Benjamin Graham Quotes

Markets can remain irrational longer than you can remain solvent.

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.

One of the funny things about the stock market is that every time one person buys, another sells, and both think they are astute.

Markets love volatility.

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.

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

Wall Street is always too biased toward short-term profitability and biased against long-term growth.

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.

At the end of the day, the markets are my passion.

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.

If you think Wall Street has a short memory, you're dead wrong. No, the folks who work on Wall Street, regulate Wall Street - and, above all, invest in its wares, notably its hedge funds - don't have a bad memory. They don't have any memory at all.

Speculation, in its broadest sense, is not an evil in itself, but the contrary, and relieves public distress far oftener than it creates it.

The stock market is the world’s largest Oujie Board.

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

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

The stock exchange is a poor substitute for the Holy Grail.

There are two times in a man's life when he should not speculate [on the Stock Market]: when he can't afford it, and when he can.

We feel that fundamentally Wall Street is sound, and that for people who can afford to pay for them outright, good stocks are cheap at these prices

The Wall Street crash doesn't mean that there will be any general or serious business depression... For six years American business has been diverting a substantial part of its attention, its energies and its resources on the speculative game... Now that irrelevant, alien and hazardous adventure is over. Business has come home again, back to its job, providentially unscathed, sound in wind and limb, financially stronger than ever before.

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

Looking at the stock market to understand the economy is like studying a manic depressive in order to understand human nature.

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

Betting that markets will be 'volatile' is like betting the weather will be partly cloudy. It's a smart-sounding strategy that doesn't mean much.

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