Benjamin Graham Biography and Works.

Benjamin Graham was born on May 8, 1894, in London to Jewish parents. He moved to New York City with his family when he was one year old. After the death of his father and experiencing poverty, he became a good student, graduating from Columbia University, as salutatorian of his class, at the age of 20. He received an invitation for employment as an instructor in English, Mathematics, and Philosophy, but took a job on Wall Street eventually starting the ‘Graham-Newman Partnership’.

Graham is considered the first proponent of value investing, an investment approach he began teaching at the Columbia Business School in 1928 and subsequently refined with David Dodd through various editions of their famous book, Security Analysis. Graham’s disciples include Warren Buffett, William J. Ruane, Irving Kahn, Walter J. Schloss and others. Buffett, who credits Graham as grounding him with a sound intellectual investment framework, described him as the second most influential person in his life after his own father. In fact, Graham had such an overwhelming influence on his students that two of them, Buffett and Kahn, named their sons, Howard Graham Buffett and Thomas Graham Kahn, after him.

According to The Snowball (a biography of Warren Buffett), Graham had an affair with his deceased son’s girlfriend (Marie Louise Amingues) and used to travel to France frequently to visit her. He later separated from his wife, Estey in New York, after she refused his novel idea of living in New York for six months and France for six months. Marie Louise was content to live with Ben without marriage. Ben never officially divorced Estey.

Trivia

He is regarded by many as the “Father of Value Investing.”

Quote

“Wall Street people learn nothing and forget everything.”