<-- I like the look of this minimalistic hardcover version from 1973; not easy to find online (if it's still available at all).
Well, I finally finished reading this one cover to cover. It took a long time - bursts of progress rather than continuous reading. And while it's nice to be acquainted with one of the foundational texts of value investing... I really didn't get as much out of it as I could have. If I were really trying to find new and better ways to pick stocks, I would have paid more attention and taken notes on some of the key principles (on a quick review, things like price close to tangible asset value, P/E ratio below 15, 20 years of continuous dividends, assets at least double liabilities, payout around two-thirds of earnings...).
I read The Boglehead's Guide to Investing almost a year ago, which makes for a good comparison. The two schools of thought aren't fundamentally opposed. Some of the advice is similar, stressing the importance of diversification, encouraging long-term holding patterns, and drawing a line between investors and traders or speculators. At a higher level, they both in their own ways reinforce the idea that investing doesn't have to take genius or dumb luck.
The main difference comes in the unit of investment. A Graham-ian portfolio will have (comprise?) 10-30 big companies represented; a Boglehead's, maybe just a few mutual funds or ETFs. Of course, the latter is probably the better-diversified portfolio. Graham addresses "investment funds," which he seems to treat as a newer concept - with at least some slight skepticism. Which is of course justified - picking actively-managed funds poses similar challenges to stocks.
Although my investment approach has been much more in the Boglehead camp (and has ridden the market surge nicely), as I write, Graham's approach seems to make more and more sense. His methods probably have higher potential rewards than an index fund. And while it makes more sense for the more serious, involved investor, today's screening tools can do in minutes what probably took him (or his research associates) hours to do manually. I may not be ready to go back to stock picking with my IRA rollover (I feel so much richer now that the money isn't sequestered on some crappy 401(k) website and I see it whenever I log into my B of A account), but something to consider in my second decade of investing.
