Tag Archives: Benjamin Graham

What hope can there be for motivated stock pickers to outperform the low-cost index funds that simply mechanically track the market? Well - in spite of the absurd rise of the Nobel-acclaimed, and highly promoted, Efficient Market Hypothesis that claims that individual investors can't beat the market - it turns out there is plenty! [Let me explain.] Words: 1574

In my view, most people who are selecting stocks for their retirement are doing it wrong. Most investors are picking “good companies,” stocks that have gone up a lot in the past, stocks of companies that are soon to release higher earnings, or stocks that have been selected because the technicals look good. All of these make for lousy long term investments. Here's a better path to retirement bliss, one that’s much more likely to work out if you are prepared to put just a little bit of time and effort into your portfolio.

Knowing how to properly value a stock is probably the most important skill for a value investor to develop and over the last fifty years one of the most popular methods to discover the fair price of a stock has been the Benjamin Graham formula.

Benjamin Graham’s The Intelligent Investor is one of a handful of books you hear mentioned over and over again when you ask investors to name the best investing books of all-time. Graham was far ahead of his time in talking about investor behavior and human psychology in terms of the role they play in shaping how markets and investors generally work. Let me explain.

Below is a list of 10 longer-term investment books that I recommend. They aren't all pure investment books (some of them teach you how markets operate in general, doing so in a clever way) but they will help you understand the markets and investing, and make you a bigger-picture thinker.

A near-term market pullback of as much as 10% is likely but we're still in bull market cycle that has just begun to run. There are years left to go on this secular bull market and, indeed, Benjamin Graham's P/E formula implies a 2015 S&P price target of somewhere around 2476 to 2545.

We estimate that a 'fair price' for the market is a Shiller PE of around 16. With the market at close to a Shiller PE of 26, the market is overvalued by about 60%. Now is not a historically good time to initiate a position in the S&P500.

Following Charlie Munger's advice to “develop into a lifelong self-learner through voracious reading; cultivate curiosity and strive to become a little wiser every day” this article presents my recommendation as to what books to read to learn more about financial market history and the basic math skills you need to be a good investor.

If you aren’t certain that you understand and can value your business far better than Mr. Market, you don’t belong in the game. As they say in poker, “If you’ve been in the game 30 minutes and you don’t know who the patsy is, you’re the patsy.”

My portfolio version of Benjamin Graham’s time- tested strategy for defensive investors has has only trailed the markets in 3 of the last 12 years and has dramatically outperformed the S&P 500 during that period realizing a 19% (annualized) return vs. only 2% (annualized) for the S&P 500. Let's take a look at the method and this year's group of Graham stocks. Words: 790