Anyone can get wealthy.

When I was eleven years old, I began investing. I simply drifted off till I was seven, eight, or nine, but regrettably, I didn't start until I was eleven. However, I purchased my first stock when I was eleven years old. From then on, I played with a ton of different things, including charting, timing stocks, and doing all kinds of crazy things. It was a lot of fun, even though it wasn't profitable, and I continued that until I was nineteen. and I devoured every book on investing in public libraries. It was engrossing, but I had no structure; I was just looking for something, hoping that small things on a chart would sometimes tell me something about what a stock was going to do. It was kind of crazy, but since everyone else was doing it, I figured I'd give it a try. Later, in 1949, I read Ben Graham's book, The Intelligent Investor. I had never heard of them before, and there are really only two chapters that are crucial to understanding them.

Nevertheless, those two chapters set my philosophical framework for investing in three ways. The first is that a stock is a part of a business and divide by the number of outstanding shares, but before you do that, you should consider the type of firm you are entering, its competitors' economic qualities, its management, and other factors that pertain to a business rather than just a little ticker symbol. I could mark the boards of Harris up there, you know, and I knew that x was U.S. Steel, t was at  and so on, but I didn't know anything; I didn't know what was behind them. I used to know, when I was eleven or twelve, the ticker symbols of every company virtually on the New York Stock Exchange.

I had to, start examining these tiny names or symbols in the newspaper as businesses and determine what matters when valuing a business. The second thing about the book is that, in chapter eight, Graham discusses his legendary Mr. Market, providing you with a fantastic starting point for how an investor should respond to stock market swings. Nothing has been written about investors more effectively.perspective on stock pricing Most people's responses to stock prices are incorrect. People get excited when their stocks rise, and they get upset when they fall. They believe that the stock market is there to guide them and that Mr. Market is your partner in investing; you know, he's a very accommodating partner; he visits you every day and offers to pay you a certain amount for your stake in the company, or he'll sell you more at the same price—something that no one ever does in a private business, at least not that I know of.Together, we agreed that I wanted you to come in every day and offer me your half interest in the station. I would then be able to either buy your half or sell you mine at the same price. If you didn't come in every day, you would be at a severe disadvantage, and if you were Mr. Market in the market, you would be at a particularly bad disadvantage because Mr. Market or a market friend obligingly gives you those figures every day at different times—at the beginning of the day and the end of the day—but he's naming a price at which you'll either buy yourself the gorgeous The thing about him is that he is a manic, depressive alcoholic who is as unsound as they come. He wanders around all day looking at crazy things, and, you know, he's going to name all kinds of crazy prices, and you don't have to pay any attention to them unless it's in your best interest to do so. If that's once a year, or once every five years, it's one stock out of three thousand; all you have to do is sit there; you owe this man no moral obligations to anything. He is naming these numbers without your request, but he's doing it nonetheless.The interesting thing about stocks, when you think about it, is that if you look at the high and low of all these American companies for the past year, you'll see case after case where the high is twice below now, and that's for sound American businesses running along paying people selling goods and so on. If you go outside and look at the farmland ten miles from here, you'll see even more examples of this.There is no way in the world that the value of the farmland here will range from x to 2x; it doesn't even possibly go from x to 110 of x or vice versa. If you look at an apartment building nearby and see the figures on basically apartment buildings like that over a year, it won't move 10 in a given year, but here are the best American businesses, and people just name these numbers that go all over the place, and you don't have to play except when you want to; that's what Graham says is important.