Wonderful Wall Street Journal columnist @jasonzweigwsj wrote great column titled “What Benjamin Graham Would Tell You to Do Now: Look in the Mirror.” Here are some excerpts:
Forget about what the stock market is going to do. Instead, focus on what you, as an investor, ought to do….
First, determine whether you are an investor or a speculator. “The investor’s primary interest lies in acquiring and holding suitable securities at suitable prices,” Graham wrote.
The speculator, on the other hand, cares mainly about “anticipating and profiting from market fluctuations.”
If you’re an investor, “price fluctuations have only one significant meaning,” according to Graham: “an opportunity to buy wisely when prices fall sharply and to sell wisely when they advance a great deal.”
The investor who permits himself to be stampeded or unduly worried by unjustified market declines in his holdings is perversely transforming his basic advantage into a basic disadvantage,” warned Graham.
He “would be better off if his stocks had no market quotation at all, for he would then be spared the mental anguish caused him by otherpersons’ mistakes of judgment.”
contrarianedge.com/oil-gets-cheap…
contrarianedge.com/oil-gets-cheap…
The primary reason many individuals fail as long-term investors, Graham said in 1972, is that “they pay too much attention to what the stock market is doing currently.”
