Quotes About Value

what Graham called "quotational" values

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.

The intelligent investor is a realist who sells to optimists and buys from pessimists. The future value of every investment is a function of its present price.

Benjamin Graham

More important, buying IPOs is a bad idea because it flagrantly violates one of Graham's most fundamental rules: No matter how many other people want to buy a stock, you should buy only if the stock is a cheap way to own a desirable business.

A great company is not a great investment if you pay too much for the stock.

Jak jsme se pou?ili? V krátkém období se trh Grahamovým princip?m vysmívá, ale v dlouhém období se jim vždy dostane rehabilitace. Jestliže nakupujete akcie jen proto, že jejich cena roste - místo toho, abyste se ptali, zda se zvyÅ¡ue fundamentální hodnota spole?nosti-eminenta - bude vás to dÃ…â"¢íve nebo pozdÄ›ji Å¡erednÄ› mrzet. To není jen pravdÄ›podobnost. To je jistota.

Antes de lanzarse a una incursión de ese tipo, el inversor debería estar seguro de sí mismo y de sus asesores, en especial a la hora de determinar si tienen una clara concepción de las diferencias existentes entre la inversión y la especulación y entre el precio de mercado y el valor subyacente.

The investor should impose some limit on the price he will pay for an issue in relation to its average earnings over, say, the past seven years. We suggest that this limit be set at 25 times such average earnings, and not more than 20 times those of the last twelve-month period.

Experience teaches that the time to buy preferred stocks is when their price is unduly depressed by temporary adversity. (At such times they may be well suited to the aggressive investor but too unconventional for the defensive investor.)

Only by insisting on what Graham called the "margin of safety"—never overpaying, no matter how exciting an investment seems to be—can you minimize your odds of error.

At some point in its life, almost every stock is a bargain; at another time, it will be expensive. Although there are good and bad companies, there is no such thing as a good stock; there are only good stock prices, which come and go.

implied that "at normal levels of the market" the investor should be able to obtain an  initial  dividend  return  of  between  31?2%  and  41?2%  on  his  stock purchases, to which should be added a steady increase in underly- ing value (and in the "normal market price") of a representative

también existe la posibilidad más probable de que vayamos a ser testigos de otro gran aumento especulativo en el valor de mercado que no tenga una justificación real en los valores subyacentes.

Value = Current (Normal) Earnings × (8.5 plus twice the expected annual growth rate) The growth figure should be that expected over the next seven to ten years.7

Companies should buy back their shares when they are cheap—not when they are at or near record highs. Unfortunately, it recently has become all too common for companies to repurchase their stock when it is overpriced. There is no more cynical waste of a company's cash—since the real purpose of that maneuver is to enable top executives to reap multimillion-dollar paydays by selling their own stock options in the name of "enhancing shareholder value.

In June 1970 the question "How much?" could be answered by the magic figure 9.40%—the yield obtainable on new offerings of high-grade public-utility bonds. This has now dropped to about 7.3%, but even that return tempts us to ask, "Why give any other answer?

The more a stock has gone up, the more it seems likely to keep going up. But that instinctive belief is flatly contradicted by a fundamental law of financial physics: The bigger they get, the slower they grow. A $1-billion company can double its sales fairly easily; but where can a $50-billion company turn to find another $50 billion in business?

The new-era doctrine - that good stocks (or blue chips) were sound investments regardless of how high the price paid for them - was at the bottom only a means of rationalizing under the title of investment the well-nigh universal capitulation to the gambling fever/

defining what is important solely by what can be measured is a bad idea - like looking for lost keys not down a dark sidewalk where they were lost, but across the street under the lamppost where the light is better.

Only a fool takes pride in pretending that a skill he doesn't possess is worthless.

I suspect most copies were used to wipe arses or light fires.

These word-stringers make nothing, grow nothing, kill no enemies, catch no fish and raise no cattle. They just take silver in exchange for words, which are free anyway. It is a clever trick, but in truth they are about as much use as priests.

I charge more for prophecy," Offa said, "on the grounds that what is worthless must be made expensive.