Benjamin Graham

Benjamin Graham

In today’s financial industry we credit people like Warren Buffet as financial geniuses because of their success and influence with investing and other financial activities. However we sometimes fail to look beyond them to the original men and women whose philosophies and works contributed to the development of the modern financial system we have today. “The education of Warren Buffet is best understood as the synthesis of two legendary figures.” (Hagstrom 27) One thing that Buffet remembers about one of his figures is that he always said that everyday he wanted to do something foolish, something creative, and something generous. Events that Benjamin Graham experienced through his life led to his methodology of preventing loss which he applied in his academic teachings, partnership with Graham-Newman, and his literary works.

The occurrence of different events in his life led him to form the financial concepts that he taught at Columbia and that his works are based on. Benjamin Graham was born in London and a year later moved to New York with his family. His father was a porcelain dealer so the family enjoyed a descent lifestyle while he was young. When Grahams father died his family experienced financial hardship. His mother turned their home into a boarding house and began to buy stocks but failed miserably due to the crash of 1907. “Dora’s business efforts failed and her disastrous attempts to improve her fortunes by trading in odd lots of stock on margin made matters even worse. The young Graham grew up in the knowledge of just how badly investment losses can hurt a family.” (Gough 129) Despite the difficulty and hardship he experienced Graham received a scholarship to attend Columbia University. This point in his life is when his intelligence and genius were beginning to be recognized. At the age of twenty he graduated second in his class, and was fluent in both Latin in Greek. Philosophy and mathematics were the areas he expressed interest in, but despite being offered three teaching positions in the subjects of philosophy, mathematics, and English during his last semester at Columbia he decided to go to Wall Street.

After graduating from Columbia Graham joined a firm and became a statistician (the original name for analyst). He began to acquire money as a money manager and later became a partner in a successful investment account known as the Graham-Newman account. The Graham-Newman join account had one of the best long term records on Wall Street. It averaged a return of around 14.7% a year while the market was just at 12% a year. The account’s success illustrates that Graham’s principles of investing are a successful way to approach the stock market. He attributed Graham-Newman success to actions they took with their investments such as arbitrage, acquisitions, liquidations, and hedges. Through cautious measures and considerations the fund survived though the depression.

The main achievement of Benjamin Graham is his influence on the finance industry through his works