The Intelligent Investor: The Definitive Book On Value part 3. 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 | 6 Introduction In the past we have made a basic distinction between two kinds of investors to whom this book was addressed the defensive and the enterprising. The defensive or passive investor will place his chief emphasis on the avoidance of serious mistakes or losses. His second aim will be freedom from effort annoyance and the need for making frequent decisions. The determining trait of the enterprising or active or aggressive investor is his willingness to devote time and care to the selection of securities that are both sound and more attractive than the average. Over many decades an enterprising investor of this sort could expect a worthwhile reward for his extra skill and effort in the form of a better average return than that realized by the passive investor. We have some doubt whether a really substantial extra recompense is promised to the active investor under today s conditions. But next year or the years after may well be different. We shall accordingly continue to devote attention to the possibilities for enterprising investment as they existed in former periods and may return. It has long been the prevalent view that the art of successful investment lies first in the choice of those industries that are most likely to grow in the future and then in identifying the most promising companies in these industries. For example smart investors or their smart advisers would long ago have recognized the great growth possibilities of the computer industry as a whole and of International Business Machines in particular. And similarly for a number of other growth industries and growth companies. But this is not as easy as it always looks in retrospect. To bring this point home at the outset let us add here a paragraph that we included first in the 1949 edition of this book. Such an investor may for example be a buyer of air-transport stocks because he believes their future is even more brilliant than the trend the market already reflects. For this class of .
