there is a tendency in part of Wall Street people to pay excessive attention to the most recent figures and the present financial picture.

The value of any investment is, and always must be, a function of the price you pay for it.

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

It's nonsensical to derive a price/earnings ratio by dividing the known current price by unknown future earnings.

No matter how careful you are, the one risk no investor can ever eliminate is the risk of being wrong. Only by insisting on what Graham called the "margin of safety" - never overpaying, no matter how exciting an investment seems to be - can you minimize your odds of error.

The thing that I have been emphasizing in my own work for the last few years has been the group approach. To try to buy groups of stocks that meet some simple criterion for being undervalued-regardless of the industry and with very little attention to the individual company.

The purpose of this book is to supply, in the form suitable for laymen, guidance in the adoption and execution of an investment policy.