Benjamin Graham was a stock investor and considered the father of value investing. He wrote many books, his most famous being the Intelligent Investor. Graham was also a mentor to Warren Buffet.
He has many fantastic quotes regarding investing evolving around the subjects of value, patience, risk, discipline and much more. If you are an avid investor you will enjoy reading these quotes. Abide by them and you will probably improve your returns too.
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Successful investing is about managing risk, not avoiding it.
Benjamin Graham
In the short run, the market is a voting machine, but in the long run it is a weighing machine.
Benjamin Graham
Investing isn't about beating others at their game. It's about controlling yourself at your own game.
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
The essence of investment management is the management of risks, not the management of returns
Benjamin Graham
At heart, "uncertainty" and "investing" are synonyms.
Benjamin Graham
The intelligent investor is a realist who sells to optimists and buys from pessimists.
Benjamin Graham
It requires strength of character in order to think and to act in opposite fashion from the crowd and also patience to wait for opportunities that may be spaced years apart.
Benjamin Graham
The investor's chief problem - and even his worst enemy - is likely to be himself.
Benjamin Graham
The intelligent investor gets interested in big growth stocks not when they are at their most popular - but when something goes wrong.
Benjamin Graham
Thousands of people have tried, and the evidence is clear: The more you trade, the less you keep.
Benjamin Graham
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 behavioural discipline that are likely to get you where you want to go.
Benjamin Graham
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.
Benjamin Graham
Buy not on optimism, but on arithmetic.
Benjamin Graham
Individuals who cannot master their emotions are ill-suited to profit from the investment process.
Benjamin Graham
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.
Benjamin Graham
A great company is not a great investment if you pay too much for the stock.
Benjamin Graham
The true investor... will do better if he forgets about the stock market and pays attention to his dividend returns and to the operation results of his companies.
Benjamin Graham
To be an investor you must be a believer in a better tomorrow.
Benjamin Graham
In the world of securities, courage becomes the supreme virtue after adequate knowledge and a tested judgement are at hand.
Benjamin Graham
The sillier the market's behaviour, the greater the opportunity for the business like investor.
Benjamin Graham
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.
Benjamin Graham
Successful investing professionals are disciplined and consistent and they think a great deal about what they do and how they do it.
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 value of any investment is, and always must be, a function of the price you pay for it.
Benjamin Graham
An intelligent investor gets satisfaction from the thought that his operations are exactly opposite to those of the crowd.
Benjamin Graham
The intelligent investor should recognize that market panics can create great prices for good companies and good prices for great companies.
Benjamin Graham
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.
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
In the financial markets, hindsight is forever 20/20, but foresight is legally blind. And thus, for most investors, market timing is a practical and emotional impossibility.
Benjamin Graham
Experience teaches that the time to buy stocks is when their price is unduly depressed by temporary adversity. In other words, they should be bought on a bargain basis or not at all.
Benjamin Graham
Never buy a stock because it has gone up or sell one because it has gone down.
Benjamin Graham
You must never delude yourself into thinking that you're investing when you're speculating.
Benjamin Graham
To achieve satisfactory investment results is easier than most people realize; to achieve superior results is harder than it looks.
Benjamin Graham
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.
Benjamin Graham
The investor with a portfolio of sound stocks should expect their prices to fluctuate and should neither be concerned by sizeable declines nor become excited by sizeable advances. He should always remember that market quotations are there for his convenience, either to be taken advantage of or to be ignored.
Benjamin Graham
Speculators often prosper through ignorance; it is a cliche that in a roaring bull market knowledge is superfluous and experience is a handicap. But the typical experience of the speculator is one of temporary profit and ultimate loss.
Benjamin Graham
Have the courage of your knowledge and experience. If you have formed a conclusion from the facts and if you know your judgement is sound, act on it – even though others may hesitate or differ.
Benjamin Graham
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.
Benjamin Graham
Buy when most people, including experts, are pessimistic, and sell when they are actively optimistic.
Benjamin Graham
I quickly convinced myself that the true key to material happiness lay in a modest standard of living which could be achieved with little difficulty under almost all economic conditions.
Benjamin Graham
You may take it as an axiom that you cannot profit in Wall Street by continuously doing the obvious or the popular thing.
Benjamin Graham
The intelligent investor is likely to need considerable will power to keep from following the crowd.
Benjamin Graham
Mr. Market's job is to provide you with prices; your job is to decide whether it is to your advantage to act on them. You no not have to trade with hime just because he constantly begs you to.
Benjamin Graham
To see how much a company is truly earning on the capital it deploys in its businesses, look beyond EPS to Return on Invested Capital (ROIC).
Benjamin Graham
In security analysis the prime stress is laid upon protection against untoward events. We obtain this protection by insisting upon margins of safety, or values well in excess of the price paid.
Benjamin Graham
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.
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
The best values today are often found in the stocks that were once hot and have since gone cold.
Benjamin Graham
Unusually rapid growth cannot keep up forever; when a company has already registered a brilliant expansion, it’s very increase in size makes a repetition of its achievement more difficult.
Benjamin Graham
Abnormally good or abnormally bad conditions do not last forever.
Benjamin Graham
The market is always making mountains out of molehills and exaggerating ordinary vicissitudes into major setbacks.
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
We urge the beginner in security buying not to waste his efforts and his money in trying to beat the market. Let him study security values and initially test out his judgement on price versus value with the smallest possible sums.
Benjamin Graham
A defensive investor can always prosper by looking patiently and calmly through the wreckage of a bear market.
Benjamin Graham
Undervaluation’s caused by neglect or prejudice may persist for an inconveniently long time, and the same applies to inflated prices caused by over-enthusiasm or artificial stimulants.
Benjamin Graham
There is a close logical connection between the concept of a safety margin and the principle of diversification.
Benjamin Graham
Avoid second-quality issues in making up a portfolio unless they are demonstrable bargains.
Benjamin Graham
Diversification is an established tenet of conservative investment.
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
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
