Charles Brandes Quotes

102 Charles Brandes Quotes (Charles H Brandes Quotes)

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The stock market is inherently misleading. Doing what everybody else is doing can often be wrong.
Charles Brandes

They find themselves switching in and out of stocks, feeding the brokers instead of themselves.
Charles Brandes

[On Benjamin Graham] He asked me a lot of questions – but, of course, he already knew the answers. It was his teaching technique.
Charles Brandes

Badly burned individuals had learned the painful lesson that, once again, it wasn’t different this time.
Charles Brandes

Worthwhile things in life have to be earned.
Charles Brandes

Quick fixes are likely to be no fixes at all.
Charles Brandes

The most successful means of investing over 60 years – value investing.
Charles Brandes

Fundamentals. Fundamentals. Fundamentals.
Charles Brandes

Value guys do not like to overpay for things.
Charles Brandes

Value investing is almost synonymous with capital preservation.
Charles Brandes



The lower the purchase price relative to value, the lower the risk.
Charles Brandes

Any contemplated holding period shorter than a normal business cycle (three to five years) is speculation.
Charles Brandes

Investors and speculators approach their tasks differently.
Charles Brandes

Investors want to know what a business is worth and imagine themselves as owning the business as a whole.
Charles Brandes

Goals are being accomplished instead by doing it the old-fashioned way – through value investing.
Charles Brandes

Value investors expect that over time, as others recognize the true value of the company, its share price will climb toward its intrinsic value.
Charles Brandes

Run from corporate managers more concerned with perquisites [special rights or privileges], golden parachutes, bonuses, and excessively high salaries in relation to the return to shareholders.
Charles Brandes

If a president owns 20 percent or more of the shares outstanding, then we both want the same thing – increased share price. Managers tied only by salary and benefits aren’t rowing the same boat as shareholders.
Charles Brandes

We firmly believe investment success is driven by the identification and purchase of securities trading at discounts to their intrinsic value estimates.
Charles Brandes

You can’t always predict the future.
Charles Brandes



Things are changing more rapidly now than they did in the past.
Charles Brandes

The market is crazy, most of the time.
Charles Brandes

By choosing stocks with a substantial difference between price and value, a wide margin of safety is created. The lower the purchase price relative to value, the lower the risk. Contrary to popular belief, by decreasing risk, this method increases potential reward.
Charles Brandes

[In 1987] Bayer is just as good a company as Monsanto or a Du Pont.
Charles Brandes

These aren’t stocks that would be kept forever. In a lot of these, I will be looking for an approximately 50% gain before thinking of selling.
Charles Brandes

[In 1998] The potential for conservative and businesslike value investors has never been greater.
Charles Brandes

I am greatly indebted to my mentor, ‘The Dean of Investing,’ Mr. Benjamin Graham. His basic principles formed the solid foundations for my worldwide investment success.
Charles Brandes

Once upon a time there was an emperor with no clothes. His loyal subjects overlooked this deficiency until one child, casting aside convention and social custom, proclaimed the truth – the emperor wasn’t all he seemed to be. If you’ve been involved in the financial world and if you’ve stood back and observed its machinations thoughtfully, you’ll have noticed that there have been many naked emperors. Doubtless, there will be many more.
Charles Brandes

There is no question that some people will make substantial money by investing in stocks. Others, like the emperor will lose their shirts.
Charles Brandes

Value investing – I will admit to being a convert to this approach and, as with many converts, I am deeply committed to it. I have seen the results; I know it works; and I know it will build wealth for those who apply its principles.
Charles Brandes



Some individual investors have shaken off the trammels of reason. Instead, they have opted to run wild after golden visions, turning to fads, alchemy, and the stars and moon in desperate efforts to increase their wealth.
Charles Brandes

Consider the 1960s. Visions of boundless wealth floated before investors with the advent of a new magic formula: ‘Synergy’. Synergy meant that under astute corporate management two and two could indeed equal five. Synergy was not the first – nor the last – of such gimmicks.
Charles Brandes

Gimmicks. We’ve had go-go stocks, the high-turnover performance game, guessing market cycles and turns, technical analysis, and an infatuation with high technology and new issues.
Charles Brandes

During the 1990s, momentum investing – the notion of buying stocks simply because they were going up – became popular. What each of these fads has in common is a complete disregard for fundamental value.
Charles Brandes

In 1996 we witnessed the spectacle of investors elbowing one another for the chance to pay $40 and $50 a share for stocks of companies with no earnings and no prospects for earnings this century. Six months after the buying frenzy began, the speculative price bubble in the initial public offering market burst…
Charles Brandes

Six months after the buying frenzy began, the speculative price bubble in the initial public offering market burst, sobriety returned, and badly burned individuals had learned the painful lesson that, once again, it wasn’t different this time.
Charles Brandes

Sophisticated investors may snort P. T. Barnum-like remarks directed toward the gullibility of amateur investors and their capricious attitude, but they would be wrong. Amateur investors aren’t the only ones at fault. The best and brightest financial professionals have proven equally gullible.
Charles Brandes

Pension funds, insurance companies, and other institutional investors have indeed been abandoning any notion of making a painstaking analysis of the companies whose stocks they buy.
Charles Brandes

Near frenzied trading currently engulf the securities markets. They have been turned into senior-level Las Vegases. Investors come and go with dazzling frequency. Each of them strives for a larger share of the average annual gains pie; each strives to speed up the process of wealth building. Instead, however, they find themselves switching in and out of stocks, feeding the brokers instead of themselves.
Charles Brandes

If investors are to make money consistently, what is required is a return to far-sighted, long-term investing. That is the only kind of investing that promises rational investors the greatest economic returns over the long haul.
Charles Brandes



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