Forbes Columnist, Bestselling Author, Fisher Investments CEO
Ken Fisher is a self-made billionaire and ranks among the world’s wealthiest individuals.
He is perhaps best known for his Forbes "Portfolio Strategy" column, where a 25-year tenure of high profile market calls makes him the fourth longest-running columnist in the magazine’s history. Since 2000, his Forbes market forecasts have been among the most accurate as measured by third-party CXO Advisory Group,* the research firm whose "Guru Grades" rates the accuracy of publicly available expert forecasts on the stock market. He has written six books, including the 2008 New York Times bestseller The Ten Roads to Riches, and the 2006 New York Times bestseller The Only Three Questions That Count. In 1984, his Super Stocks was that year's bestselling stock market book. Others include 1987's The Wall Street Waltz and 1993's 100 Minds That Make the Market, both re-released by John Wiley & Sons in 2007. His sixth book, How to Smell a Rat was released by Wiley in August 2009 and also a New York Times bestseller. In addition to English, Ken's books have been translated into Chinese, German, Indonesian, Japanese, Korean, Portuguese, Romanian, and Thai, reaching of 2/3 of global GDP.**
Ken Fisher has been published, interviewed and/or been written about in numerous major American, British, and German finance and business periodicals. He writes a weekly column for Handelsblatt, Germany's leading daily. His early 1970s theoretical work pioneered a tool known as the Price-to-Sales ratio, now a core part of financial curriculum. A prize-winning researcher, Ken's credits span a multitude of professional and scholarly journals-in both traditional and behavioral finance.
Ken Fisher is also the founder, chairman, and CEO of Fisher Investments, a multi-billion money management firm serving large corporate and public pension plans, as well as endowments, foundations, and affluent individuals across the US, UK and Canada. Fisher Investments is also a joint venture partner of Gruener Fisher Investments GmbH, which serves investors in Germany.
Ken Fisher's hobbies include studying the history of Kings Mountain, California, 19th century redwood lumbering and anything about redwoods. He resides in Woodside, California, with his wife Sherrilyn. They have three adult sons.
Author, Investing Guru, Fisher & Co. Founder
Born in San Francisco in 1907, Philip Fisher was one of the first investment "philosophers" to focus almost exclusively on qualitative and growth factors. He is widely regarded as one of the early seminal thinkers in the evolution of growth stock investing.
Philip Fisher's career began in 1928, when he dropped out of the newly created Stanford Graduate Investment program to take a job as a securities analyst for the Anglo-London bank in San Francisco. Four years later, he founded Fisher & Co., the investment advisory firm he managed until retiring in 1999 at the age of 91.
Philip Fisher is the author of three books and a Financial Analysts Federation (now the CFA Institute) monograph, and the subject of many articles. His investment principles have been studied and used by countless contemporary finance professionals. He was the first to contribute an analytical framework within which to judge a growth stock and contemplate its potential in growth instead of just price trends and absolute value. He was also a seminal proponent of what are now called concentrated portfolios. His principles espoused identifying long-term growth stocks and their emerging value through the analysis of quality as opposed to choosing short-term trades for initial profit.
At a time when many investment professionals sought profits by betting on business cycles, Philip Fisher favored holding stocks of firms that were well-positioned for long-term growth. This positioning could best be determined by examining factors that are difficult to measure through ratios and other mathematical formulations - the quality of management, the potential for future long-term sales growth, and the firm's competitive advantage.
Philip Fisher outlined his philosophy for the average investor in his book Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits, published in 1958, which became the first investment book to make the New York Times best seller list. He later expanded upon his work in Conservative Investors Sleep Well and Paths to Wealth through Common Stocks, and went on to write Developing an Investment Philosophy. All his writings, with the exception of Paths to Wealth, have been republished in Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits and Other Writings by Philip A. Fisher, which is listed under the John Wiley & Sons Publishers Investment Classics publications.
Philip Fisher passed away in San Mateo, CA in March 2004 at the age of 96.