Benjamin Graham Quotes

While enthusiasm may be necessary for great accomplishments elsewhere, on Wall Street it almost invariably leads to disaster

Nowhere does history indulge in repetitions so often or so uniformly as in Wall Street.

Wall Street is littered with the bones of those who knew just what to do, but could not bring themselves to do it.

It is no difficult trick to bring a great deal of energy, study, and native ability into Wall Street and to end up with losses instead of profits. These virtues, if channeled in the wrong directions, become indistinguishable from handicaps.

People who invest make money for themselves; people who speculate make money for their brokers. And that, in turn, is why Wall Street perennially downplays the durable virtues of investing and hypes the gaudy appeal of speculation.

Bulls don't read. Bears read financial history. As markets fall to bits, the bears dust off the Dutch tulip mania of 1637, the Banque Royale of 1719-20, the railway speculation of the 1840s, the great crash of 1929.

You might say that economic history is the history of people learning to manage risk.

I've always wanted to invest. That's why I started working on Wall Street in the first place, back in 1986 when I went through the Salomon Brothers training program.

I don’t know why the Stock Market does what it does.

Getting an unsophisticated client was the golden prize. The quickest way to make money on Wall Street is to take the most sophisticated product and try to sell it to the least sophisticated client.

In 1929 the discovery of the wonders of the geometric series struck Wall Street with a force comparable to the invention of the wheel.

In Las Vegas, people know that the odds are stacked against them. On Wall Street, they manipulate the odds while you are playing the game.

There can be few fields of human endeavor in which history counts for so little as in the world of finance.Past experience, to the extent that it is part of memory at all, is dismissed as the primitive refuge of the those who do not have insight to appreciate the incredible wonders of the present.

There is nothing new in Wall Street. There can't be because speculation is as old as the hills. Whatever happens in the stock market today has happened before and will happen again.

I like Burton Malkiel's 'A Random Walk Down Wall Street.' He comes to the same conclusion that I do - that indexing is the way. My 'Little Book of Common Sense Investing' says pretty much the same thing.

In reality, no one on Wall Street cares about anything except performance.

Wise investors won't try to outsmart the market.

I think a lot of hedge funds get their trades from Wall Street and get their ideas from Wall Street. And I just like to find my own ideas. I'm reading a lot; I read a lot of news. I'm addicted to it. I basically - I follow my nose on news stories.

The problem with most people who play the market is that they are not flexible.

The stock market is a giant distraction from the business of investing.

There's something on Wall Street called PIG - panic, ignorance, and greed. Those are the big sins. I'm not greedy, I knew I was ignorant, and I didn't panic.

In fact, of all hoodoos in Wall Street I think the resolve to induce the stock market to act as a fairy godmother is the busiest and most persistent.

Treat the past as a school.

Wall Street has a few prudent principles; the trouble is that they are always forgotten when they are most needed.

There seems to be an unwritten rule on Wall Street: If you don't understand it, then put your life savings into it. Shun the enterprise around the corner, which can at least be observed, and seek out the one that manufactures an incomprehensible product.