Kenneth L Fisher Quotes
104 Kenneth L Fisher Quotes
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Two bear markets in a row rarely start with the same causes because most investors are always fighting the last war and are prepared for what took them down last time.
Kenneth L Fisher
Bear markets make people’s brains go haywire like nothing but an extreme bull market.
Kenneth L Fisher
Bear markets are emotionally trying and can make folks seek to reduce the near-term pain. That can mean making a radical change to investing strategy; one that may feel better now, but may not be appropriate long term. Ironically, it can end up hurting folks far worse than the pain they feel now…
Kenneth L Fisher
A huge part of successful investing is just avoiding common errors most folks make repeatedly…
Kenneth L Fisher
All investors make mistakes. Even the very best – repeatedly. I make mistakes – lots of them. Some huge ones! I’ll make more in the future – I promise. If you think you won’t, you’re wrong.
Kenneth L Fisher
Pretty much no long-term investor has been right in their decisions more than about 70 percent of the time.
Kenneth L Fisher
Investing, inherently, requires faith that Capitalism isn’t perfect in the near term but eventually gets darn close in the longer term…
Kenneth L Fisher
Capitalism draws it success from change, creative destruction, renewal, the young upstart wiping out the old guard, then becoming the old guard about to be wiped out.
Kenneth L Fisher
I don’t see much merit in poverty.
Kenneth L Fisher
If you get yourself rich in one of a handful of appropriate ways, you make the world a better place.
Kenneth L Fisher
I’m a roads scholar. Not a Rhodes Scholar who got money to study at Oxford, but the more important kind – that studies the various roads leading to financial success and failure.
Kenneth L Fisher
In life there are roads leading to riches and roads not. There’s nothing wrong with ones that don’t, but if you travel them you’ll go where they take you.
Kenneth L Fisher
Frugality is a virtue but isn’t necessary to becoming super wealthy…
Kenneth L Fisher
Becoming rich usually means doing good and often living an exciting life.
Kenneth L Fisher
[In 2009] The overwhelming bulk of my wealth goes to John Hopkins Medicine – which in my view helps people after my life through medical research.
Kenneth L Fisher
You can create change where you’re passionate.
Kenneth L Fisher
People who create their wealth… end up more happy than the few who get lucky getting wealth in ways that can’t be planned for. The people who made their own wealth earned it and are confident about themselves relative to their money.
Kenneth L Fisher
Entrepreneurs change the world two basic ways: Creating something entirely new – filing a product or service hole – or making existing products better, more efficient.
Kenneth L Fisher
To build to sell, think like a buyer. To build to last, think like an owner.
Kenneth L Fisher
[On founders of businesses.] Founders are quitters first. If you’ve got a job, quit. Find a way to sustain yourself and just do it.
Kenneth L Fisher
The single most important CEO trait is leadership. If you can’t lead, you can’t be CEO.
Kenneth L Fisher
[On his father Phil Fisher] Like most Asperger’s sufferers, my father spent lots of time alone thinking. He was a great thinker – just didn’t feel much. He loved sitting alone thinking – hours on end in solitude! But he was generous with his time with me. He may have been the world’s best bedtime storyteller. Every night he told the most marvelous stories until I fell asleep. Action stories he invented with vivid protagonists – superheroes, natural leaders. At the time I couldn’t see how they applied to me or why he was telling them.
Kenneth L Fisher
I firmly believe if we could make everyone really rich the world would be a far better place.
Kenneth L Fisher
Learn from failures, try again differently, fail, and try again. Your odds keep improving the more you try. And as you improve your odds in life, you become richer naturally.
Kenneth L Fisher
[In 2009 on leadership.] People often ask why I don’t have a private jet. It would demoralize my people if I did. I fly commercial. They love that. When I’m with them I fly coach.
Kenneth L Fisher
The best way to make them believe is to believe yourself.
Kenneth L Fisher
A good land baron is daring, but doesn’t self-delude.
Kenneth L Fisher
Pessimism disbelief is a phrase I use to describe the current social trend all over the world to perceive news as either bad news or if it’s good news that it’s not credible – believable. An example of the pessimism disbelief is the tendency to believe that a) We have to fear a weak economy but we also don’t think that attempts to stimulate the economy will work and if they do work they’ll probably just turn into inflation anyway which would be bad. That’s a perfect example of all news being bad news.
Kenneth L Fisher
[In June 2010] I believe in a world where there’s more upside as you move from pessimism to optimism… [Instead of thinking about ‘Melt Downs’] They should actually be thinking about the possibility of ‘Melt Ups’.
Kenneth L Fisher
[In 2011] Many people think gold is a safe haven. Gold actually is a commodity and as a commodity has a very very heavy fluctuation in price over the long term. I’m neither for nor against gold, but when you think about gold’s long-term return that return has come out 15% of the total months of gold’s existence. The other 85% of the time, gold’s actually been a money loser, not a money maker. Therefore when you believe in gold what you really have to believe in is your ability to time it. And once you understand that, if you don’t think you’re a good timer gold’s not safe. If you think you’re a good timer, maybe gold is safe… Timing is everything with gold… How good a timer are you?
Kenneth L Fisher
[In April 2007] Every bull market leads to a bear market.
Kenneth L Fisher
[On hating annuities in May 2011] What’s not to hate?… It go out and buy a $1,000,000 worth of variable annuities, you just put that salesperson’s kid through a private college. The commission’s that big.
Kenneth L Fisher
If you like the annuities salesperson that much, just give them the money to put their kid through private school and go invest directly in stocks and bonds, because you’re going to end up better off that way. Cause all they’re going to do is invest that money in stocks and bonds and they can’t give you a higher return truly than the stocks and bonds do.
Kenneth L Fisher
[On his father] In 1970, at sixty-three, he still didn’t have a gray hair on his head. That same year, my oldest brother, Arthur, an ecclesiastical historian by training and a very good one, went to work to join him. Two years later, I joined. Father’s vision was that we would work for a few years and then slowly take over his business. That could never happen. It took me only about a year to realize why. Father was such a stickler for detail and so focused and so socially awkward and insecure that he was absolutely incapable of delegating in any way. So, Arthur and I could never really evolve into any meaningful contributors. I was inherently high energy, rebellious, and emotionally pretty brutal to people, and as soon as I realized Father could never delegate, I know I had to distance myself from him for both our sakes. Otherwise, there was no opportunity for me, and either he would hurt me or I would hurt him or both. It took Arthur four more years to leave, and initially he left to join me. But it is tough for an older brother to join his younger brother as a junior partner…
Kenneth L Fisher
[On his father Phil Fisher] He thought his father fell apart because he stopped working, and he concluded that if he stopped working, he, too, would fall apart and die… For the rest of his life, work was life itself… He saw life as like a muscle – if you worked it hard, it kept working for you, but if you let it relax, it would weaken (and in his mind would lead to decay and death).
Kenneth L Fisher
[On his father] Compared to most business successes, he never worked very long hours or all that hard or frantically. Early on, I marveled at how someone could have succeeded as well as he did working as few hours as he did or with as little strenuous effort as he exerted, but it was because of his genius. At times, he was a laser beam and beautiful to behold. You only need a relative few of those times in a career to accomplish a great deal if you don’t screw up too badly at times. He had the one and not the other, and that made it work.
Kenneth L Fisher
[On Phil Fisher] He was always alone… Non-social. Thinking. Reading. Talking on the phone, yes but not oriented toward being with people. A very definite non-people person.
Kenneth L Fisher
[In the early 1970’s one night at ‘The Monterey Conference’ put on by the American Electronics Association] The conference announced a dinner contest. There was a card at each place setting, and each person was to write down what he or she thought the Dow Jones Industrials would do the next day, which is, of course, a silly exercise. The cards were collected. The person who came closest to the Dow’s change for the day would win a min-color TV (which were hot new items then). The winner would be announced at lunch the next day, right after the market closed at one o’clock (Pacific time). Most folks, it turned out, did what I did – wrote down some small number, like down or up 5.57 points. I did that assuming that he market was unlikely to do anything particularly spectacular because most days it doesn’t. Now in those days, the Dow was at about 900, so 5 points was neither huge nor tiny. That night, back at the hotel room, I asked Father [Phil Fisher] what he put down, and he said, ‘Up 30 points,’ which would be more than 3 percent. I asked why. He said he had no idea at all what the market would do; and if you knew him, you knew that he never had a view of what the market would do on a given day. But he said that if he put down a number like I did and won, people would think he was just lucky – that winning at 5.57 meant beating out the guy that put down 5.5 or the other guy at 6.0. It would all be transparently seen as sheer luck. But if he won saying, ‘Up 30 point,’ people would think he knew something and was not just lucky. If he lost, which was probably and he expected to, no one would know what number he had written down, and it would cost him nothing. Sure enough, the next day, the Dow was up 26 points, and father won by 10 points. When it was announced at lunch that Phil Fisher had won and how high his number was, there were discernable ‘Ooh’ and ‘Ahhhh’ sounds all over the few-hundred-person crowd.
Kenneth L Fisher
He was pretty frugal sometimes, and when I was young and we went somewhere on business, I had to share a hotel with him. We did this even after I could afford my own room because he couldn’t handle the notion of me ‘wasting’ the money.
Kenneth L Fisher
What else did my father enjoy? Three big W’s: walking, worrying, and work. He loved them all.
Kenneth L Fisher
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