This story begins with Benjamin Graham riding high. His arbitrage success with Guggenheim Exploration piqued the interest of Algernon Tassin, Ben’s former English professor at Columbia College. Tassin, a frugal bachelor, had invested his savings in what Ben calls “a...
Imagine Benjamin Graham at that exhilarating moment where we last left him—the moment when a rival firm offered him a dream job. Had he earned his degree at Columbia in three years, working eight-hour evening shifts yet graduating second in his class, only to wind up...
I’m not exaggerating when I tell you that Ben Graham witnessed worldwide panic in his first summer on Wall Street. My twenty-year-old grandfather was no seasoned investor. In July 1914, he must have noted with alarm that Britain was suffering a bank panic due to an...
Benjamin Graham met my grandmother Hazel Mazur when they were both driven teenagers. Ben attended Columbia College on scholarship, excelling at his rigorous course load while working more than full-time, on track to graduate second in his class. Hazel, still in high...
Long before protests erupted on the Columbia College campus, pictured above in 1910, the teenaged Benjamin Graham attended Columbia on scholarship and took his first investment risk. Most college students don’t think about investing—they have no cash to spare. That...
How did a nerdy math major like Benjamin Graham meet girls? My grandfather was a nineteen-year-old scholarship student at Columbia when he met a girl named Alda Miller. In the 1910s, Columbia was a men’s college. Barnard educated women at a separate location. Ben’s...
