Benjamin Graham: Before you invest, you must ensure that you have real...

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

teach adversity should

No matter how careful you are, the one risk no investor can ever eliminate is the risk of being wrong. Only by insisting on what Graham called the "margin of safety" - never overpaying, no matter how exciting an investment seems to be - can you minimize your odds of error.

Benjamin Graham

safety errors odds

Investing is most intelligent when it is most businesslike.

Benjamin Graham

investing intelligent

The investor with a portfolio of sound stocks should expect their prices to fluctuate and should neither be concerned by sizable declines nor become excited by sizable 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

investing taken sound

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

fashion character thinking

At heart, "uncertainty" and "investing" are synonyms.

Benjamin Graham

synonym investing heart

Speculators often prosper through ignorance; it is a cliché 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

typical ignorance loss

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

Benjamin Graham

investing successful thinking

We define a bargain issue as one which, on the basis of facts established by analysis, appears to be worth considerably more that it is selling for.

Benjamin Graham

investing issues analysis

Since we have emphasized that analysis will lead to a positive conclusion only in the exceptional case, it follows that many securities must be examined before one is found that has real possibilities for the analyst. By what practical means does he proceed to make his discoveries? Mainly by hard and systematic work.

Benjamin Graham

real discovery mean

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

Benjamin Graham

sells

It always seemed, and still seems, ridiculously simple to say that if one can acquire a diversified group of common stocks at a price less than the applicable net current assets alone - after deducting all prior claims, and counting as zero the fixed and other assets - the results should be quite satisfactory.

Benjamin Graham

groups zero simple

Undervaluations 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

prejudice may long

Observation over many years has taught us that the chief losses to investors come from the purchase of low-quality securities at times of good business conditions. The purchasers view the good current earnings as equivalent to 'earning power' and assume that prosperity is equivalent to safety.

Benjamin Graham

taught-us views loss

The thing that I have been emphasizing in my own work for the last few years has been the group approach. To try to buy groups of stocks that meet some simple criterion for being undervalued-regardless of the industry and with very little attention to the individual company.

Benjamin Graham

simple trying years

If you are shopping for common stocks, choose them the way you would buy groceries, not the way you would buy perfume.

Benjamin Graham

investing shopping intelligent

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

investing pay attention

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

Benjamin Graham

investment investing emotion

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

Benjamin Graham

investing quality loss

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

Benjamin Graham

intelligent business running

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.