A Quote by Benjamin Graham

Nothing in finance is more fatuous and harmful, in our opinion, than the firmly established attitude of common stock investors regarding questions of corporate management. That attitude is summed up in the phrase: "If you don't like the management, sell your stock." ... The public owners seem to have abdicated all claim to control over the paid superintendents of their property.

Benjamin Graham

Quote Topics

Attitude Claim Common Control Corporate Established Finance Firmly Harmful Investors Like Management More Nothing Opinion Our Over Owners Paid Phrase Property Public Questions Regarding Seem Sell Stock Superintendents Than Up Your

Quote Author

Benjamin Graham
American - Economist
May 8, 1894 - September 21, 1976

When you buy enough stocks to give you control of a target company, that's called mergers and acquisitions or corporate raiding. Hedge funds have been doing this, as well as corporate financial managers. With borrowed money you can take over or raid a foreign company too. So, you're having a monopolistic consolidation process that's pushed up the market, because in order to buy a company or arrange a merger, you have to offer more than the going stock-market price. You have to convince existing holders of a stock to sell out to you by paying them more than they'd otherwise get.

Michael Hudson

It can be argued that the U.S. brokerage and investment banking industry has transformed the modern American stock market into nothing more than a mechanism for transferring wealth from shareholders to management.

Peter Schiff

What it takes to do a job will not be learned from management courses. It is principally a matter of experience, the proper attitude, and common sense — none of which can be taught in a classroom... Human experience shows that people, not organizations or management systems, get things done.

Hyman Rickover

ICG became a dot-com joke, a one-stock example of extreme hubris on the part of its management and the investment bankers and sell-side analysts who embarrassed themselves by pumping it up.

Adam Lashinsky

As for the employees, the payment in stock options revives, somewhat ironically, the old anarchist ideology of self-management of the company, as they are co-owners, co-producers, and co-managers of the firm.

Manuel Castells

When a corporation goes into the marketplace to buy back its own stock, it means management thinks the stock is undervalued. This is a smart time to buy.

Nancy Dunnan

Driving stock up from one day to the next is not what we are about. We are about building a good company and performing for the long term. I know everyone says that, that sounds trite when I repeat it that way, but that is and has always been our attitude about our business. If we do the right things, the stock price will take care of itself, and our shareholders will be rewarded.

James Sinegal

Our standard prescription for the know-nothing investor with a long-term time horizon is a no-load index fund. I think that works better than relying on your stock broker. The people who are telling you to do something else are all being paid by commissions or fees. The result is that while index fund investing is becoming more and more popular, by and large it's not the individual investors that are doing it. It's the institutions.

Charlie Munger

It's a whole different attitude toward public service than it once was. I tell you, we can all sit around in our old age and moan about it, but I think the administrative processes and the management effectiveness of the federal government are terrible!

Paul Volcker

There are three important principles to Graham's approach. [The first is to look at stocks as fractional shares of a business, which] gives you an entirely different view than most people who are in the market. [The second principle is the margin-of-safety concept, which] gives you the competitive advantage. [The third is having a true investor's attitude toward the stock market, which] if you have that attitude, you start out ahead of 99 percent of all the people who are operating in the stock market - it's an enormous advantage.

Warren Buffett

Successful investors like stocks better when they’re going down. When you go to a department store or a supermarket, you like to buy merchandise on sale, but it doesn’t work that way in the stock market. In the stock market, people panic when stocks are going down, so they like them less when they should like them more. When prices go down, you shouldn’t panic, but it’s hard to control your emotions when you’re overextended, when you see your net worth drop in half and you worry that you won’t have enough money to pay for your kids’ college.

Seth Klarman

The only beef Enron employees have with top management is that management did not inform employees of the collapse in time to allow them to get in on the swindle. If Enron executives had shouted, "Head for the hills!" the employees might have had time to sucker other Americans into buying wildly over-inflated Enron stock. Just because your boss is a criminal doesn't make you a hero.

Ann Coulter

You are in charge of your own attitude whatever others do or circumstances you face. The only person you can control is yourself...worry more about your attitude than your aptitude or lineage.

Marian Wright Edelman

As to the Income Tax, my opinion is that the needful revenue would be fairly and most fairly raised if paid by property, and by individuals in proportion to their property. A Property Tax should be an assessment upon all land and buildings, and canals and railroads, but not on property such as machinery, stock in trade, etc. The aristocracy have squeezed all they can out of the mass of the consumers, and now they lay their daring hands on those not wholly impoverished.

John Bright

Many stock options in the corporate world have worked in exactly that fashion: they have gained in value simply because management retained earnings, not because it did well with the capital in its hands.

Warren Buffett

Sell a stock only when you have found a new stock that is a 50% better bargain than the one that you hold.