📖Benjamin Graham

Individual Understanding Required

🌿 Intermediate★★★★☆

Stay within your analytical capabilities.

💬

To achieve satisfactory investment results is easier than most people realize; to achieve superior results is harder than it looks. The intelligent investor needs to stay within areas they can analyze.

— _The Intelligent Investor_,1949

🏠 Everyday Analogy

A process is like a pilot checklist: discipline prevents simple mistakes when pressure rises and keeps outcomes more repeatable.

📖 Core Interpretation

Benjamin Graham advocates a repeatable process: define criteria, execute consistently, and review decisions against evidence. Process quality drives outcome consistency.
💎 Key Insight:Superior results require deep understanding within a narrow domain.

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❓ Why It Matters

Without process, there is no reliable feedback loop. Structured execution and review improve decision quality over time.

🎯 How to Practice

Run a decision loop of research, thesis, execution, and post-mortem; document assumptions and update playbooks with evidence, not hindsight bias.

⚠️ Common Pitfalls

Having opinions without execution criteria
Reviewing outcomes but not decisions
Abandoning rules during volatility spikes

📚 Case Studies

1
Crash of 1929 and Aftermath (1929)
Graham’s partnership suffered huge losses in the 1929 crash, exposing over-leverage and inadequate margins of safety in his holdings.
✨ Outcome:He shifted to a more conservative, balance-sheet-focused approach emphasizing financial soundness and margin of safety.
2
American Express Salad Oil Scandal (1963)
American Express plunged after a fraud scandal tied to falsified salad oil inventories, raising concerns about solvency and reputation.
✨ Outcome:Graham-style analysis saw core financial strength; investors applying his principles bought shares, which recovered strongly over subsequent years.

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