want it to be worth. Beyond this, it is particularly dangerous too, because sometimes your ideas of the future turn out to be wrong. Then you have paid an awful lot for a future that isn't there. Your position then is pretty bad."
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"The investor has a right to expect good results to flow from a consistent and courageous application of the principle of buying after the market has declined substantially and selling after it has had a spectacular rise. But he cannot expect to reduce this principle to a simple and foolproof formula, with profits guaranteed and no anxious periods."
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"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."
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"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."
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"The modern world is not geared properly to the storage of goods."
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"Calculate a stock's price/earnings ratio yourself, using Graham's formula of current price divided by average earnings over the past three years."
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"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."
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"there is a tendency in part of Wall Street people to pay excessive attention to the most recent figures and the present financial picture."
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"... the loss of public confidence in the financial community growing out of its own conduct in recent years. I insist that more damage has been done to stock values and to the future of equities from inside Wall Street than from outside Wall Street."
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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."
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"Whether we like it or not, government intervention in the face of surplus is here to stay."
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