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The Interpretation of Financial Statements book cover
The Interpretation of Financial Statements
1955
First Published
4.04
Average Rating
144
Number of Pages

"All investors, from beginners to old hands, should gain from the use of this guide, as I have." From the Introduction by Michael F. Price, president, Franklin Mutual Advisors, Inc. Benjamin Graham has been called the most important investment thinker of the twentieth century. As a master investor, pioneering stock analyst, and mentor to investment superstars, he has no peer. The volume you hold in your hands is Graham's timeless guide to interpreting and understanding financial statements. It has long been out of print, but now joins Graham's other masterpieces, The Intelligent Investor and Security Analysis, as the three priceless keys to understanding Graham and value investing. The advice he offers in this book is as useful and prescient today as it was sixty years ago. As he writes in the preface, "if you have precise information as to a company's present financial position and its past earnings record, you are better equipped to gauge its future possibilities. And this is the essential function and value of security analysis." Written just three years after his landmark Security Analysis, The Interpretation of Financial Statements gets to the heart of the master's ideas on value investing in astonishingly few pages. Readers will learn to analyze a company's balance sheets and income statements and arrive at a true understanding of its financial position and earnings record. Graham provides simple tests any reader can apply to determine the financial health and well-being of any company. This volume is an exact text replica of the first edition of The Interpretation of Financial Statements, published by Harper & Brothers in 1937. Graham's original language has been restored, and readers can be assured that every idea and technique presented here appears exactly as Graham intended. Highly practical and accessible, it is an essential guide for all business people—and makes the perfect companion volume to Graham's investment masterpiece The Intelligent Investor.

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Author

Benjamin Graham
Benjamin Graham
Author · 15 books
Benjamin Graham (May 8, 1894 – September 21, 1976) was an American economist and professional investor. Graham is considered the first proponent of value investing, an investment approach he began teaching at Columbia Business School in 1928 and subsequently refined with David Dodd through various editions of their famous book Security Analysis. Disciples of value investing include Jean-Marie Eveillard, Warren Buffett, William J. Ruane, Irving Kahn, Hani M. Anklis, and Walter J. Schloss. 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.
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