Benjamin Graham

Benjamin Graham was born in London in 1894 and emigrated with his family to New York as an infant. He graduated from Columbia University with extraordinary academic distinction and began his career on Wall Street in 1914. His early experiences in the 1929 crash — and his loss of significant client capital — shaped his lifelong philosophy of conservative, analytically grounded investing. With David Dodd he co-authored "Security Analysis" in 1934, the most rigorous and comprehensive textbook on fundamental analysis ever written. The book established the discipline of fundamental security analysis — the systematic evaluation of companies based on their financial statements, earnings, assets, and competitive position — and introduced the concept of "intrinsic value" as distinct from market price. "The Intelligent Investor" (1949) presented these ideas in more accessible form for general audiences and introduced the allegory of "Mr. Market" — an emotional, erratic partner who offers to buy or sell shares at varying prices, which the rational investor should take advantage of rather than follow. The concept of "margin of safety" — buying securities significantly below their intrinsic value to protect against errors in analysis — became the cornerstone of value investing. Graham ran Graham-Newman Corporation, which averaged about 20% annual returns from 1936 to 1956. His most famous student was Warren Buffett, who studied under him at Columbia and worked for Graham-Newman before starting his own partnership. Graham passed away in 1976, but his intellectual legacy — filtered through Buffett — has influenced more invested capital than any other single thinker in finance.