I’m usually not a fan of people whose argument for reading a book or watching a movie resonates with something along the lines of “because it is a classic.” However, I’m going to be a hypocrite and say that it’s the only reason to read this book for someone who is at least semi-familiar with value investing.
Benjamin Graham last edited this book in the early 1970s making a lot of the information in the text outdated. I strongly believe that the historical information discussed is extremely valuable. History always repeats itself, so knowing how the market behaved in the past provides great insight and similarities into how the market behaves now, and how it will behave in the future. People tend to get caught up in the ongoing bull / bear market, making it seem as if there had never been one like it before. Therefore, the insight Graham provides from his own viewpoint is invaluable. While it is very educational, Graham is not a very succinct writer, which is a quality I would have hoped he possess when writing a book that should also act as a reference. In addition, several of the topics (the names of which escape me now) discussed are either no longer relevant today or not relevant to 90% of the people reading this book: the general intelligent investor. Together, combining long-winded sentences with irrelevant topics, it was definitely a tough read.
Unless this is the first book you’re reading as you do get into risk analysis, it won’t teach you any new techniques or concepts that you haven’t heard before. There are plenty of other resources (books, videos, etc…) I could recommend which could transcend the same knowledge in a much more concise matter.
I would say that this book is not worth reading unless you read the revised version, edited by Jason Zweig around 2003, which compares the concepts and situations outlaid by Graham in a post dot-com bubble era. Zweig does an outstanding job and modernizing (for the time) Graham’s words, finding very interesting analogies between companies that existed in the 1960s and around 2000, while remaining very clear and succinct. I would argue that he is a much better write than Graham, but his job was easier as a commentator rather than being the one responsible for writing the meat of the text.
The main thing you will get out of this book is interesting historical context, the credibility of someone who can say they read this book, and just the satisfaction that you learned about value investing from Buffet’s coach, the man who essentially founded this science.