Charles Brandes Quotes

102 Charles Brandes Quotes

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The distinction between investing and speculation has always been difficult to define…1) Any contemplated holding period shorter than a normal business cycle (three to five years) is speculation and 2) any purchase based on anticipated market movements or forecasting is also speculation
Charles Brandes

As one turn-of-the-century commentator noted, when a ‘security is bought and paid for in full, put away in a place of safe keeping, and held for the income it produces – that is called an investment.’ But, when it ‘is held for sale as soon as the price advances – that is speculation.’
Charles Brandes

Investors and speculators approach their tasks differently. Investors want to know what a business is worth and imagine themselves as owning the business as a whole. Speculators are less interested in what a business is actually worth and more concerned with what a third party will pay to own shares on a given day.
Charles Brandes

Who can tell what a third party will pay for your shares today, tomorrow, or any day? Markets typically swing between extremes of fear and greed; both are irrational emotions, beyond anyone’s ability to forecast.
Charles Brandes

The basic ingredients necessary for your investing success. As with any endeavor, success depends on three key factors: knowledge, correct action, and patience.
Charles Brandes

Two… key factors: correct action and patience. These you must supply yourself.
Charles Brandes

If you use the value investing approach… you should increase your capital, possibly substantially.
Charles Brandes

Although modified many times over the ensuring decades, the essential concept of value investing remains unchanged: The shares of any sound company – even a boring, slow-growing business – are a fine investment if bought at a cheap enough price.
Charles Brandes

[Benjamin] Graham was value investing’s leading prophet, but he was more than that. He transformed investing from an art form based mainly on Wall Street blather – imagination, guesswork, and inside information – into a methodical discipline.
Charles Brandes

[Benjamin] Graham believed that any conscientious investor could map a high trail through the slough of market fluctuations by paying close attention to investment fundamentals and by taking advantage of undervaluation and mispricing of individual securities.
Charles Brandes



[Benjamin] Graham’s philosophy was much akin to that of financier Bernard Baruch, who, writing of the 1929 stock market crash, said: ‘I have always thought that if… even in the presence of dizzily spiraling stock prices, we had all continuously repeated two and two still makes four, much of the evil might have been averted.’ In other words: Fundamentals. Fundamentals. Fundamentals.
Charles Brandes

For many, value investing is too painstaking, too boring, and too disciplined.
Charles Brandes

Few will stay the course, since there is no excitement, no action in watching eggs that take years to come to a boil.
Charles Brandes

Value investing strains too much the patience and will of the investor, who needs courage to play against the crowd – often under trying circumstances.
Charles Brandes

Patience is necessary if large and enduring profits are to be made from equity investments. Put another way, it is often easier to tell what will happen to the price of a security than when it will happen.
Charles Brandes

To appreciate the need for discipline and patience.
Charles Brandes

When I’ve talked with small investors, the most striking feature has been their tendency to set sail on financial oceans without so much as a chart to guide them…
Charles Brandes

Value investing made dollars and sense.
Charles Brandes

Sometimes investing seems easy.
Charles Brandes

Certain investors are obtaining superior results, watching their portfolios grow, taking some profits, and encountering minimal risk, year in, year out. How? Not by listening to innumerable prophets, the ones that spring up during bad times with ‘new’ strategies and advice. Nor by employing complicated theories such as market timing, efficient market, or asset allocation – in fact, any of the intricate tools of academicians or market technicians. And certainly not by happenchance or accident. These investors; goals are being accomplished instead by doing it the old-fashioned way – through value investing.
Charles Brandes



Value bargains aren’t found in strong markets. A good rule is to examine stock markets that have reacted adversely for a year or so.
Charles Brandes

Value beats growth over the long haul because sentiment distorts what investors are willing to pay to own a stock.
Charles Brandes

High expectations are difficult to meet.
Charles Brandes

The value investor exploits the sentimental journey from under- to overvalued.
Charles Brandes

Value investing requires some effort. Then too, the application of several standards means that not every horse that comes by gets ridden.
Charles Brandes

A value investor… must look for mistakes in judgment or analysis rather than short-term market prices.
Charles Brandes

Frequently, anticipated bear markets never come. Paul Samuelson, the noted economist, once quipped that ‘The market has accurately called nine of the last five recessions.’
Charles Brandes

William Simon, treasury secretary in the Ford Administration… said that ‘Economists put decimal points in their forecasts to prove they have a sense of humor.’
Charles Brandes

A bigger pie is not necessarily a better pie.
Charles Brandes

Rather than guessing where the market or the economy may be headed, here is a little rhyme to help you remember a better way to decide when to buy stocks:
When stocks can be found at cheap prices,
the time is ripe to buy.
When appropriate values cannot be found,
the market is too high.
Charles Brandes



Executing a value approach… requires the courage of one’s convictions, since the value investor will almost always be going against popular opinion.
Charles Brandes

Don’t fidget, don’t fuss, don’t bail out, don’t let your emotions get the better of you, and don’t be concerned with day-to-day market fluctuations.
Charles Brandes

The stock price rises above and falls below the company’s intrinsic value. These price fluctuations create opportunities for value investors. When the stock price of the company falls sufficiently below the intrinsic value, it creates a buying opportunity… Value investors expect that over time, as others recognize the true value of the company, its share price will climb toward its intrinsic value. As this happens, the margin of safety shrinks. When the share price equals or exceeds the company’s intrinsic value, the margin of safety has disappeared and the shares should be sold.
Charles Brandes

When [Benjamin Graham] retired, I think that he just moved his money into municipal bonds and he didn’t do much investing.
Charles Brandes

Let’s say we have a small company that produces a widget and there are 102 shares outstanding. The $1020 invested in the company nets on the average $102 after taxes. The stock has an intrinsic value of $10 per share.
Charles Brandes

[Investing in companies that you know well means] You won’t give away to scare headlines that could influence you over the short term. Also, understanding the business acts as a spur and facilitates digging that may be necessary.
Charles Brandes

[On meeting Benjamin Graham after he had gone in and bought some shares of National Presto Industries] I decided to go back and read his books, and when I did, I realized, hey, this makes a lot of sense. I called him up and he was willing to talk to me. We met several times. He asked me a lot of questions – but, of course, he already knew the answers. It was his teaching technique.
Charles Brandes

An investment strategy that contemplates owning ‘falling knives’ may indeed leave the manager holding ‘the next Enron,’ but our study suggests that – particularly in a portfolio context – this approach may improve aggregate portfolio returns over time.
Charles Brandes

We consistently apply the value investing philosophy in all market conditions – and to every portfolio we manage. We firmly believe investment success is driven by the identification and purchase of securities trading at discounts to their intrinsic value estimates. In our opinion, the benefits of this approach are evident in the long-term results we have achieved.
Charles Brandes



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