Warren Buffett once gave a speech at Columbia Business School explaining how Graham’s record of creating exceptional investors (such as Buffett himself) is unquestionable, and how Graham’s principles are everlasting. The speech is now called as “The Superinvestors of Graham-and-Doddsville”.

Here’s what Buffett said about one such “superinvestor”:
“He’s not looking at quarterly earnings projections, he’s not looking at next year’s earnings, he’s not thinking about what day of the week it is, he doesn’t care what investment research from any place says, he’s not interested in price momentum, volume, or anything. He’s simply asking: What is the business worth?”

Buffett describes Graham’s book – The Intelligent Investor – as “by far the best book about investing ever written” (in its preface).

Graham’s first recommended strategy – for casual investors – was to invest in Index stocks.
For more serious investors, Graham recommended three different categories of stocks – Defensive, Enterprising and NCAV – and 17 qualitative and quantitative rules for identifying them.
For advanced investors, Graham described various special situations or “workouts”.

The first requires almost no analysis, and is easily accomplished today with a good S&P500 Index fund.
The last requires more than the average level of ability and experience. Such stocks are also not amenable to impartial algorithmic analysis, and require a case-specific approach.

But Defensive, Enterprising and NCAV stocks can be reliably detected by today’s data-mining software, and offer a great avenue for accurate automated analysis and profitable investment.