Quotes

It may be that professionally managed funds are too large a part of the total picture to be able to outperform the market as a whole; it may also be true, as I suspect, that certain weaknesses in their basic principles of stock selection tend to offset the superior training, intelligence, and effort that they bring to this task.

If the relative stability of general business and corporate profits produces an unlimited enthusiasm and demand for common stocks, then it must eventually produce instability in stock prices.

My experience leads me to predict that the action of the market will govern the investor's choice as to probable future growth rates, rather than vice-versa.

The market cycle will once more prove to be the human-nature cycle; its economic background will have changed, but not its basic character nor the consequences of its character.

Sound common stocks, bought at sound prices, are always good investments.

Good common stocks are investment media which are subject to speculative influences. The speculative influences are not in the common stocks; they are in the minds of the people who buy and sell them.

The problem of investment in common stocks is either to insulate yourselves from the speculative influences, or else to adjust your investment policy so that you can take advantage of the speculative fluctuations that are imposed upon the basic investment quality of common stocks.

The security analyst can only give you certain hints as to what the solution is likely to be, certain indications of a range of value rather than a specific figure, and perhaps a diffident suggestion as to where within this range he believes the probabilities of the future will lie.

It is very hard to think against the crowd, especially when the crowd is practically universal and unanimous in thought and emotion.

The single most important thing to me in the stock market for anyone is to know what you own.