Benjamin Graham and David Dodd

Benjamin Graham and David Dodd were American economists whose Security Analysis, first published in 1934, established the intellectual foundations of value investing and became the essential textbook for fundamental equity analysis.

Benjamin Graham — investor, economist, and mentor to Warren Buffett — co-wrote Security Analysis with Columbia University colleague David Dodd in 1934, in the immediate aftermath of the 1929 crash and the Depression. The book argued that investment should be a disciplined, analytical process: the purchase of securities whose intrinsic value, calculated from financial statements, exceeds their current market price by a sufficient margin of safety. This framework — value investing — became the foundation of one of the most influential schools of investment thought in financial history.

Security Analysis is a textbook rather than a narrative: dense with accounting examples, balance sheet analysis, and methodological argument. It has been revised through six editions, each updating the examples while preserving the core analytical framework. Its influence is measured not by its popular readership but by its downstream effects: Warren Buffett credits it as the book that most shaped his investment philosophy, and the entire discipline of fundamental equity analysis draws on its methods.

Graham’s later work, The Intelligent Investor (1949), is the more accessible and widely read book — written for the general investor rather than the financial professional. Security Analysis remains essential for anyone who wants to understand where contemporary investment analysis came from and why its foundational principles have proven so durable. David Dodd taught at Columbia Business School for over fifty years; Graham managed money, taught, and wrote until his death in 1976.