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The cover of The Intelligent Investor

The Intelligent Investor

Benjamin Graham, Jason Zweig, 1949

Benjamin Graham's guide to disciplined investing, updated with Jason Zweig's commentary, shows how to separate price from value, ignore the market's moods and demand a margin of safety.

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11 parts, about 30 minutes to read.

Why read it

  • Separates investing from speculating and sorts investors into defensive and enterprising by the effort they will make, not the risk they take
  • Teaches the margin of safety: pay well below a business's worth so the gap can absorb errors and bad luck
  • Pictures the market as an obliging partner who names a new price daily, so swings become chances to buy or sell rather than signals

Who it is for

  • Savers deciding how to split money between stocks and bonds
  • Beginners tempted by hot stocks and market forecasts
  • Readers who want a rule based way to judge a company's price

What the summary covers

  1. A Framework, a Temperament, a Price3 min
  2. Investing Versus Speculating3 min
  3. Inflation and a Century of Prices2 min
  4. The Defensive Investor3 min
  5. What the Enterprising Investor Adds2 min
  6. Living with Market Fluctuations4 min
  7. Funds and Advisers2 min
  8. What the Numbers Can and Cannot Tell2 min
  9. Rules for Choosing Stocks3 min
  10. Extremes, Pairs and Owners2 min
  11. The Margin of Safety4 min

Recommended by

  • Warren BuffettInvestor, chairman emeritus of Berkshire Hathaway
    By far the best book about investing ever written.

About the authors

  • Benjamin GrahamWas an English American financial analyst, investor and professor
    • Benjamin Graham was born Benjamin Grossbaum in London in 1894 and moved with his family to New York City at the age of one.
    • He finished Columbia University in three and a half years after entering at sixteen, graduating as salutatorian of his class.
    • He started on Wall Street after Columbia and went on to found the Graham Newman Corporation, a successful mutual fund.
    • His first book, Security Analysis, written with David Dodd, appeared in 1934.
    • He taught investing for many years at Columbia Business School, where Warren Buffett was one of his students.
    • He was the driving force behind the creation of the profession of security analysis and the Chartered Financial Analyst designation.
    • He died in southern France in 1976 at the age of 82.
  • Jason ZweigAmerican financial journalist and Wall Street Journal columnist
    • Jason Zweig became a personal finance columnist for The Wall Street Journal in 2008.
    • He has a B.A. from Columbia College, where he held a John Jay National Scholarship.
    • He was the mutual funds editor at Forbes from 1987 to 1995.
    • Before the Journal he was a senior writer for Money magazine and a guest columnist for Time magazine and cnn.com.
    • He edited the revised edition of Graham's The Intelligent Investor, published by HarperCollins in 2003.
    • He wrote Your Money and Your Brain (2007), one of the first books on the neuroscience of investing.
    • He won the 2013 Gerald Loeb Award for Personal Finance and Personal Service for his Wall Street Journal column The Intelligent Investor.
    • He received the 40th Elliot V. Bell Award from the New York Financial Writers Association in 2020.

Read it alongside

  • Pushes backThe Simple Path to Wealth

    Benjamin Graham says prices cannot be predicted, so the defensive investor should always hold both stocks and bonds, with 25% to 75% in stocks; JL Collins recommends 100% in a total stock market fund while accumulating, adding bonds once you stop working

  • Goes deeperThe Behavioral Investor

    Graham says the investor's main problem is probably himself, and that how you behave matters far more than how your investments behave; Crosby names that risk and sorts it into ego, conservatism, attention and emotion, each needing its own remedy.

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