Happy Thanksgiving!
If the future is unknowable—and it is—then what is an investor to do?
Predict harder?
Model with more decimals?
Channel your inner clairvoyant?
No.
You buy a Margin of Safety.
You pay the price of uncertainty upfront, not at the crash site.
Ben Graham’s enduring genius is simple:
Margin of Safety exists to make precise forecasting unnecessary.
It is humility converted into portfolio construction.
Because the greatest danger in markets is not ignorance.
It’s the things we’re certain about that are dead wrong.
Mark Twain captured it beautifully:
“It’s what you know for sure that just ain’t so.”
Margin of Safety also means keeping flexibility—liquidity you didn’t deploy, leverage you didn’t take, options you preserved for when (not if) reality surprises you.
Financial Takeaway:
Survival requires humility.
Protection > Prediction.
Margin of Safety is not a constraint; it is the admission price for staying in the game long enough for your ideas to matter.
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