Quote for the Week
The much wider fluctuations in investment common stocks that have come about since World War I have made it practically impossible for buyers of common stocks to disregard price changes. It would be extremely unwise — and hypocritical — for anybody to buy a list of common stocks and say that he was interested only in his dividend return and cared nothing at all about price changes.
The problem is not whether price changes should be disregarded — because clearly they should not be — but rather in what way can the investor and the security analyst deal intelligently with the price changes which take place…
The fact that investors have been willing to pay so much for so-called quality, and so much for so-called future prospects, on the average, that they have themselves introduced serious speculative elements into common stock valuations. These elements are bound to create fluctuations in their own attitude, because quality and prospects are psychological factors. The dividend, of course, is not a psychological factor; it is more or less of a fixed datum. Matters of the former kind — I am speaking now of prospects and quality — are subject to wide changes in the psychological attitude of the people who buy and sell stocks. — Ben Graham (source)
From the Archives
Last Call
- What We Do When Things Go Up (a lot) – Behavioural Investment
- A Cure for Investment Anxiety – Safal Niveshak
- The Hidden Truth About Private Market Returns –
- When it Comes to Retirement, Fear is an Invitation – Purpose Code
- How Happy Do You Need to Be to Be Happy with Money? – Root of All
- Andrew Ross Sorkin: Market Bubbles, Banking Rules, and the Real Lessons of 1929 – Conversations w/ Tyler
- A Century of Automobile Industry History in Charts – ABHC
- “Epistemic Trespassing:” Why Brilliant People Say Idiotic Things – Big Think
- Many Victorian Cities Grew by Tenfold in a Century – Works in Progress
- The Mountain that Weighed the Earth – Signore Galilei