The Intelligent Investor: The Definitive Book On Value part 23. The purpose of this book is to supply, in a form suitable for laymen, guidance in the adoption and execution of an investment policy. Comparatively little will be said here about the technique of analyzing securities; attention will be paid chiefly to investment principles and investors’ attitudes. We shall, however, provide a number of condensed comparisons of specific securities - chiefly in pairs appearing side by side in the New York Stock Exchange list in order to bring home in concrete fashion the important elements involved in specific choices of common stocks | 206 The Intelligent Investor movements are important to him in a practical sense because they alternately create low price levels at which he would be wise to buy and high price levels at which he certainly should refrain from buying and probably would be wise to sell. It is far from certain that the typical investor should regularly hold off buying until low market levels appear because this may involve a long wait very likely the loss of income and the possible missing of investment opportunities. On the whole it may be better for the investor to do his stock buying whenever he has money to put in stocks except when the general market level is much higher than can be justified by well-established standards of value. If he wants to be shrewd he can look for the ever-present bargain opportunities in individual securities. Aside from forecasting the movements of the general market much effort and ability are directed on Wall Street toward selecting stocks or industrial groups that in matter of price will do better than the rest over a fairly short period in the future. Logical as this endeavor may seem we do not believe it is suited to the needs or temperament of the true investor particularly since he would be competing with a large number of stock-market traders and first-class financial analysts who are trying to do the same thing. As in all other activities that emphasize price movements first and underlying values second the work of many intelligent minds constantly engaged in this field tends to be self-neutralizing and selfdefeating over the years. The investor with a portfolio of sound stocks should expect their prices to fluctuate and should neither be concerned by sizable declines nor become excited by sizable advances. He should always remember that market quotations are there for his convenience either to be taken advantage of or to be ignored. He should never buy a stock because it has gone up or sell one because it has gone down. He would not be far .
