Philip Fisher Quotes & Sayings

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

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

Even in those earlier times, finding the really outstanding companies and staying with them through all the fluctuations of a gyrating market proved far more profitable to far more people than did the more colorful practice of trying to buy them cheap and sell them dear. — Philip Arthur Fisher

M F K Fisher is the dowager queen of writers on browsing and slicing. — Philip Howard, 20th Earl Of Arundel

Most frequently given of such reasons is the conviction that a general stock market decline of some proportion is somewhere in the offing. In the preceding chapter I tried to show that postponing an attractive purchase because of fear of what the general market might do will, over the years, prove very costly. This is because the investor is ignoring a powerful influence about which he has positive knowledge through fear of a less powerful force about which, in the present state of human knowledge, he and everyone else is largely guessing. — Philip A. Fisher

One, which I mention several times elsewhere, is the need for patience if big profits are to be made from investment. Put another way, it is often easier to tell what will happen to the price of a stock than how much time will elapse before it happens. The other is the inherently deceptive nature of the stock market. Doing what everybody else is doing at the moment, and therefore what you have an almost irresistible urge to do, is often the wrong thing to do at all. — Philip Arthur Fisher

History has shown that in every age and in every field of human knowledge, many of the views which almost everyone accepted as true and never bothered to think about further, were in time proven completely wrong. — Philip Arthur Fisher

But his very best questions always popped out of his mind, unprepared, never having been written down in advance because they were the angle he picked up on the fly, as he heard an answer to a lesser question. Those creative questions were the art. It is what, in my mind, made his querying great. — Philip A. Fisher

In a new plant for even established processes or products, there will probably be a shake-down period of six to eight weeks that will prove rather expensive. It takes this long to get the equipment adjusted to the required operating efficiency and to weed out the inevitable "bugs" that seem to occur in breaking in modern intricate machinery. — Philip A. Fisher

Be extra careful when buying into companies and industries that are the current darlings of the financial community ... — Philip Arthur Fisher

I have already made up my mind, don't confuse me with facts. — Philip A. Fisher

My father, Philip Fisher, was the toughest guy I ever knew. An example: He had terrible teeth, yet he got his fillings done without ever using a painkiller. Now, that's tough! — Kenneth Fisher

I had made what I believe was one of the more valuable decisions of my business life. This was to confine all efforts solely to making major gains in the long-run. — Philip Arthur Fisher

If the growth rate is so good that in another ten years the company might well have quadrupled, is it really of such great concern whether at the moment the stock might or might not be 35% overpriced? — Philip Arthur Fisher

Such a study indicates that the greatest investment reward comes to those who by good luck or good sense find the occasional company that over the years can grow in sales and profits far more than industry as a whole. It further shows that when we believe we have found such a company we had better stick with it for a long period of time. It gives us a strong hint that such companies need not necessarily be young and small. Instead, regardless of size, what really counts is a management having both a determination to attain further important growth and an ability to bring its plans to completion. — Philip A. Fisher

My mistake was to project my skill beyond the limits of experience. I began investing outside the I began investing outside of the industries which I believe I thoroughly understood, in completely different spheres of activity; situations where I did not have comparable background knowledge. — Philip Arthur Fisher

I remember my sense of shock some half-dozen years ago when I read a recommendation to sell shares of a company ... The recommendation was not based on any long-term fundamentals. Rather, it was that over the next six months the funds could be employed more profitably elsewhere. — Philip Arthur Fisher

Of one thing the investor can be certain: A large company's need to bring in a new chief executive from the outside is a damning sign of something basically wrong with the existing management - no matter how good the surface signs may have been as indicated by the most recent earnings statement. — Philip Arthur Fisher