The art of investment has one characteristic that is not generally appreciated. A creditable, if unspectacular, result can be achieved by the lay investor with a minimum of effort and capability; but to improve this easily attainable standard requires much application and more than a trace of wisdom. If you merely try to bring just a little extra knowledge and cleverness to bear upon your investment program, instead of realizing a little better than normal results, you may well find that you have done worse.

The qualitative factors upon which most stress is laid are the nature of the business and the character of the management. These elements are exceedingly important, but they are also exceedingly difficult to deal with intelligently.

We define a bargain issue as one which, on the basis of facts established by analysis, appears to be worth considerably more that it is selling for.

Confronted with a challenge to distill the secret of sound investment into three words, we venture the motto, Margin of Safety.

In an ideal world, the intelligent investor would hold stocks only when they are cheap and sell them when they become overpriced, then duck into the bunker of bonds and cash until stocks again become cheap enough to buy.

Before you invest, you must ensure that you have realistically assessed your probability of being right and how you will react to the consequences of being wrong.

A defensive investor can always prosper by looking patiently and calmly through the wreckage of a bear market.