Investing isn’t about mastering the markets; it’s about mastering yourself.

That was the central tenet of Benjamin Graham’s “The Intelligent Investor”—and, in large part, why Warren Buffett has called it “the best book about investing ever written.”

Graham’s emphasis on self-control is also why, although first published in 1949, the book is still relevant today. In fact, it’s more relevant than ever.

Graham wasn’t only one of the best investors of all time; he may have been the wisest. His intellectual brilliance, six decades of investing and study of history gave him a profound understanding of human nature.

As he wrote: “The investor’s chief problem—and even his worst enemy—is likely to be himself.”

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This article was originally published in The Wall Street Journal.

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The catchier an investment’s name, the more you should ask: What’s the catch?

Just consider YES. Offered to wealthy advisory clients of UBS Group AG, YES stands for Yield Enhancement Strategy. Who doesn’t love getting to yes? And who wouldn’t want to enhance yield?

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The market wisdom that sounds the easiest can be the hardest to follow.

Take “buy low, sell high.”

Buying low and selling high is logically sound but emotionally harrowing. That’s because it requires buying something that feels risky because it just went down, while selling something that feels safer because it has just gone up. That counterintuitive step is what investment professionals call rebalancing: moving against the market’s recent direction to adjust your mix of stocks, bonds and other assets back to predetermined targets.…

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Mutual-fund votes are usually pro-forma rituals in which investors do whatever the fund manager asks. An upcoming one at Putnam Investments should have investors asking what the manager has been doing.

On Apr. 15, shareholders in Putnam Capital Spectrum Fund were scheduled to decide on a proposal to merge the mutual fund out of existence after years of dismal performance. The vote, stymied by the coronavirus shutdown, will likely be rescheduled for later this spring.

Putnam launched Capital Spectrum (and a sibling fund, Equity Spectrum) in 2009 with unusual objectives and fees.…

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If the coronavirus lockdown has frozen your investing plans, you’re in good company. Charlie Munger is watching and waiting, too.

Mr. Munger, vice chairman of Berkshire Hathaway Inc. and Warren Buffett’s longtime business partner, likes to say that one of the keys to great investing results is “sitting on your ass.” That means doing nothing the vast majority of the time, but buying with “aggression” when bargains abound.

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Floating-rate funds have taken on water.

These funds are meant to protect against rising interest rates while paying high income and preserving capital. They sank in the first quarter as coronavirus locked down the economy and the Federal Reserve snuffed out the notion interest rates will rise anytime soon.

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Investors can survive a bear market the same way hikers survive an encounter with a bear: Remain calm and don’t make sudden moves.

With some modifications, the National Park Service’s advisory on how to behave if you come across a bear in the wild is a surprisingly useful guide for investors as well.

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How could a microscopic organism destroy nearly $15 trillion in global stock-market wealth in five weeks?

Until recently, many investors believed central banks and other policy makers had repealed the business cycle and that making money in the stock market was something you could take for granted — in much the same way that science and technology seemed to have beaten back diseases that had been the scourge of humanity for millennia.

Maybe investors a century ago and more had a wiser view. They believed the world was governed by unseen, omnipresent powers that could be appeased but never controlled — and that financial panics were a form of divine retribution for the sinful excesses of prosperity.

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Investing, once a necessity, has become a luxury.

“In the 1930s we had the Great Depression, in 2008 we had the start of the Great Recession and now we are facing the Great Cessation,” says John Cammack, a private investor and former executive at T. Rowe Price Group Inc. in Baltimore. The global economic lockdown to combat the spread of coronavirus, he says, is “stopping the many small actions that make up Adma Smith’s marketplace dead in their tracks.”

Yet Twitter and the internet are full of urgings to invest now, on the belief that the economy will eventually recover and stocks will bounce back — as they always have in the long run, at least in the U.S.…

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It’s springtime in the year 2030. You’re looking back at the crash of 2020, the devastation it dealt your portfolio and how you behaved as an investor.

What will you say?

If human nature is any guide — and, let’s face it, it is — your accounts of what happened will begin with such words and phrases as “Clearly…” or “It was obvious to me that…” or “Everybody knew that…”

In the future, your memory of the crash of 2020 won’t be a recollection. It will be a reconstruction, built partly from what is happening now and largely from what you learn later about what hasn’t happened yet.

I’m describing hindsight bias — the belief, after something happens, that we foresaw that it would occur.…

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