The Motley Fool, Randy Befumo
Ben Graham is single-handedly responsible for the fact that investors even think about ratios like the price/earnings ratio, the current ratio or working capital-to-market capitalization. Coming out of the stock market's total implosion in 1929 and throughout the '30s, Graham knew that he needed to discover logical rules that any investor could use in order to attain safe, sustainable, market-beating results. He was so preoccupied with ensuring that anyone could duplicate his methods towards the end of his career that he often told his junior analysts at Graham-Newman like Albert Schloss or Warren Buffett that they could not involve themselves in complicated financial shenanigans to make money--it all had to be plain vanilla.
The Intelligent Investor was Graham's attempt to make his cumbersome joint-effort with David Dodd--Security Analysis--comprehensible to the average person. Much like Nietzsche's Beyond Good & Evil was intended to make Thus Spoke Zarathustra transparent, Graham's Intelligent Investorset about educating the average person as to what made an investment, what made a speculation and how this knowledge could be applied to build wealth in the most risk-averse way possible. Although he was a little bond-crazy, Graham's zeal for the common investor made him about as Foolish as they come. The fifth edition of The Intelligent Investor comes with the added bonus of a laudatory introduction by editor Warren Buffett as well as the best essay Warren Buffett ever wrote, bar none, called "The Superinvestors of Graham & Doddsville." Although it can make for pretty dense, didactic reading, the investor will come away from The Intelligent Investor with a newfound understanding of how the numbers fit together to make a great stock.
Product Description
This guide to the stockmarket offers principles proven by the success of investors for over 35 years. Its main objective in its philosophy of "value investing" is to protect the investor against the areas of possible error and to develop policies which are rational. It takes account of both the defensive and enterprising investor, outlining the principles of stock selection for each, and stressing the advantages of a simple portfolio policy. It features the use of comparisons of pairs of common stocks to bring out their elements of strength and weakness, and also the construction of investment portfolios designed to meet specific requirements of quality and price attractiveness.
