Wednesday 30 January 2019

General Portfolio Policy (Benjamin Graham)

General Portfolio Policy: The Defensive Investor

Graham opens the chapter defining two different kinds of investors: the “active” investor, which is the kind of investor that actively seeks new investments and invests serious time into studying investments, and the “passive” or “defensive” investor, the kind of investor that wants to invest once (or on a highly regular basis) and just let his or her portfolio run on autopilot.
Regardless of the activity that you apply to your investments, Graham sticks hard with his recommendation from the earlier chapter: 50% stocks, 50% bonds (or a close approximation thereof, with an absolute maximum of 75% in either side). It’s important to remember with a recommendation like that that Graham is very conservative in his investing, dreading the idea of an actual loss in capital. Only in the most dire of down markets (like 2008, for example) would such a portfolio actually deliver a loss to the investor.

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