A great company is not a great investment if you pay too much for the stock.

Although there are good and bad companies, there is no such thing as a good stock; there are only good stock prices, which come and go.

Diversification is an established tenet of conservative investment.

I am no longer an advocate of elaborate techniques of security analysis in order to find superior value opportunities.

Calculate a stock's price/earnings ratio yourself, using Graham's formula of current price divided by average earnings over the past three years.

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.

we have complaints that institutional dominance of the stock market has put 'the small investor at a disadvantage because he can't compete with the trust companies' huge resources, etc. The facts are quite the opposite. It may be that the institutions are better equipped than the individual to speculate in the market.But I am convinced that an individual investor with sound principles, and soundly advised, can do distinctly better over the long pull than large institutions.