Benjamin Graham Quotes

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

It is worth pointing out that assuredly not more than one person out of a hundred who stayed in the market after after 1925 emerged from it with a net profit and that the speculative losses taken were appalling.

Bulls and bears aren't responsible for as many stock losses as bumsteers.

By March '87 we're down to seven thousand, by the end of the year we're down to twelve hundred. The whole bottom just fell out of the market. It was bad for me because I was in Australia at the time.

There is no such thing as a value trap. There are investing mistakes.

Just because a stock is down doesn't mean it's a great buy.

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.

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.

From a strictly economic point of view, buying gold in a major inflation and holding it probably presents the least risk of capital loss of any investment or speculation.

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

Never invest in a company without understanding its finances. The biggest losses in stocks come from companies with poor balance sheets.

The bottom line is down where it belongs – at the bottom. Far above it in importance are the infinite number of events that produce the profit or loss.

Using volatility as a measure of risk is nuts. Risk to us is 1) the risk of permanent loss of capital, or 2) the risk of inadequate return.

I presumably lost $150,000 in the depression of 1937—on my one stock investment—because I did everything Lehman Brothers told me. I said, well, this is a fool’s procedure . . . buying stock in other people’s businesses.

It's a fact: stock investors sometimes lose money on their way to wealth. Get over it.

The stock market has spoiled more appetites than bad cooking.

... No one is less happy than I am with the performance of Microsoft stock! I've lost tens of billions of dollars this year - if you check, you'll see that's more than most people make in a lifetime!

The dominant factors affecting control valuations are earning power (past and prospective) and asset values.

In the LBO field there is a buried "covariance" with marketable equities, toward disaster in generally bad business conditions, and competition is now extremely intense.

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.

In my rear view mirror the sun is going down sinking behind bridges in the road and I think of all the good things that we have left undone and I suffer premonitions confirm suspicions of the holocaust to come.

I would rather sustain the penalties resulting from over-conservatism than face the consequences of error, perhaps with permanent capital loss, resulting from the adoption of "New Era" philosophy where trees really do grow to the sky.

We regard using [a stock's] volatility as a measure of risk is nuts. Risk to us is 1) the risk of permanent loss of capital, or 2) the risk of inadequate return. Some great businesses have very volatile returns - for example, See's [a candy company owned by Berkshire] usually loses money in two quarters of each year - and some terrible businesses can have steady results.

If it is hard to imagine that 20% of losses on the stock market, you should never participate