The Rediscovered Benjamin Graham: Selected Writings of the Wall Street Legend (Hardcover)

by Janet Lowe (Author) "When Ben Graham's three-part series, "Is American Business Worth More Dead Than Alive?..." (more)
Key Phrases: unintelligent speculation, commodity reserve plan, net quick assets, Wall Street, Dow Jones, General Motors (more...)

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review
In The Rediscovered Benjamin Graham, Janet Lowe collects plenty of value. Graham was one of the greatest seers and bargain hunters in Wall Street history. Lowe, a veteran financial journalist and editor, showcases a wide range of Graham's writings, lectures, speeches, and interviews from the 1930s to the 1970s. A money manager, author, and adjunct professor at Columbia University, Graham became a millionaire by buying beaten-up stocks following the 1929 crash. Warren Buffett was an early enthusiast of Graham, whose style of investing and advice remain important nearly 25 years after his death. Graham preached the need to buy companies at a major discount to the rest of the market, based on factors such as book value, dividend yields, and price-to-earnings ratio. "Graham still has one of the largest and most loyal followings of any investment philosopher of this century," Lowe writes in the preface. "The more readers study Graham's value investing principles, the more loyal they are likely to become."

The book includes "Renaissance of Value," an address by Graham from 1974 that foreshadowed the bull market of the next decade; "Is American Business Worth More Dead than Alive?", Graham's three-part series in Forbes in 1932 that correctly heralded the deals on Wall Street at the time; and "Interviews with Benjamin Graham," three magazine articles about his musings in retirement after 60 years of investing. Graham, known for his books Security Analysis and The Intelligent Investor, could be amazingly prescient. But he also made lots of mistakes, leading him to conclude that no one could be precise about the direction of the stock market. "The only thing that we can be pretty sure of, perhaps, is that we are acting reasonably and intelligently," he said in a lecture 50 years ago. "And if we are wrong, as we are likely to be, at least we have been intelligently wrong and not unintelligently wrong." Like most books by and about Graham, this belongs on the shelf of any value investor. --Dan Ring

Review
"Graham's thoughts are as relevant as they ever were. Go forth and seek value." -- Investor's Week, 2nd November 2000

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 304 pages
• Publisher: Wiley; 1 edition (April 15, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0471244724
• ISBN-13: 978-0471244721
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.1 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.9 out of 5 stars See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #192,180 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

29 of 30 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Useful supplement to previously issued material, November 26, 1999

By	S. Schneider (USA) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

I've profited handsomely in a real-time portfolio over less than 6 months from ideas accumulated from my reading of this nice collection of articles. Before picking up this text, I expected it would contain mainly writings from Graham's earliest years --writings destined to be melded into the first edition of "Security Analysis." There are a couple of such pieces, but I was most taken with the pieces written towards the end of his life. Some of these are interviews. Graham generated financial ideas for the individual investor until the very end of his life, and this book is currently the only published repository for these. I'm not sure if someone just coming to Benjamin Graham will derive the greatest benefit from this book, but anyone who has a passiing familiarity with "Security Analysis", "The Intelligent Investor" and "The Interpretation of Financial Statements" will derive great pleasure and a goodly number of valuable insights from this collection.

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent primary materials, April 27, 1999

By A Customer

This is an excellent collection of lectures, writings, and other primary materials from Graham. It's not a tired third-party exposition of what Graham means to investing or what he meant to say in his writings. Like Buffett, Graham can be sublime, so the more context you have, the more valuable this book becomes. This collection is a good deal at five times the cover price.

A small observation, though. Who calls Ben Graham "the father of financial advice?" "The father of fundamental analysis" is more common. I don't know where Lowe got that, but I've never heard that.

10 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Relevant and valuable, November 24, 1999

By	John (Oakville, Ontario) - See all my reviews

Janet Lowe's book delivers. Want to know what a genius of finance thinks about investing, the stock market and economics? Buy this book. Each time I read it, I discover a new insight which previously eluded me. Truly a great book and I recommend it to all investors of any level of investment sophistication.