Customer Reviews

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

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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.

Janet Lowe has done an outstanding job collating and introducing each section of this book of previously unpublished articles, lectures, and interviews from the father of value investing. I believe anyone reading this book will get a huge value out of it. This book is a great addition to Mr. Graham's books. It is also a great book to read for those new to Graham's teachings of buying good stocks when their prices are below intrinsic value. Graham's methods of finding good stocks at fair prices by examining their equity to asset ratios, book value, and P/E multiples brought the Graham-Newman partnership over a 20% annual return on equities for 20 years. Followed by his pupil Warren Buffet using and refining his techniques to return over 20% a year for 40 years and eventually lead Warren Buffett to be worth $40 billion thanks to using his value investing for the holding company Berkshire-Hathaway. I sit up and listen to anything these two great men have to say. I also recommend reading Graham's Intelligent Investor and Security Analysis, and "The essays of Warren Buffett" by Cunningham.

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.

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.

This book give a concrete two factor formula for buying below market value investments without needing the more extensive balance sheet analysis as used in the "Intelligent Investor" or "Security Analysis".

I don't think too many people know about this book, however, everyone should. It is an easy, quick read culminating Graham's entire philosophy. It also includes interviews near the end of his great life- and still then his mind is sharp.

Another thing I found interesting was in the last interviews of the book, Graham had begun to believe that investing should be extremely simple- and I mean extremely simple- rather than the long, drawn out process that he had been doing his entire career. I will leave you with one quote:

They called it the "Bible of Graham and Dodd." Yes, well now I have lost most of the interest I had in the details of security analysis which I devoted myself to so strenuously for many years. I feel that they are relatively unimportant, which, in a sense, has put me opposed to developments in the whole profession. I think we can do it successfully with a few techniques and simple principles. The main point is to have the right general principles and the character to stick to them.

This book is collection of articles written by Benjamin Graham. Most other books on Graham explain the value investing philosophy, but this book allows readers access to the primary source so that they can make their own determinations and conclusions. It is similar in a way to The Essays of Warren Buffett by Cunningham, which is also a collection of writing straight from the source.

Every investor will find Graham's writing educational. If Warren Buffett found Graham's teachings important to his investment success, then this means that the information is valuable. I found the "Testimony before the Committee on Banking and Currency, United State Senate," very interesting. This section is in a question and answer format where Graham answers the Chairman's questions. I highly recommend this book to any value investor.

- Mariusz Skonieczny, author of Why Are We So Clueless about the Stock Market? Learn how to invest your money, how to pick stocks, and how to make money in the stock market

For anyone interested in getting to the heart of Benj. Graham and value investing, this is a great source. I only wish it would have been published a few years earlier; I would have saved countless hours searching for the same documents in my college library. Now, if Janet Lowe would only do a similar work with Graham's prized pupil, Warren Buffett as the subject...