19 Facts About Benjamin Graham

Benjamin Graham was a British-born American financial analyst, economist, accountant, investor and professor.

Benjamin Graham is widely known as the "father of value investing", and wrote two of the discipline's founding texts: Security Analysis with David Dodd, and The Intelligent Investor.

Benjamin Graham taught investing for many years at Columbia Business School, where one of his students was Warren Buffett.

Benjamin Graham later taught at the Anderson School of Management at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Benjamin Graham laid the groundwork for value investing at mutual funds, hedge funds, diversified holding companies, and other investment vehicles.

Benjamin Graham was the driving force behind the establishment of the profession of security analysis and the Chartered Financial Analyst designation.

Benjamin Graham advocated the creation of index funds decades before they were introduced.

Benjamin Graham moved with his family to New York City when he was one year old.

Benjamin Graham excelled as a student, graduating as salutatorian of his class at Columbia, finishing his studies in three-and-a-half years after entering at age 16.

Benjamin Graham chose instead to help support his widowed mother by taking a job on Wall Street, where he later ran private partnerships and, starting in 1936, the Benjamin Graham-Newman fund.

Early on, Graham made a name for himself with "The Northern Pipeline Affair", an early case of shareholder activism involving John D Rockefeller.

Later, Benjamin Graham patented two innovative hand-held calculators, wrote a Broadway play called "Baby Pompadour," and taught himself Spanish so he could translate a major Uruguayan novel, Mario Benedetti's The Truce, into English.

Benjamin Graham wrote that the owner of stocks should regard them first and foremost as conferring part ownership in a business.

Benjamin Graham recommended that enterprising investors devote substantial time and effort to analyze the financial state of companies.

Benjamin Graham was critical of the corporations of his day for obfuscated and irregular financial reporting that made it difficult for investors to discern the true state of the business's finances.

Benjamin Graham was an advocate of dividend payments to shareholders rather than businesses hoarding all of their profits as retained earnings.

Benjamin Graham criticized those who advised that some types of stocks were a good buy at any price, because of the prospect of potentially unlimited earnings growth, without a thorough analysis of the business's actual financial condition.

On September 21,1976, Benjamin Graham died in Aix-en-Provence, France, at the age of 82.

Benjamin Graham's contributions spanned numerous fields, primarily fundamental value investing.