Benjamin Graham Quotes

I have always believed that a single talented analyst, working very hard, can cover an amazing amount of investment landscape, and this belief remains unchallenged in my mind.

To beat the market you'll have to invest serious bucks to dig up information no one else has yet.

When buying shares, ask yourself, would you buy the whole company?

You have to know what you own. You have to really do your homework in terms of knowing what supports your bonds.

Finding a single investment that will return 20% per year for 40 years tends to happen only in dreamland. In the real world, you uncover an opportunity, and then you compare other opportunities with that. And you only invest in the most attractive opportunities. That's your opportunity cost. That's what you learn in freshman economics. The game hasn't changed at all. That's why Modern Portfolio Theory is so asinine.

You have to keep your priorities straight if you plan to do well in stocks.

The value of the security analyst to the investor depends largely on the investor's own attitude. If the investor asks the analyst the right questions, he is likely to get the right or at least valuable answers.

While it's wonderful that investors have access to all the data now available to them, it has become a full-time job to sift through it and separate out the valuable news from the useless noise.

Your initial instincts about investments and people are usually correct. We do a lot of due diligence in this business and most of the time it comes out where we started.

Start small; get to know the landscape. We take risks but not major risks. We always started with small capital - €4m in Holland, $10m in Russia - and as we get to know the landscape of a country, we think about other businesses.

Having the opportunity to follow the market frequently gives you the opportunity to see if you need to reevaluate your portfolio. But reevaluating your portfolio shouldn't trigger a sell signal so frequently.

I'm not emotional about investments. Investing is something where you have to be purely rational and not let emotion affect your decision making - just the facts.

I've always loved to play games, and face it: investing is one big game. You need to be decisive, open-minded, flexible and competitive.

I grade my stocks. I'm what they call a quant, one of the geeks of the stock market.

The best early-stage venture capital investments appear obvious in retrospect; however, very few of them are actually obvious when you make them.

You want less of the annoying nonsense that interferes with your portfolios and more of the significant data that allow you to become a less distracted, more purposeful investor.

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

We take the traditional value investor's process and just flip it around a little bit. The traditional value investor asks 'Is this cheap?' and then 'Why is it cheap?' We start by identifying a reason something might be mispriced, and then if we find a reason why something is likely mispriced, then we make a determination whether it's cheap.

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

If you are going to be a great investor, you have to fit the style to who you are.

Investing is about intellectual honesty. You want to know what you know. You want to know, mostly, what you don't know.

Successful investing is all about common sense.

Trust me: I know a good investment when I see one.

Provided someone can persuade me, I will invest in anything.

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