Links

Core Books

Value investors worthy of the name must repeatedly read and study:

• The Intelligent Investor: A Book of Practical Counsel (rev. 1973 ed., with preface and Appendix by Warren Buffett, updated with new commentary by Jason Zweig, HarperBusiness Essentials, 2006). Buffett regards it “by far the best book on investing ever written.” Walter Schloss adds “anybody who has any money to invest should understand this approach.”
• Security Analysis (6th ed., foreword by Warren Buffett, updated with new commentary by Seth Klarman, et al., McGraw-Hill Education, 2008). In its Foreword, Buffett hails it as “a roadmap for investing that I have now been following for 57 years. There’s been no reason to look for another.”

Other Core Material

• • Berkshire Hathaway’s web site provides links to Buffett’s Annual Letters to Shareholders, Charlie Munger’s Letters to Wesco’s shareholders, the Berkshire Owner’s Manual, etc.
  • The Superinvestors of Graham and Doddsville is a seminal speech that Buffett delivered at Columbia University in 1984 in order to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Security Analysis;
  • What Has Worked in Investing: Studies of Investment Approaches and Characteristics Associated with Exceptional Returns analyses and describes the approach that Tweedy Brown LLC has used since at least 1958, when Thomas Knapp joined the firm from Graham-Newman Corporation.

 

Writings of Benjamin Graham

In addition to his books, Graham’s writings include

• The Rediscovered Benjamin Graham – a collection of hard-to-find lectures delivered by Graham during the 1940s at the New York Institute of Finance.
• Should Rich Corporations Return Stockholders’ Cash? – in this, the first of three articles written for Forbes magazine at the nadir of the Great Depression, Graham proposed a principle which was then novel and has since become commonplace (and commonly misused).
• Inflated Treasuries and Deflated Stockholders – in the second of the three articles written for Forbes in 1932, Graham noted and described an oddity: “a great number of American businesses are quoted in the market for much less than their liquidating value; that in the best judgment of Wall Street, these businesses are worth more dead than alive.”
• Should Rich but Losing Corporations Be Liquidated? – “if gold dollars without any strings attached could actually be purchased for 50 cents, plenty of publicity and plenty of buying power would quickly be marshalled to take advantage of the bargain. Corporate gold dollars are now available in quantity at 50 cents and less – but they do have strings attached …”

Other Material by and about Buffett, Graham, Munger and Schloss

• My Hero, Benjamin Grossbaum by James Grant – “my subject is Benjamin Graham: his life, his investment philosophy, his writings and his Jewishness. About his love life, I will say little, as my time this evening is limited – just three hours, I believe …”
• Benjamin Graham, Securities Expert – The New York Times (23 September 1976) recorded the death of the “founding father of modern securities analysis.”
• Remembering a Classic Investing Theory by David Leonhardt (The New York Times, 15 August 2007) – “More than 70 years ago, two Columbia professors named Benjamin Graham and David L. Dodd came up with a simple investing idea that remains more influential than perhaps any other. In the wake of the stock market crash in 1929, they urged investors to focus on hard facts — like a company’s past earnings and the value of its assets — rather than trying to guess what the future would bring.”
• Experience by Bernard Condon (Forbes, 25 January 2008) – “At 91, the man Warren Buffett famously dubbed a ‘superinvestor’ is still picking unloved stocks. Walter Schloss has lived through 17 recessions, starting with one when Woodrow Wilson was President. This old-school value investor has made money through many of them. What’s ahead for the economy? He doesn’t worry about it.”
• Mr Buffett on the Stock Market – Berkshire’s Chairman, in a series of speeches published in Fortune magazine in November 1999, outlines why he believes that many of today’s “investments” are riskier propositions than their owners realise and why investors should reduce their expectations about future rewards.
• Mr Buffett on the Stock Market II – updating his 1999 speeches with an address published in Fortune in late 2001, Mr Buffett warns that many people are unduly influenced by immediate past experience. Their behaviour thus tends to be either excessively confident or overly despondent.
• Mr Munger on Worldly Wisdom – a speech to the School of Business at the University of Southern California in 1994: “… The subject of my talk is the art of stock picking as a subdivision of the art of worldly wisdom. That enables me to start talking about worldly wisdom – a much broader topic that interests me because I think all too little of it is delivered by modern educational systems, at least [not] in an effective way.”
• Mr Buffett, Meet Ludwig von Mises and Murray Rothbard – by Michael Rozeff. “We have much to learn from Warren Buffett as investment genius and as business manager. But he and others have much to learn from Ludwig von Mises and Murray Rothbard and those following in their footsteps who are advancing the Austrian School of economics …” (see also The Trouble with Warren Buffett by Doug French; Ludwig von Mises, Meet Benjamin Graham: Value Investing from an Austrian Point of View by Chris Leithner; and Value Investing’s Compatibility with Austrian Economics—Truth or Myth? A Rejoinder by Chris Leithner).

Academic Centres and Archives

• The Ben Graham Centre for Value Investing at the University of Western Ontario applies, promotes, researches and teaches value investing; it contains useful information including interviews value investors including Walter Schloss.
• Columbia University’s Business School – Benjamin Graham’s alma mater and the birthplace of value investing – hosts The Heilbrunn Center for Graham and Dodd Investing. Its materials include an extensive archive about and by Graham, Schloss, etc.