How One Man Created a Profession—and Entirely Transformed the World of Investing. A collection of rare writings by and interviews with one of financial history’s most brilliant visionaries, Benjamin Graham, Building a Profession presents Graham’s evolution of ideas on security analysis spanning five decades.

When Benjamin Graham began working on Wall Street in 1914, the center of American finance resembled a lawless frontier. The concept of regulatory laws was in its infancy, the SEC wouldn’t see the light of day for 20 years, and many firms hid assets and earnings from nosy outsiders.

And security analysts didn’t exist as we know them. They were called “diagnosticians,” and they didn’t do much analyzing. These investors prided themselves on going with the “feel” of the market, and most of them rarely looked at a financial statement.

Appalled by the lack of research and quantification, Benjamin Graham set out to change all this—and ended up creating the discipline of modern security analysis.

A collection of rare writings by and interviews with one of financial history’s most brilliant visionaries, Benjamin Graham, Building a Profession presents Graham’s evolution of ideas on security analysis spanning five decades. Articles include:

• “Should Security Analysts Have a Professional Rating? The Affirmative Case”
  Financial Analysts Journal (1945)
• “Toward a Science of Security Analysis”
  Financial Analysts Journal (1952)
• “Inflated Treasuries and Deflated Stockholders: Are Corporations Milking Their Owners?”
  Forbes (1932)
• “The Future of Financial Analysis”
  Financial Analysts Journal (1963)
• “Controlling versus Outside Stockholders”
  Virginia Law Weekly (1953)

These pages reveal the revolutionary ideas of a man who didn’t so much find his calling as he created it from scratch—and opened the door for entire generations of investors.

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