The market is a voting machine in the short run and a weighing machine in the long run
Under review No measurable rule is attached: no timeframe, threshold, or settlement source, so JMM assigns no truth verdict. The long-run half of the claim has substantial supporting evidence, and the short-run half is routinely demonstrated by market behavior.
Show 4 supporting points
- The claim contains no testable boundary: "short run" and "long run" are undefined, and no outcome would count as a miss.
- Long-run support: since the letter was written, US corporate earnings growth and stock price growth have tracked each other over multi-decade windows, which is the weighing outcome the quote predicts.
- Short-run support: prices deviate widely from fundamentals for years at a time, as the 2000 dot-com unwind, the 2020-2021 meme stock episode, and 2022 rate shock each showed.
- The metaphor resists falsification by design, which is exactly why the audit leaves the verdict open while reporting the evidence.
As Ben said: "In the short run, the market is a voting machine but in the long run it is a weighing machine."
Buffett's line, in the 1987 Berkshire Hathaway chairman's letter, credits Benjamin Graham. He returned to it in the 1993 letter and again in the 2023 letter, published February 24, 2024. It is a claim about how prices relate to business fundamentals over time, not a dated market forecast.
What happened, dated
Every entry carries the date and the record behind it. Sources are indexed against the register below.
-
Graham publishes Security Analysis
The voting and weighing contrast first appears in Graham's work on how markets price securities over time. Source 3
-
Buffett quotes the line
The 1987 letter uses the full sentence, attributing it to Ben Graham, in a discussion of how owners should judge market prices. Source 1
-
1993 letter repeats it
The letter for 1993, signed March 1, 1994, returns to the line with Coca-Cola as the worked example of a business whose value the market eventually weighed correctly. Source 2
-
Dot-com unwind
From 2000 to 2002, high-multiple tech stocks fall roughly 80 percent from peak, an episode the short-run voting machine produced and the long-run weights corrected. Source 4
-
Meme stock volatility
GameStop and peers swing thousands of percent in weeks on order flow, a textbook short-run voting episode with no earnings change behind it. Source 4
-
2023 letter repeats the line
The letter published February 24, 2024 uses it against mark-to-market accounting: "As Ben Graham taught me, 'In the short run the market acts as a voting machine; in the long run it becomes a weighing machine.'" Source 5
What the evidence shows
A metaphor with a testable core
Strip the poetry and the claim becomes two statements: prices can detach from value for a long time, and value eventually wins. The first is easy to document and the second is supported by century-long data on earnings and prices moving together. What the quote never supplies is the unit of "eventually", which keeps it out of the scored-claim bucket.
The short run is genuinely chaotic
The meme stock episode of 2021 is the cleanest recent exhibit. Trading volume, not earnings, moved prices. The weighing machine had nothing to weigh because the votes were pure opinion. Investors who acted on the votes, like the late buyers of 2021 crypto and SPAC paper, learned the second half of the sentence the expensive way.
Why JMM leaves this verdict open
A claim that cannot fail is not a claim JMM can grade. The honest output is the evidence set itself: the quote, the episodes that illustrate it, and the long-run series that support it, with no score attached. The same standard keeps open verdicts from drifting into endorsements.
Every receipt, with retrieval dates
JMM attaches a statement only when the contemporaneous primary record and an exact locator exist. Retrieved dates are when JMM last verified each link.
Evidence strength: Quoted from the primary record. Qualified: no official or statistical series is attached, so the verdict rests on the documentary record alone.
Section "Marketable Securities - Permanent Holdings", paragraph beginning "Following Ben's teachings": "As Ben said: 'In the short run, the market is a voting machine but in the long run it is a weighing machine.'"
Coca-Cola valuation discussion, in a longer form than the 1987 letter: "In the short-run, the market is a voting machine - reflecting a voter-registration test that requires only money, not intelligence or emotional stability - but in the long-run, the market is a weighing machine."
Market versus intrinsic value chapters
Quotes of Buffett on short-run voting and long-run weighing
Paragraph immediately preceding the "What We Do" heading: "As Ben Graham taught me, 'In the short run the market acts as a voting machine; in the long run it becomes a weighing machine.'"