Ben Graham

Of Ben Graham, Investing, and Eternity

September 12, 2019 | Reading Time: 3 minutes | 12 Comments |

The Heilbrunn Center for Graham and Dodd Investing created a wonderful video in 2013 titled ‘Legacy of Ben Graham,’ which contains bytes from some of his students on how Graham’s teachings changed their lives.

Marshall Weinberg, one of the students from Graham’s class said that the biggest lesson he drew out of that class was on long-term thinking. Here’s what he said –

One sentence changed my life…Ben Graham opened the course by saying: ‘If you want to make money in Wall Street you must have the proper psychological attitude. No one expresses it better than Spinoza the philosopher.’

When he said that, I nearly jumped out of my course. What? I suddenly look up, and he said, and I remember exactly what he said: ‘Spinoza said you must look at things in the aspect of eternity.’ And that’s what suddenly hooked me on Ben Graham.

Ben Graham: Just Plain Lucky?

January 30, 2019 | Reading Time: 9 minutes | Leave a Comment |

Remember Ben Graham, the guy who wrote The Intelligent Investor? And who taught Warren Buffett to become Warren Buffett?

Well, if you really know who Graham was, you also know that he is associated with buying something cheap (one dollar worth at fifty cents) and then selling it when it reaches a value that reflects what it’s worth.

A very copybook, calculated approach, right? Like what a Rahul Dravid would do in cricket.

A Tribute to the World’s First Investing Teacher

September 7, 2015 | Reading Time: 16 minutes | 3 Comments |

As part of my Mastermind Value Investing Course, I ask students to watch the following video created by ‘The Heilbrunn Centre for Graham and Dodd Investing’ of Columbia Business School, where Benjamin Graham taught value investing in the late 1920s.

This video showcases Graham giving a lecture, and also his students’ views on the legacy of this great man whom the world now knows as the ‘Father of Value Investing’.

If you can’t watch the video above, click here.

My exercise for Mastermind students is to watch the complete video and share the “one” big idea from it that inspires them the most from Graham’s teachings or from what his students say of their teacher.

How to Handle Your Money

April 15, 2015 | Reading Time: 2 minutes | 5 Comments |

Benjamin Graham was one of the most successful investors who ever lived and remains the most influential investment thinker of all time.

He was the one who taught Warren Buffett the art of investing, and was also his first boss.

Graham worked on Wall Street for more than four decades, ran a market-beating mutual fund, taught finance at Columbia Business School and wrote two classic books on investing.

Security Analysis (1934) is still the bible for professional money managers. The Intelligent Investor (1949) is, in Buffett’s words, “by far the best book about investing ever written.”

In June 1955, Graham gave an interview on the basics of handling money. Almost 60 years have passed since then, but a large number of investing ideas that Graham talked about then, remain valid to this day.

When I (Almost) Dumped Ben Graham’s Intelligent Investor

April 10, 2015 | Reading Time: 8 minutes | 1 Comment |

It was sometime in 2005 when a close friend of mine gifted me Ben Graham’s The Intelligent Investor, knowing that I was working as a stock analyst and aspired to become a sensible investor (aspirations are always sensible, you see).

“Is this a good book?” I asked him.

“Seek for yourself,” he told me.

I read through the first few pages of the book, and it didn’t seem to catch hold of my attention, forget captivating me to any extent.

I realized Graham was the teacher of Warren Buffett, whom I’d first read about during my MBA in 2003 (not in the class, but in the library). But the book still did not interest me.