Timing is of no value, unless it coincides with pricing, enabling repurchase at substantially under previous selling price.

The investor can scarcely take seriously the innumerable predictions which appear almost daily and are his for the asking.

Yet in many cases he pays attention to them and even acts on them.  Why?

Because he has been persuaded that it is important for him to form some opinion of the future course of the stock market, and because he feels that the brokerage or service forecast is at least more dependable than his own.

This attitude will bring the typical investor nothing but regrets.

Without realizing it, he is likely to find himself transformed into a market trader.  

During a sustained bull movement, when it is easy to make money by simply swimming with the speculative tide, he will gradually lose interest in the quality and the value of the securities he is buying and become more and more engrossed in the fascinating game of beating the market.

But "beating the market" really means beating himself - for he and his fellows constitute the market.

Thus he begins by studying market movements as a "commonsense investment precaution" or a "desirable supplement to his study of security values"; he ends as a stock-market speculator, indistinguishable from all the rest.

A great deal of brain power goes into this field, and undoubtedly, some people can make money by being good stock-market analysts.

But it is absurd to think that the general public can ever make money out of market forecasts.

For who will buy when the general public, at a given signal, rushes to sell out at a profit?

If you, the reader, expect to get rich over the years by following some system or leadership in market forecasting, you must be expecting:

(a) to try to do what countless others are aiming at and
(b) to be able to do it better than your numerous competitors in the market.

There is no basis either in logic or in experience for assuming that any typical or average investor can anticipate market movements more successfully that the general public, of which he is himself a part.


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Timing is of great psychological importance to the speculator because he wants to make his profit in a hurry.

The idea of waiting a year before his stock moves up is repugnant to him.  

But a waiting period, as such, is of no consequence to the investor.

What advantage is there to him in having his money un-invested until he receives some (presumably) trustworthy signal that the time has come to buy?

He enjoys an advantage only if by waiting he succeeds in buying later at a sufficiently lower price to offset his loss of dividend income.

What this means is that timing is of no real value to the investor unless it coincides with pricing - that is, unless it enables him to repurchase his shares at substantially under his previous selling price.


Benjamin Graham
Intelligent Investor