Benjamin Graham

Basically, price fluctuations have only one significant meaning for the true investor. They provide him with an opportunity to buy wisely when prices fall sharply and to sell wisely when they advance a great deal. At other times he will do better if he forgets about the stock market and pays attention to his dividend returns and to the operating results of his companies.

Investment is most intelligent when it is most businesslike.

Do not let anyone else run your business.

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

All the real money in investment will have to be made—as most of it has been in the past— not out of buying and selling but out of owning and holding securities, receiving interests and dividends therein, and benefiting from their long-term increases in value. Hence stockholder's major energies and wisdom as investors should be directed toward assuring themselves of the best operating results from their corporations. This in turn means assuring themselves of fully honest and competent managements.

You are neither right nor wrong because people agree with you.

Though business conditions may change, corporations and securities may change, and financial institutions and regulations may change, human nature remains the same. Thus the important and difficult part of sound investment, which hinges upon the investor's own temperament and attitude, is not much affected by the passing years.

Intelligent investment is more a matter of mental approach than it is of technique. A sound mental approach toward stock fluctuations is the touchstone of all successful investment under present-day conditions.

In the short run, the market is a voting machine, but in the long run, it is a weighing machine.

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

The individual investor should act consistently as an investor and not as a speculator.