Value investing is an investment paradigm that involves buying securities that appear underpriced by some form of fundamental analysis. All forms of value investing derive from the investment philosophy taught by Benjamin Graham and David Dodd at Columbia Business School in 1928 and subsequently developed in their 1934 text Security Analysis.

Benjamin Graham was a British-born American financial analyst, investor and professor. He is widely known as the "father of value investing", and wrote two of the discipline's founding texts: Security Analysis (1934) with David Dodd, and The Intelligent Investor (1949). His investment philosophy stressed independent thinking, emotional detachment, and careful security analysis, emphasizing the importance of distinguishing the price of a stock from the value of its underlying business.