Philip Fisher Quotes

100 Philip Fisher Quotes (Phil Fisher Quotes, Philip A Fisher Quotes)

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The successful investor is usually an individual who is inherently interested in business problems.
Philip Fisher

Doing what everyone else is doing at the moment, and therefore what you have an almost irresistible urge to do, if often the wrong thing to do at all.
Philip Fisher

Practical investors usually learn their problem is finding enough outstanding investments, rather than choosing among too many.
Philip Fisher

Usually a very long list of securities is not a sign of the brilliant investor, but of one who is unsure of himself.
Philip Fisher

There are fads and styles in the stock market just as there are in women’s clothes.
Philip Fisher

Conservative investors sleep well.
Philip Fisher

Constant leadership in engineering, not patents is the fundamental source of protection.
Philip Fisher

Never promote someone who hasn’t made some bad mistakes, because if you do, you are promoting someone who has never done anything.
Philip Fisher

If the job has been correctly done when a common stock is purchased, the time to sell it is – almost never.
Philip Fisher

Investors have been so oversold on diversification that fear of having too many eggs in one basket has caused them to put far too little into companies they thoroughly know and far too much in others which they know nothing about.
Philip Fisher



People operating in such a mental climate [negative war scare] are inclined to overlook some even more fundamental economic influences. The results are always the same.
Philip Fisher

The wise investor can profit if he can think independently of the crowd and reach the rich answer when the majority of financial opinion is leaning the other way.
Philip Fisher

This matter of training oneself not to go with the crowd but to be able to zig when the crowd zags, in my opinion, is one of the most important fundamentals of investment success.
Philip Fisher

If you can’t do a thing better than others are doing it, don’t do it at all.
Philip Fisher

The need for patience if big profits are to be made from investment.
Philip Fisher

Nothing is worth doing unless it is worth doing right.
Philip Fisher

There is a complicating factor that makes the handling of investment mistakes more difficult. This is the ego in each of us.
Philip Fisher

None of us likes to admit to himself that he has been wrong.
Philip Fisher

Go to five companies in an industry, ask each of them intelligent questions about the points of strength and weakness of the other four, and nine times out of ten a surprisingly detailed and accurate picture of all five will emerge.
Philip Fisher

Most people, particularly if they feel sure there is no danger of their being quoted, like to talk about the field of work in which they are engaged and will talk rather freely about their competitors.
Philip Fisher



Scuttlebutt.
Philip Fisher

I believe that the greatest long-range investment profits are never obtained by investing in marginal companies.
Philip Fisher

Investors… had best stay away from low profit-margin or marginal companies.
Philip Fisher

It is not the profit margins of the past but those of the future that are basically important to the investor.
Philip Fisher

When profit margins of a whole industry rise because of repeated price increases, the indication is not a good one for the long-range investor.
Philip Fisher

Those organizations where the top brass personally interfere with and try to handle routine day-to-day operating matters seldom turn out to be the most attractive type of investments.
Philip Fisher

It is the nature of business that in even the best-run companies unexpected difficulties, profit squeezes, and unfavorable shifts in demand for their products will at times occur.
Philip Fisher

If the right stocks are bought and held long enough they will always produce some profit. However to produce close to the maximum profit… some consideration must be given to timing.
Philip Fisher

Forecasting is like trying to turn lead into gold.
Philip Fisher

If an investor had bought at the absolute lows, it would have been more a matter of luck than anything else.
Philip Fisher



If we have made a mistake in buying a stock but can sell the stock at a small profit, we have somehow lost any sense of having been foolish. On the other hand if we sell at a small loss we are quite unhappy about the whole matter.
Philip Fisher

More money has probably been lost by investors holding a stock they really did not want until they could ‘at least come out even’ than from any other single reason. If to these actual losses are added the profits that might have been made through the proper reinvestment of these funds if such reinvestment had been made when the mistake was first realized, the cost of self-indulgence becomes truly tremendous.
Philip Fisher

What is most important… is that stocks are not bought in companies where the dividend pay-out is so emphasized that it restricts realizable growth.
Philip Fisher

Don’t overstress diversification.
Philip Fisher

The disadvantage of having eggs in so many baskets that a lot of eggs do not end up in really attractive baskets, and it is impossible to keep watching all the baskets after the eggs are put in.
Philip Fisher

Buying a company without having sufficient knowledge of it may be even more dangerous than having inadequate diversification.
Philip Fisher

An investor should always realize that some mistakes are going to be made…
Philip Fisher

He should take extreme care to own not the most, but the best.
Philip Fisher

In the field of common stocks, a little bit of a great many can never be more than a poor substitute for a few of the outstanding.
Philip Fisher

Don’t be afraid of buying on a war scare.
Philip Fisher



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