Quotes from Benjamin Graham

Know what you are doing—know your business." For the investor this means: Do not try to make "business profits" out of securities

Do not let anyone else run your business, unless (1) you can supervise his performance with adequate care and comprehension or (2) you have unusually strong reasons for placing implicit confidence in his integrity and ability.

If most secondary issues tend normally to be undervalued, what reason has the investor to believe that he can profit from such a situation? For if it persists indefinitely, will he not always be in the same market position as when he bought the issue? The answer here is somewhat complicated. Substantial profits from the purchase of secondary companies at bargain prices arise in a variety of ways.

You'd insist on your right to take control of your own emotional life, based on your experiences and your beliefs. But, when it comes to their financial lives, millions of people let Mr. Market tell them how to feel and what to do—despite the obvious fact that, from time to time, he can get nuttier than a fruitcake.

Do not enter upon an operation—

Staying humble about your forecasting powers

Have the courage of your knowledge and experience. If you have formed a conclusion from the facts and if you know your judgment is sound, act on it—even though others may hesitate or differ.

The intelligent investor shouldn't ignore Mr. Market entirely. Instead, you should do business with him—but only to the extent that it serves your interests. Mr. Market's job is to provide you with prices; your job is to decide whether it is to your advantage to act on them. You do not have to trade with him just because he constantly begs you to.

That's why inflation is so easy to overlook—and why it's so important to measure your investing success not just by what you make, but by how much you keep after inflation.

The investor who permits himself to be stampeded or unduly worried by unjustified market declines in his holdings is perversely transforming his basic advantage into a basic disadvantage.

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. p25

knows the price of everything, and the value of nothing.

Everything changes, including companies, regulations and the economy, but people do not, and people are what drive the market.

Cuando dejas todo al albur del azar, de repente tu suerte se agota. Pat Riley, entrenador de baloncesto

It is easy in the world to live after the world's opinion; it is easy in solitude to live after our own; but the great man is he who in the midst of the crowd keeps with perfect sweetness the independence of solitude.

what Graham called "quotational" values

De estos dos ejemplos generales se pueden extraer dos lecciones para nuestros lectores: 1. Las perspectivas evidentes de crecimiento físico de un sector no se traducen en beneficios evidentes para los inversionistas.

He would not be far wrong if this motto read more simply: Never buy a stock immediately after a substantial rise or sell one immediately after a substantial drop. p43

Que tratamos, entonces, de lograr con este libro? Nuestro principal objetivo consistirá en orientar al lector para prevenirle frente a las áreas de posibles errores sustanciales, y en desarrollar políticas con las que se sienta cómodo.

Among the things that should make your antennae twitch are technical terms like "capitalized," "deferred," and "restructuring"—and plain-English words signaling that the company has altered its accounting practices, like "began," "change," and

Growth stocks are worth buying when their prices are reasonable, but when their price/earnings ratios go much above 25 or 30 the odds get ugly:

In late 1998, the stock of a tiny, rarely traded building-maintenance company, Temco Services, nearly tripled in a matter of minutes on record-high volume. Why? In a bizarre form of financial dyslexia, thousands of traders bought Temco after mistaking its ticker symbol, TMCO, for that of Ticketmaster Online (TMCS), an Internet darling whose stock began trading publicly for the first time that day.8 Oscar Wilde joked that a cynic "knows the price of everything, and the value of nothing.

Hemos visto ganar y conservar mucho más dinero a «personas comunes» que estaban temperamentalmente bien dotadas para el proceso de inversión que a otras personas que carecían de esta buena predisposición anímica, aunque tuviesen un gran conocimiento de las finanzas, la contabilidad y la historia del mercado de valores.

Obvious prospects for physical growth in a business do not translate into obvious profits for investors