Most businesses change in character and quality over the years, sometimes for the better, perhaps more often for the worse. The investor need not watch his companies' performance like a hawk; but he should give it a good, hard look from time to time.

The stock market resembles a huge laundry in which institutions take in large blocks of each others washing ... without rhyme or reason.

There is no reason to feel any shame in hiring someone to pick stocks or mutual funds for you. But there's one responsibility that you must never delegate. You, and no one but you, must investigate whether an adviser is trustworthy and charges reasonable fees.

Avoid second-quality issues in making up a portfolio unless they are demonstrable bargains.

The intelligent investor gets interested in big growth stocks not when they are at their most popular - but when something goes wrong.

The market is a pendulum that forever swings between unsustainable optimism (which makes stocks too expensive) and unjustified pessimism (which makes them too cheap). The intelligent investor is a realist who sells to optimists and buys from pessimists.

Experience teaches that the time to buy stocks is when their price is unduly depressed by temporary adversity. In other words, they should be bought on a bargain basis or not at all.