📖Benjamin Graham

Simple Portfolio Rules

🌱 Beginner★★★★☆

Stick to well-established, financially strong companies.

💬

The defensive investor should confine his holdings to the shares of important companies with long records of profitable operations and in strong financial condition.

— _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:Simplicity in portfolio construction reduces errors for most investors.

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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
Dot-com Bubble Restraint (1999)
Tech and internet stocks soared despite little or no earnings. A Graham-inspired investor stuck to valuation metrics, requiring earnings and margin of safety.
✨ Outcome:They sidestepped the 2000–02 crash. While others lost heavily, their conservative portfolio declined less and recovered faster, enabling cheap stock purchases.
2
Pre-Crash Speculation (1929)
An investor buys popular industrial stocks on margin during the late 1920s boom, ignoring earnings and balance-sheet strength, focusing only on rising prices and tips.
✨ Outcome:The 1929 crash wipes out most capital, teaching the danger of leverage, speculation, and neglect of intrinsic value.

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