Benjamin Graham is considered the father of value investing. He is also teacher and mentor to Warren Buffett, widely considered to be the best investor of all time. Little is known that Graham ran Graham-Newman Corporation and achieved stellar returns of 17% annually. Even lesser know is that Graham picked stocks using a checklist. In The Snowball, Alice Schroeder writes: [Warren Buffett] and Walter [Schloss] collected numbers from the Moody’s manuals and filled out hundreds of the simple forms that Graham-Newman used to make decisions. Did Graham practice mechanical investing? Take a look at his checklist from the Graham-Newman Corporation:

1. An earnings-to-price yield at least twice the AAA bond rate
2. P/E ratio less than 40% of the highest P/E ratio the stock had over the past 5 years
3. Dividend yield of at least 2/3 the AAA bond yield
4. Stock price below 2/3 of tangible book value per share
5. Stock price ...

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