Benjamin Graham Quotes

Speculator: One who bought stocks that went down.

Investors have few spare tires left. Think of the image of a car on a bumpy road to an uncertain destination that has already used up its spare tire. The cash reserves of people have been eaten up by the recent market volatility.

I knew a guy who had $5 million and owned his house free and clear. But he wanted to make a bit more money to support his spending, so at the peak of the internet bubble he was selling puts on internet stocks. He lost all of his money and his house and now works in a restaurant. It's not a smart thing for the country to legalize gambling [in the stock market] and make it very accessible.

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

I had some airline stock, but the airlines tanked. I didn't have a lot of money in them, though.

Education is a bubble in a classic sense. To call something a bubble, it must be overpriced, and there must be an intense belief in it.

There is no safe haven in today's markets.

If you were approaching the TARP investments from a pure investment standpoint, then there's no doubt in my mind the taxpayer lost, and probably lost big.

My investments have been hurt.

Like everybody, I have invested in things that have gone bad, because there's never any guarantee of success or profit when it comes to money.

Because of my own experience with market fluctuation, I recognize the great risks one takes on investments. This converts the Social Security safety net into a risky proposition many cannot afford to take.

The best restraint is old-fashioned market discipline, in which financial traders know that they, personally, will lose a ton of money if they take risky bets that don't pan out.

No one likes to look at their stock price go down and say, 'I feel good about that.' It goes without saying.

Market risk is like taking a plunge into a cool pool ... a lot of people are finding out right now what their risk tolerance is.

A price decline is of no real importance to the bona fide investor unless it is either very substantial say, more than a third from cost or unless it reflects a known deterioration of consequence in the company's position. In a well-defined bear market many sound common stocks sell temporarily at extraordinary low prices. It is possible that the investor may then have a paper loss of fully 50 per cent on some of his holdings, without any convincing indication that the underlying values have been permanently affected.

I got an E-Trade account. Turns out I can turn $1,000 into $420 in less than a week. Sure, I had to pay some fees.

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.

However, it is safe to say that at the peak in 1929 the number of active speculators was less - and probably was much less - than a million.

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.

A pin lies in wait for every bubble. And when the two eventually meet, a new wave of investors learns some very old lessons: First, many in Wall Street (a community in which quality control is not prized) will sell investors anything they will buy. Second, speculation is most dangerous when it looks easiest.

With enough insider information and a million dollars, you can go broke in a year.

Consciously paying more for a stock than its calculated value - in the hope that it can soon be sold for a still-higher price - should be labelled speculation

If you have trouble imagining a 20% loss in the stock market, you shouldn't be in stocks.

The reason is they failed to learned the primary lesson we should have learned from when Long Term Capital Management went belly up ten years ago. That is, investments that seem uncorrelated can be correlated simply because we're interested in it.

I fully understand that not all of the companies will succeed and that there will be losses along the way, but this is very much the norm with early stage investment.