One of the most influential books the young Warren Buffett read was Benjamin Graham’s The Intelligent Investor. Buffett has called it “By far the best book on investing ever written.”
In chapter 8 of the book, Graham famously anthropomorphizes the actions of the stock market into the erratic “Mr. Market.” Graham wrote that sometimes the prices for stocks that Mr. Market quotes are reasonable, but sometimes “Mr. Market lets his enthusiasm or his fears run away with him, and the value he proposes seems to you a little short of silly.”
“It’s a marvelous game,” Warren Buffett said at the 2012 Berkshire Hathaway Annual Meeting. “The rules are stacked in your favor, if you don’t turn those rules upside down and start behaving like the drunken psychotic instead of the guy that’s there to take advantage of it.”
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© 2022 David Mazor
Disclosure: David Mazor is a freelance writer focusing on Berkshire Hathaway. The author is long in Berkshire Hathaway, and this article is not a recommendation on whether to buy or sell the stock. The information contained in this article should not be construed as personalized or individualized investment advice. Past performance is no guarantee of future results.