水不恋云    复制

504- Great Investors: Benjamin Graham
    Benjamin Graham taught an investment class at the Columbia University business
  school for 28 years. If you had been a student in Graham's classes during the
  early 1950s, your textbook, Security Analysis, would have been written by
  Graham himself, along with David Dodd.
  
  You may have also met a few interesting students by the name of Warren
  Buffett, Bill Ruane, Tom Knapp, and Walter Schloss. Each of these men would go
  on to manage investments in one form or another. Buffett and Schloss both
  started investment partnerships. Buffett folded his partnership in 1969, but
  his partners were given the opportunity to receive shares of a struggling
  textile manufacturer named Berkshire Hathaway BRK.B. Ruane and Knapp started
  firms that manage public mutual funds.
  
  In 1984, Buffett returned to Columbia to give a speech commemorating the 50th
  anniversary of the publication of Security Analysis. During that speech, he
  presented his own investment record as well as those of Ruane, Knapp, and
  Schloss. In short, each of these men posted investment results that blew away
  the returns of the overall market. Buffett noted that each of the portfolios
  varied greatly in the number and type of stocks, but what did not vary was the
  managers' adherence to Graham's investment principles. The investment
  principles taught by Graham at Columbia served his students exceptionally
  well, and it is difficult to overstate the influence Graham had on the field
  of professional stock analysis. The good news is that Graham made the same
  principles easily accessible for ordinary investors by writing the classic
  book The Intelligent Investor.
  
  
  The Principles of Value Investing
  
  Multibillion dollar casinos have been built in the desert because of the
  insatiable human desire to speculate. However, when speculation is confused
  with investment, trouble inevitably follows. The Internet bubble of the late
  1990s is merely the most recent example of the speculative frenzies that
  occasionally occur in financial markets. In The Intelligent Investor, Graham
  set forth the principles that form the foundation of value investing. Value
  investors seek to purchase assets at prices that are substantially below the
  assets' true, or intrinsic, value. Graham's timeless principles provide a map
  that all value investors can follow to stock market success. According to
  Graham, investing consists of three elements:
  
  1. Thorough Analysis
  Stocks are not merely pieces of paper or electronic quotations on a computer
  screen, but partial ownership interests in real businesses. Therefore, you
  must thoroughly analyze the underlying business and its prospects before
  purchasing a stock. Equally important--given the endless amount of data that
  flows from the stock market on a daily basis--is recognizing the information
  you must ignore or discard. For example, the average price of a stock over the
  past 50 days may be important to so-called chartists or technical analysts,
  but does that have any effect on the safety or value of the underlying
  business? As Graham wrote, you must study "the facts in light of established
  standards of safety and value."
  
  2. Safety of Principal
  Warren Buffett is fond of saying that his two rules of investing are Rule #1:
  Don't Lose Money, and Rule #2: Don't Forget Rule #1. Buffett undoubtedly
  inherited his strong aversion to permanent capital loss from Graham. To
  succeed over an investment lifetime, you do not have to find the next
  Microsoft MSFT or Dell DELL, but it is necessary that you avoid significant
  losses.
  
  3. Adequate Return
  For Graham, an "adequate" or "satisfactory" return meant "any rate or amount
  of return, however low, which the investor is willing to accept, provided he
  acts with reasonable intelligence." Many investors will find that the best way
  to own common stocks is through a low-cost mutual fund or ETF (exchange-traded
  fund) that tracks a broad market index such as the S&P 500. Index funds allow
  investors to participate in the growth of American business, which has been
  very satisfactory over the last century. In addition, very few active managers
  have outperformed S&P 500 index funds over long periods of time. Therefore, if
  you decide to construct your own portfolio of stocks or to purchase shares of
  an actively managed mutual fund, your investment return must exceed that of a
  low-cost index fund over the long term to be "adequate." Otherwise,
  "reasonable intelligence" should dictate that you own an index fund.
  
  
  Intrinsic Value
  
  How much should you pay for a business? Every day the stock market offers
  prices for thousands of businesses, but how do you know if the price for any
  particular business is too low or too high? To succeed as an investor, you
  must be able to estimate a business's true worth, or "intrinsic value," which
  may be entirely separate from its stock market price.
  
  For Graham, a business's intrinsic value could be estimated from its financial
  statements, namely the balance sheet and income statement. For example, in
  1926 Graham discovered that Northern Pipe Line, an oil transport company,
  owned a collection of railroad bonds that were worth $95 for each of its
  shares. However, Northern's stock was selling for only $65 per share. It does
  not take a genius of Graham's caliber to see from Northern's balance sheet
  that its intrinsic value was at least $95 per share since the company also
  owned valuable pipeline assets. Although it took a proxy fight, Graham
  eventually brought Northern's management to his way of thinking: Northern sold
  the bonds and paid a $70 per share dividend.
  
  
  Mr. Market
  
  If all investors based their investment decisions on rational and conservative
  estimates of intrinsic value, it would be very difficult to make money in the
  stock market. Fortunately, the participants in the stock market are humans
  subject to the corroding influence of emotions. Investors are frequently given
  to bouts of over-optimism and greed, which causes stock prices to be bid up to
  very high levels. These same investors are also vulnerable to excessive
  pessimism and fear, in which case, stock prices are driven down substantially
  below intrinsic value.
  
  Graham offers intelligent investors an escape from the swift tides of greed
  and fear. He wrote, "Basically, price fluctuations have only one significant
  meaning for the true investor. They provide him with an opportunity to buy
  wisely when prices fall sharply and sell wisely when they advance a great
  deal. At other times he will do better if he forgets about the stock market."

  Graham's attitude toward market fluctuations, of course, makes perfect sense.
  Can you imagine waiting to purchase a television until its price went up, but
  refusing to buy the same television when it went on sale? Strange as it seems,
  behavior that is blatantly irrational in most aspects of life is commonplace
  in the stock market.
  
  Graham succinctly captured his liberating philosophy toward market
  fluctuations in the famous parable of Mr. Market. Graham said to imagine you
  had a partner in a private business named Mr. Market. Mr. Market, the obliging
  fellow that he is, shows up daily to tell you what he thinks your interest in
  the business is worth.
  
  On most days, the price he quotes is reasonable and justified by the
  business's prospects. However, Mr. Market suffers from some rather incurable
  emotional problems; you see, he is very temperamental. When Mr. Market is
  overcome by boundless optimism or bottomless pessimism, he will quote you a
  price that, as Graham noted, "seems to you a little short of silly." As an
  intelligent investor, you should not fall under Mr. Market's influence, but
  rather you should learn to take advantage of him.
  
  The value of your interest should be determined by rationally appraising the
  business's prospects, and you can happily sell when Mr. Market quotes you a
  ridiculously high price and buy when he quotes you an absurdly low price. The
  best part of your association with Mr. Market is that he does not care how
  many times you take advantage of him. No matter how many times you saddle him
  with losses or rob him of gains, he will arrive the next day ready to do
  business with you again.
  
  The lesson behind Graham's Mr. Market parable is obvious. Every day the stock
  market offers investors quotes on thousands of businesses, and you are free
  either to ignore or take advantage of those prices. You must always remember
  that it is not Mr. Market's guidance you are interested in, but rather his
  wallet.
  
  
  Margin of Safety
  
  If you had asked Graham to distill the secret of sound investing into three
  words, he might have replied, "margin of safety." Those are still the right
  three words and will remain so for as long as humans are unable to accurately
  predict the future.
  
  As Graham repeatedly warned, any estimate of intrinsic value is based on
  numerous assumptions about the future, which are unlikely to be completely
  accurate. By allowing yourself a margin of safety--paying only $60 for a stock
  you think is worth $100, for example--you provide for errors in your forecasts
  and unforeseeable events that may alter the business landscape.
  
  Just think, if you were asked to build a bridge over which 10,000-pound trucks
  were to pass, would you build it to hold exactly 10,000 pounds? Of course
  not--you'd build the bridge to hold 15,000 or 20,000 pounds. That is your
  margin of safety.
  
  
  The Bottom Line
  
  When Benjamin Graham passed away in 1976, Warren Buffett wrote this about
  Graham's teachings: "In an area where much looks foolish within weeks or
  months after publication, Ben's principles have remained sound--their value
  often enhanced and better understood in the wake of financial storms that
  demolished flimsier intellectual structures. His counsel of soundness brought
  unfailing rewards to his followers--even to those with natural abilities
  inferior to more gifted practitioners who stumbled while following counsels of
  brilliance or fashion." Buffett's words remain undeniably true today.
  Investing is most intelligent when it is most businesslike, and investors who
  follow Graham's principles will continue to reap rewards in the stock market.