Benjamin Graham was an investor and economist who is widely regarded as the father of Value Investing. His thoughts and sayings are still valuable to the investors of the new generation.
The world's most successful investor, Warren Buffett, learned the principles of value investing from Benjamin Graham. Warren Buffett also recommends his books The Intelligent Investor and Security Analysis for stock market investors.
The quotes of Benjamin Graham will be useful for investors to get insights for evaluating businesses for stock market investments. You will become an informed and better investor after learning from these quotes.
1. The intelligent investor is a realist who sells to optimists and buys from pessimists.
2. On the other hand, investing is a unique kind of casino—one where you cannot lose in the end, so long as you play only by the rules that put the odds squarely in your favor.
3. You must thoroughly analyze a company, and the soundness of its underlying businesses, before you buy its stock; you must deliberately protect yourself against serious losses; you must aspire to “adequate,” not extraordinary, performance.
4. An investment operation is one which, upon thorough analysis, promises safety of principal and an adequate return. Operations not meeting these requirements are speculative.
5. But investing isn’t about beating others at their game. It’s about controlling yourself at your own game.
6. The soundness of the best investments must rest not upon legal rights or remedies but upon ample financial capacity of the enterprise.
7. The value of the pledged property is vitally dependent on the earning power of the enterprise.
8. A strong-minded approach to investment, firmly based on the margin-of-safety principle, can yield handsome rewards. But a decision to try for these emoluments rather than for the assured fruits of defensive investment should not be made without much self-examination.
9. Analysis is concerned primarily with values which are supported by the facts and not with those which depend largely upon expectations.
10. 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
