Benjamin Graham, the teacher and mentor of Warren Buffett, wrote two seminal tomes on value investing called Security Analysis in 1934 and The Intelligent Investor in 1949. I was reading The Intelligent Investor at a time when the bear market following the dot com bubble was in full swing and I remember thinking to myself that some of what Mr. Graham mentions in his book may no longer hold true as even at that point  it was almost impossible to find stocks that met his criteria such as a Price/Book ratio of less than 1.5, a P/E < 15, uninterrupted dividends for last 20 years and an adequate margin of safety. If you like bargain hunting for things, you are probably aware that there is an intrinsic value to things and unless the seller is in distress it is very difficult to ...

The tremors from the failure of Lehman Brothers (LEH) are still being felt across the globe in what I feel might be last act in the financial meltdown we have experienced this year. As I read the announcement of Lehman's decision to declare bankruptcy on Sunday night, I watched the Indian stock market crash with the BSE Sensex dropping more than 800 points to 13,150 before recovering to close at 13,531, a loss of 470 points or 3.35%. Much of Europe shared a similar fate with London's FTSE 100 dropping 3.92%. In contrast the 250 to 300 point loss that the Dow posted through most of the trading session on Monday felt like a muted response until things fell apart in the last hour of trading and the Dow Jones Industrial Average closed the day with a loss of ...