An Assessment on Graham’s Approach for Stock Selection: The Case of Turkey

Abstract

Graham’s approach is widely discussed by individual investors, portfolio managers and academicians in these days. Graham’s approach has very simple formula to evaluate the company’s intrinsic value. The fundamental idea behind the concept is the opinion that companies have an intrinsic value which the markets don’t necessary reflect in their stock prices. Intrinsic value is defined by a company’s asset, dividend, earning and financial ability. To focus on this value can hinder an investor from wrong decision especially, uncertainty times. In this perspective, this study aims to investigate the performance of stock selection criteria of Benjamin Graham on Istanbul Stock Exchange for the period from 2005 to 2014. The results showed that an investors who used Benjamin Graham’s criteria, would have achieved better results than that of the BIST-100 in between 2005 and 2014, excluded crisis period. Further research can be conducted with different criteria in other developing countries.