Book Review : Benjamin Graham on Investing

Reading an author ’s early writing allows us to see juvenile attempts at expressing a message more fully developed in that author’s later works. Having read through the Intelligent Investor and Security Analysis a few times, reading Benjamin Graham on Investing was an interesting opportunity to do just this.

Rodney Klein has put together a collection of early writings from Benjamin Graham pulled from a selection of shorter magazine articles by Graham dating from the period 1917-1927. Chapters include such topics as: Valuation of Great Northern Oil Certificates, and Is United Drug Cheap at 53?

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5 Facts about Benjamin Graham

Benjamin Graham is known as the father of value investing and is probably one of the most well read and studied investor of the 20th century.  While his most famous work The Intelligent Investor is read in business schools around the word,  not much is known about the man behind the writing. Much of this is due to the quite reserved life that Graham lead and some also to the fact that he existed before the era of the celebrity investor to understand any author’s great works requires some back ground so I present to you these 5 facts about Benjamin Graham:
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Fannie Mae?

Benjamin Graham often wrote of distinguishing the difference between investing and speculating. Fannie Mae, in its current state, sits in the speculating bucket. Investing has to fun though, sometimes it is interesting to window shop, so lets look.

Evaluation based on Buffet’s Criteria

When looking at a business I often ask myself what other investors would think? So lets apply Buffett’s criteria and see if we can’t look at it through his eyes.
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Value Investing Four Filters

I am always looking for good high quality companies that are trading at a discount. Finding these companies is both challenging and time consuming. Finding cheap companies isn’t hard- finding cheap good ones is. A professional investor will spend the entire day researching company after company trying to find something the market has overlooked. As an amateur investor I don’t have that kind of time so I needed a method to reduce the number of companies I examine every week to a small handful that merit my further investigations.
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Marty Whiteman On Risk, & Graham and Dodd

A little food for thought on a Sunday afternoon. While I don’t agree with Whiteman on a number of issues I do appreciate the arguments he makes. Have a look and see what you think.

If you are getting this via email try the following link:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uwbToH2TAco

Banks Stopped Investing and Started Speculating

Over Christmas I have had a bit of a chance to catch up on some reading, one of the books I read through was Garrett Gunderson’s Killing Sacred Cows: Overcoming the Financial Myths That Are Destroying Your Prosperity. In Gunderson’s book he suggests individuals look at investing in the same way that banks do as they have been so extremely efficient. As Gunderson puts it banks mitigate investment risk in personal loans by doing the following:
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• Check your credit.
• Secure their investments with collateral
• Require a down payment
• Determine the interest rate
• Determine the payment

Graham vs. Greenblatt (Session 3) Return on Capital

Greenblatt in his book The Little Book that Beats the Market advocated a simple method for attaining substantial stock returns. In this series we are looking at the particulars of this investing theory to both understand why he advocated the elements of this theory and what Benjamin Graham would have thought of the approach that Greenblatt was advocating. The next part in this series looks at Return on Capital or ROC.

What is it?

Graham Security Analysis (Session 1)

Benjamin Graham had a great investment philosophy. Find great companies determine their intrinsic value and then only buy them when they are cheap. Or as Graham puts it: apply a set of standards to each purchase, to make sure that he obtains (1) a minimum of quality in the past performance and current financial position of the company, and also (2) a minimum of quantity in terms of earnings and assets per dollar of price. The Intelligent Investor P347-348 Harper Collins Edition 2003 Read More...