by Benjamin Graham
The bible of value investing as written by the "father of securities analysis". Very thorough.
- Buffet: "I read the first edition of this book in 1950, when I was nineteen. I thought then that it was by far the best book about investing ever written. I still think it is."
- This book is an intellectual framework for making good investment decisions (emotional discipline not included)
- How successful you are depends on the effort and intellect you apply and how much stock market foolishness occurs during your investing career
- Follow Graham to profit from the market's foolishness
- Benjamin Graham 1894–1976
- Every day Graham sought to do "something foolish, something creative and something generous"
- Graham was a fierce discipline-agnostic intellectual
- "Walter Lippmann spoke of men who plant trees that other men will sit under. Ben Graham was such a man."
- This book teaches you how to:
- minimize the odds of suffering irreversible losses
- maximize the chances of achieving sustainable gains
- control the self-defeating behavior that keeps most investors from reaching their full potential
- "By the end of 2002, many dot-com and telecom stocks had lost 95% of their value or more. Once you lose 95% of your money, you have to gain 1,900% just to get back to where you started. Taking a foolish risk can put you so deep in the hole that it's virtually impossible to get out."
- Your investments will go down sometimes; you can't eliminate the risk, but you can manage it and get your fears under control
- Being an intelligent investor is about "being patient, disciplined, and eager to learn; you must also be able to harness your emotions and think for yourself. This kind of intelligence, explains Graham, 'is a trait more of the character than of the brain.'"
- Having a high IQ and education don't necessarily make you an intelligent investor — "In 1998, Long-Term Capital Management L.P., a hedge fund run by a battalion of mathematicians, computer scientists, and two Nobel Prize–winning economists, lost more than $2 billion in a matter of weeks on a huge bet that the bond market would return to 'normal.' But the bond market kept right on becoming more and more abnormal—and LTCM has borrowed so much money that its collapse nearly capsized the global financial system."
- He highlights 10 recent major financial events where investors using Graham's principles avoided much damage that others did not
- "The investor's chief problem — and even his worst enemy — is likely to be himself."
- "The highest 20-year return in mutual fund history was 25.8% per year, achieved by the legendary Peter Lynch of Fidelity Magellan over the two decades ending December 31, 1994. Lynch's performance turned $10,000 into more than $982,000 in 20 years."
- People got irrationally bullish on tech stocks in the late 90s... fund managers claiming they would beat that (lul)
- Obvious rospects for physical growth don't translate to obvious profits for investors if most other investors are already expecting the same thing. An industry declared "obviously" the best has already has its stocks "bid up so high that its future returns have nowhere to go but down."
- The people eager to buy stocks in the late 90s, sold when they went down in price in the early 2000s (this is backwards...)
- The pendulum swings "from irrational exuberance to unjustifiable pessimism"
- "The intelligent investor realizes that stocks become more risky, not less, as their prices rise — and less risky, not more, as their prices fall. The intelligent investor dreads a bull market, since it makes stocks more costly to buy. And conversely (so long as you keep enough cash on hand to meet your spending needs), you should welcome a bear market, since it puts stocks back on sale."