The Intelligent Investor - 04

===Chapter 2 ：The Investor and Inflation

Unfortunately, real-estate values are also subject易受...的影响 

to wide fluctuations; serious errors can be made in

location, price paid, etc.; 

There’s another reason investors overlook the importance of inflation:

what psychologists call the “money illusion.” 

-

If you receive a 2% raise in a year when inflation runs at 4%, 

you will almost certainly feel better than you will if you take 

a 2% pay cut during a year when inflation is zero. 

two inflation-fightershave become widely available to investors:

1. Real Estate Investment Trusts

2.Treasury Inflation-Protected Securities  ???

===CHAPTER 3 A Century of Stock-Market History: The Level of Stock Prices in Early 1972

The work of a financial analyst falls somewhere in the middle

between that of a mathematician and of an orator演说家.

You’ve got to be careful if you don’t know where you’re going,

’cause you might not get there.

★The intelligent investor must never forecast the future 

exclusively专门地 by extrapolating /ɪk'stræpəleɪt/ 推算 the past. 

★★★

Graham urges the intelligent investor to ask some simple, skeptical questions：

-Why should the future returns of stocks always be the same as their

past returns? 

-When every investor comes to believe that stocks are guaranteed to 

make money in the long run, won’t the market end up

being wildly overpriced? 

-And once that happens, how can future returns possibly be high?

The profits that companies can earn are finite, the price that 

investors should be willing to pay for stocks must also be finite.

Even though investors all know they’re supposed to buy low and

sell high, in practice they often end up getting it backwards.

-

Graham’s warning in this chapter is simple: “By the rule of opposites,” 

the more enthusiastic investors become about the stock market in the 

long run, the more certain they are to be proved wrong in the short run.

Considering how calamitously wrong the “experts” were the last time 

they agreed on something, why on earth should the intelligent 

investor believe them now?

★The stock market’s performance depends on three factors:

•real growth (the rise of companies’ earnings and dividends)

•inflationary growth (the general rise of prices throughout the

economy)

•speculative growth—or decline (any increase or decrease in the

investing public’s appetite for stocks)

The only thing you can be confident of while forecasting 

future stock returns is that you will probably turn out to be 

wrong. The only indisputable无可争辩的 truth that the past teaches 

us is that the future will always surprise us—always!

-

And the corollary推论 to that law of financial history is that the 

markets will most brutally surprise the very people who are most 

certain that their views about the future are right.

★★Staying humble about your forecasting powers, as Graham did, 

will keep you from risking too much on a

view of the future that may well turn out to be wrong.

So, by all means务必, you should lower your expectations—but take care

not to depress使沮丧 your spirit. For the intelligent investor, hope always

springs跃起 eternal /ɪ'tɜːn(ə)l/ 永恒的

, because it should. In the financial markets, the worse

the future looks, the better it usually turns out to be.