Quotes from Benjamin Graham

It requires a great deal of boldness and a great deal of caution to make a great fortune; and when you have got it, it requires ten times as much wit to keep it. —Nathan Mayer Rothschild

The investment world nevertheless has enough liars, cheaters, and thieves to keep Satan's check-in clerks frantically busy for decades to come.

Bond selection is primarily a negative art. It is a process of exclusion and rejection, rather than of search and acceptance.

Hold an index fund for 20 years or more, adding new money every month, and you are all but certain to outper-forms the vast majority of professional and individual investors alike. Late in his life, Graham praised index funds as the best choice for individual investors, as does Warren Buffett.6

The best way to measure your investing success is not by whether you're beating the market but by whether you've put in place a financial plan and a behavioral discipline that are likely to get you where you want to go. In the end, what matters isn't crossing the finish line before anybody else but just making sure that you do cross it.8

Astute observers of corporate balance sheets are often the first to see business deterioration

Since the profits that companies can earn are finite, the price that investors should be willing to pay for stocks must also be finite.

An elementary requirement for the intelligent investor is an ability to resist the blandishments of salesmen offering new common-stock issues during bull markets.

the art of successful investment lies first in the choice of those industries that are most likely to grow in the future and then in identifying the most promising companies in these industries.

Likewise, investors were delighted to earn 11% on bank certificates of deposit (CDs) in 1980 and are bitterly disappointed to be earning only around 2% in 2003—even though they were losing money after inflation back then but are keeping up with inflation now.

The most dangerous untruths are truths slightly distorted. —G. C. Lichtenberg

While a trend shown in the past is a fact, a "future trend" is only an assumption.

closed at $1.19 per share. Weighing the evidence objectively, the intelligent investor should conclude that IPO does not stand only for "initial public offering." More accurately, it is also shorthand for: It's Probably Overpriced, Imaginary Profits Only, Insiders' Private Opportunity, or Idiotic, Preposterous, and Outrageous.

intelligence has nothing to do with IQ or SAT scores. It simply means being patient, disciplined, and eager to learn;

A recent article in the Financial Analysts Journal confirmed what other studies (and the sad experience of many investors) have shown: that the fastest-growing companies tend to overheat and flame out.

There is no room in this philosophy for a middle ground, or a series of gradations, between the passive and aggressive status. Many

The Interborough issues are an example of a rather special group of situations in which analysis may reach more definite conclusions respecting intrinsic value than in the ordinary case. These situations may involve a liquidation or give rise to technical operations known as "arbitrage" or "hedging.

Many skeptics, it is true, are inclined to dismiss the whole procedure [chart reading] as akin to astrology or necromancy; but the sheer weight of its importance in Wall Street requires that its pretensions be examined with some degree of care.

I feel grateful to the Milesian wench who, seeing the philosopher Thales continually spending his time in contemplation of the heavenly vault and always keeping his eyes raised upward, put something in his way to make him stumble, to warn him that it would be time to amuse his thoughts with things in the clouds when he had seen to those at his feet. Indeed she gave him or her good counsel, to look rather to himself than to the sky. —Michel de Montaigne

inversor representará una pequeña sección transversal

The heart of Graham's argument is that the intelligent investor must never forecast the future exclusively by extrapolating the past.

The investor's chief problem - and even his worst enemy - is likely to be himself.

To achieve satisfactory investment results is easier than most people realize; to achieve superior results is harder than it looks.

But make sure you remember this: The people who now claim that the next "sure thing" will be health care, or energy, or real estate, or gold, are no more likely to be right in the end than the hypesters of high tech turned out to be.