THE HIGHER THEY GO, THE HARDER THEY FALL
As the enduring antidote to any bull-market, 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?
Graham’s answers, as always, are rooted in logic and common sense. The value of any investment is, and always must be, a function of the price you pay for it. By the late 1990s, inflation was withering away, corporate profits appeared to be booming, and most of the world was at peace. But that did not mean—nor could it ever mean— that stocks were worth buying at any price. Since the profits that com- panies can earn are finite, the price that investors should be willing to pay for stocks must also be finite.
Think of it this way: Michael Jordan may well have been the great- est basketball player of all time, and he pulled fans into Chicago Sta- dium like a giant electromagnet. The Chicago Bulls got a bargain by paying Jordan up to $34 million a year to bounce a big leather ball around a wooden floor. But that does not mean the Bulls would have been justified paying him $340 million, or $3.4 billion, or $34 billion, per season.