Ben Graham And The Financialization Of Value Investing

The Financialization Of Value Investing by Wendl Financial

When the New York Stock Exchange first set up shop, stocks traded in minimum increments of 1/8 = $0.125 dollars. This system was probably a holdover from the Spanish trading system, whose largest gold coin was valued at eight escudos. If academics in finance would break apart a universe of stocks into eight different groups and rank their performance based on some rigorous filtering criterion, it would tie in nicely with our New York Stock Exchange tradition of shares changing hands in 1/8 increments. Unfortunately, these competitive publish-or-perish types seem to prefer decile categories over pieces of eight. Any last remnants of Wall Street’s Spanish...