Benjamin Graham Quotes

The idea is to buy when the probability is greatest that the market is going to advance.

Disregarding the big swing and trying to jump in and out was fatal to me. Nobody can catch all the fluctuations. In a bull market your game is to buy and hold until you believe that the bull market is near its end. To do this you must study general conditions and not tips or special factors affecting individual stocks.

Doing ventures is great - I'm talking economics now - if you've got a rising market. It's wonderful. If I hadn't got HKT, I would have been just as happy. Because there's a price for everything. And to overpay for something is awful.

I've been in real estate for my whole life, I've been trying to sharpshoot the market with my investments, I'm never right. All you need to do is get near the bottom. That's good enough.

Never, never try to scope the market.

Investors tend to discover 'hot' mutual fund managers just after a successful run and just before the inescapable force of mean reversion is about to kick in.

Whether a tops-down or bottoms-up investor in bonds, stocks, or private equity, the standard analysis tends to judge an investor or his firm on the basis of how the bullish or bearish aspects of the cycle were managed.

Everybody thinks that they're going to time the market, they're going to sharpshoot the market, and buy right at the bottom. The truth of the matter is that nobody is good at it.

In real estate, you make 10% of your money because you're a genius and 90% because you catch a great wave.

I mean that what makes me a professional, but the market itself has been fabulous during this whole period and I've got to give the market credit before I give myself credit.

When the man who ought to want a stock doesn't want it, why should I want it?

The few times that Soros has ever criticized me was when I was really right on a market and didn't maximize the opportunity.

People always come up to me and ask what the next 'big short' will be. The truth is I simply do not have an answer, and do not want to have an answer, to this question.

There are two ways to approach the market. You can guess which direction prices will go in next, or you can figure out what businesses and their securities are really worth.

Because everybody else was investing in the consumer Internet, I did, too.

Fundamentalists who say they are not going to pay any attention to the charts are like a doctor who says he's not going to take a patient's temperature.

If you can't find any companies that you think are attractive, put your money in the bank until you discover some.

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.

I learned very early in my investing careers: I better not invest in what I want. I better invest in what's happening in the world. Otherwise I'll be broke - dead broke.

For instance, let us say that a new stock has been listed in the last two or three years and its high was 20, or any other figure, and that such a price was made two or three years ago. If something favorable happens in connection with the company, and the stock starts upward, usually it is safe play to buy the minute it touches a brand new high.

Always remember that market quotations are there for convenience, either to be taken advantage of or to be ignored.

We want to use cash. The reason we haven't used our cash two years ago, we just didn't find things that were that attractive. But when people talk about cash being king, it's not king if it just sits there and never does anything. There are times when cash buys more than other times, and this is one of the other times when it buys a fair amount more, so we use it.

you may take it as an axiom that you cannot profit in Wall Street by continuously doing the obvious or the popular thing

There are all kinds of businesses that Charlie and I don't understand, but that doesn't cause us to stay up at night. It just means we go on to the next one, and that's what the individual investor should do.

The chief obstacle to success lies in the stubborn fact that if the favorable prospects of a concern are clearly apparent they are almost always reflected already in the current price of the stock. Buying such an issue is like betting on a topheavy favorite in a horse race. The chances may be on your side, but the real odds are against you.