Joe Carlen on "The Test of Time: Ben Graham in 2012"

It was 1914, nearly 100 years ago, when a 20-year-old Benjamin Graham began working on Wall Street. Within a few years, his views on the market were already being circulated in the financial press of that era. By 1932/1933, wizened by his experiences during the Roaring Twenties and The Great Depression, his views had crystallized into a comprehensive system of security selection that he (with the help of David Dodd) codified in the 1934 classic, Security Analysis. In 2012, 78 years since its initial publication, we have several decades of stock market history with which to evaluate the soundness of Graham’s view of market behavior and the price/value dichotomy.