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* For today’s investor, the ideal strategy for pursuing this “formula” is rebalancing, which we discuss on pp. 104–105.

* Most companies today provide “an engraved stock certificate” only upon special request. Stocks exist, for the most part, in purely electronic form (much as your bank account contains computerized credits and debits, not actual currency) and thus have become even easier to trade than they were in Graham’s day.

† Net asset value, book value, balance-sheet value, and tangible-asset value are all synonyms for net worth, or the total value of a company’s physical and financial assets minus all its liabilities. It can be calculated using the balance sheets in a company’s annual and quarterly reports; from total shareholders’ equity, subtract all “soft” assets such as goodwill, trademarks, and other intangibles. Divide by the fully diluted number of shares outstanding to arrive at book value per share.

* Graham’s use of the word “paradox” is probably an allusion to a classic article by David Durand, “Growth Stocks and the Petersburg Paradox,” The Journal of Finance, vol. XII, no. 3, September, 1957, pp. 348–363, which compares investing in high-priced growth stocks to betting on a series of coin flips in which the payoff escalates with each flip of the coin. Durand points out that if a growth stock could continue to grow at a high rate for an indefinite period of time, an investor should (in theory) be willing to pay an infinite price for its shares. Why, then, has no stock ever sold for a price of infinity dollars per share? Because the higher the assumed future growth rate, and the longer the time period over which it is expected, the wider the margin for error grows, and the higher the cost of even a tiny miscalculation becomes. Graham discusses this problem further in Appendix 4(p. 570).

* The more recent history of A & P is no different. At year-end 1999, its share price was $27.875; at year-end 2000, $7.00; a year later, $23.78; at year-end 2002, $8.06. Although some accounting irregularities later came to light at A & P, it defies all logic to believe that the value of a relatively stable business like groceries could fall by three-fourths in one year, triple the next year, then drop by two-thirds the year after that.

* “Only to the extent that it suits his book” means “only to the extent that the price is favorable enough to justify selling the stock.” In traditional brokerage lingo, the “book” is an investor’s ledger of holdings and trades.

† This may well be the single most important paragraph in Graham’s entire book. In these 113 words Graham sums up his lifetime of experience. You cannot read these words too often; they are like Kryptonite for bear markets. If you keep them close at hand and let them guide you throughout your investing life, you will survive whatever the markets throw at you.

* Graham has much more to say on what is now known as “corporate governance.” See the commentary on Chapter 19.

* By what Graham called “the rule of opposites,” in 2002 the yields on long-term U.S. Treasury bonds hit their lowest levels since 1963. Since bond yields move inversely to prices, those low yields meant that prices had risen—making investors most eager to buy just as bonds were at their most expensive and as their future returns were almost guaranteed to be low. This provides another proof of Graham’s lesson that the intelligent investor must refuse to make decisions based on market fluctuations.

* An updated analysis for today’s readers, explaining recent yields and the wider variety of bonds and bond funds available today, can be found in the commentary on Chapter 4.

* As mentioned in the commentary on Chapters 2 and 4, Treasury Inflation-Protected Securities, or TIPS, are a new and improved version of what Graham is suggesting here.

1 See Graham’s text, pp. 204–205.

2 As Graham noted in a classic series of articles in 1932, the Great Depression caused the shares of dozens of companies to drop below the value of their cash and other liquid assets, making them “worth more