Investor wiki

Philip Fisher

Born 1907, died 2004, American, founder of Fisher & Co. (1931)

Find a superior business, get to know it deeply, then hold for a generation. The pioneer of growth-quality investing and the scuttlebutt research method. The qualitative counterweight to Graham in Buffett's self-described 85-15 methodological mix.

Biography

Philip Arthur Fisher was born on 8 September 1907 in San Francisco. He attended the newly founded Stanford Graduate School of Business but left in 1928 (before completing the degree) to take a position as a securities analyst at the Anglo London & Paris National Bank in San Francisco. He survived the 1929 crash in his analyst seat, learned the lessons of the early 1930s bear market firsthand, and founded Fisher & Co. as a sole proprietorship in March 1931 with three clients.

The deliberate smallness of the practice was a Fisher trademark throughout its life. Where most of his contemporaries chased assets-under-management growth as the marker of business success, Fisher kept his client list intentionally limited because the scuttlebutt-intensive research method he was building required deep time with each name in the portfolio. He famously refused most new client business after the 1950s. The firm ran for over seventy years under his direct stewardship.

Fisher's breakthrough work was the systematic application of qualitative research (scuttlebutt) to find businesses whose long-run competitive advantages were not visible in the published financial statements. The canonical example is Motorola, where Fisher's conversations with engineers, customers, and competing semiconductor firms in 1955 established a conviction in Motorola's R&D culture that proved correct over the subsequent four decades. The position became Fisher & Co.'s largest holding and was still held when Fisher died in 2004.

Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits, published in 1958, brought Fisher to public attention and remains one of the founding texts of modern stock analysis. The 1996 reissue with a new introduction by his son Ken Fisher brought the book to a new generation of readers; Warren Buffett provided one of the cover endorsements, calling it a book that he had pressed on every aspiring investor he met. Fisher continued to publish, advise, and travel into his nineties, dying in San Mateo on 11 March 2004 at age 96. Fisher Investments, the much larger institutional asset manager founded by his son Ken, continues the family's involvement in investing today.

Investment philosophy in seven principles

Each principle is sourced to Fisher's published canon (Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits 1958, Paths to Wealth 1960, Conservative Investors Sleep Well 1975, Developing an Investment Philosophy 1980).

1. Scuttlebutt research

Fisher's most enduring methodological contribution is scuttlebutt: the practice of building an investment thesis not by reading published financials alone but by talking systematically to people who know the company from many angles. Customers, suppliers, ex-employees, current competitors, research scientists at the company and its rivals, distributors, and industry consultants. Each conversation yields a fragment of evidence about product quality, management depth, competitive position, and culture. Aggregated, the fragments produce a picture that no SEC filing can convey. Fisher describes the method at length in Chapter 2 of Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits (1958). The classic example is his Motorola work in 1955: through conversations with engineers and customers, he satisfied himself that Motorola's R&D capability and competitive position were substantially stronger than Wall Street appreciated. The position became Fisher & Co.'s largest holding and was still held at his death in 2004. The method is labour-intensive (a single thoroughly scuttlebutted name might take months of work) which is exactly why it produces an edge: most institutional investors will not do it. invest-like cannot run scuttlebutt mechanically, but the Fisher-Fit Score's Management and Durable Demand pillars test for the indirect signals (R&D efficiency, employee retention, customer concentration) that good scuttlebutt would uncover.

2. The fifteen points to look for in a common stock

Chapter 3 of Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits is structured around fifteen specific questions an investor must answer about a candidate stock. The list compresses Fisher's entire qualitative framework. In condensed form: Does the company have products or services with sufficient market potential to make possible a sizable increase in sales for at least several years? Does management have a determination to continue developing products that will further increase total sales potential? How effective is the R&D effort relative to size? Does the company have an above-average sales organisation? Does it have a worthwhile profit margin? What is being done to maintain or improve profit margins? Does the company have outstanding labour and personnel relations? Does it have outstanding executive relations? Does it have depth to its management? How good are its cost-analysis and accounting controls? Are there other aspects of the business, peculiar to its industry, which give important clues as to outstanding capability? Does the company have a short-range or long-range outlook in regard to profits? In the foreseeable future, will the growth of the company require sufficient equity financing so that the larger share count cancels existing shareholders' benefit from the growth? Does management discuss freely with shareholders during times when things are going well, but clam up when troubles or disappointments occur? Does the company have a management of unquestionable integrity? An honest answer of yes to all fifteen is rare; Fisher held that even a single firm no on the integrity question disqualified a stock.

3. Buy and hold for the long term

Fisher's holding period was almost geological by modern standards. He bought Motorola in 1955 and still held it forty-nine years later when he died. He bought Texas Instruments in 1956 and held for decades. The thesis behind multi-decade holding is symmetric to Buffett's: if the underlying business retains its competitive edge and reinvests at high incremental returns, selling forces the holder to find another superior business in a saturated competitive market plus pay taxes plus pay friction costs. Most of the time the find-replace transaction is net negative. Fisher had a phrase for the temptation to sell into apparent overvaluation: "If the job has been correctly done when a common stock is purchased, the time to sell it is almost never." The corollary is that the buy decision must be made under unusual analytical rigour because the holder will live with it for a generation. invest-like surfaces the durability question through the Durable Demand pillar of the Fisher-Fit Score, which weights products likely to still matter in fifteen to twenty years materially higher than products dependent on a single technology cycle.

4. Concentration in a handful of best ideas

Fisher ran a deliberately concentrated portfolio, typically holding ten to twelve names. He argued that a portfolio of forty stocks was self-evidently impossible to follow with the depth of analysis his framework demanded, and that the dilution penalty of holding mediocre best-twenty-fifth ideas alongside best-three ideas was greater than the diversification benefit. Conservative Investors Sleep Well (1975) lays out the case explicitly. The argument is not that diversification is bad in principle; it is that diversification past the point at which the investor can maintain real depth on each name is a sign of incomplete homework, not prudent risk management. Fisher's son Ken Fisher, who continued the firm and built it into a much larger institutional manager, has documented the same philosophical commitment to a tight book in his own writing. The concentration principle is one of two main points of contact between Fisher's framework and Buffett's, the other being the focus on management quality. Buffett has repeatedly described himself as 15 percent Fisher and 85 percent Graham, with the Fisher component being precisely the quality-and-management orientation that justifies concentration.

5. Avoid forecasting macro and timing the market

Fisher devoted Chapter 4 of Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits to what he called the five don'ts, the first of which is "Don't overstress diversification" and the second is "Don't be afraid to buy on a war scare." The list continues with "Don't forget your Gilbert and Sullivan" (a memorable framing of the discipline of selling when a thesis is confirmed wrong) and the closing two are anti-forecasting: do not be afraid to buy stocks during war, and do not pay any attention to short-term forecasts. His position on macro-forecasting was the same as Graham's and Buffett's: it cannot be done reliably enough by anyone to base a long-term portfolio on it, and the cognitive bandwidth spent trying is bandwidth not spent on company-specific scuttlebutt work where the analyst actually has an edge. The right framework is to buy great businesses when the price is reasonable relative to long-term earning power and to ignore the question of whether the next twelve months will be better or worse than the consensus expects. invest-like enforces this discipline by anchoring the Valuation pillar to multi-year owner-earnings yield rather than to forward-twelve-month consensus estimates.

6. When to sell, almost never

Fisher articulated only three valid reasons to sell a stock. First, the original analytical case has been proven wrong by subsequent events (a research bet failed, a key executive proved dishonest, the moat eroded faster than expected). Second, the company no longer meets the fifteen-point framework as well as it did at purchase (typically because management quality degraded or product leadership was lost). Third, a clearly superior opportunity has emerged that requires capital, and the capital cannot be raised any other way. He explicitly rejected as invalid the reasons most retail investors actually use: the price has risen, the price has fallen, the cycle looks late, the multiple looks high relative to history, the chart looks weak. None of those, in Fisher's framework, are reasons to part with ownership in a great business. Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits dedicates Chapter 6 to when to sell, and the chapter's brevity (fewer than ten pages) is itself part of the argument: there is not much to say, because the answer is mostly no.

7. R&D efficiency, not R&D spend

Fisher was deeply interested in research and development as a source of long-run competitive advantage, but his framework asked not how much a company spent on R&D but what its R&D efficiency was: dollars of incremental long-term earnings produced per dollar of cumulative research investment. Two companies in the same industry might spend the same proportion of revenue on R&D but produce wildly different results because of differences in research focus, scientific calibre of the team, willingness to abandon dead-end projects, and ability to translate research outputs into commercial product. The Motorola conviction in 1955 hinged on Fisher's view that Motorola's per-engineer R&D productivity was substantially above the semiconductor industry mean. The principle predates and anticipates the modern literature on intangible capital, which formalises R&D as a capitalisable asset rather than expensed-as-incurred operating cost. invest-like's Fisher-Fit Score includes an R&D Efficiency sub-metric that compares five-year capitalised research spend to incremental gross profit over the same window.

Famous picks

Documented Fisher & Co. positions and case studies from Fisher's published writing. Fisher & Co. did not publish a 13F (it was below the threshold), so the list is reconstructed from Fisher's own writing and interviews.

Motorola

Initiated 1955, held by Fisher and Fisher & Co. until his death in 2004, a 49-year hold. Fisher's research established that Motorola's R&D culture and engineering talent gave it a sustained competitive edge not visible in the published financials. The single most cited Fisher position.

Texas Instruments

Initiated 1956. Another technology-and-engineering position where Fisher's scuttlebutt work identified durable advantages in semiconductors well before consensus. Held for decades.

Dow Chemical

Held for decades. Fisher cited Dow as a positive example of management depth and consistent reinvestment in R&D across cycles, in contrast with chemical peers whose research effort waxed and waned with quarterly earnings pressure.

Food Machinery and Chemical Corporation (later FMC)

Fisher's first major position in his Fisher & Co. days, initiated in the early 1930s. The company's diversified industrial portfolio matched his framework's preference for resilience and steady reinvestment.

Du Pont (E. I. du Pont de Nemours)

Documented holding from the 1940s onward. Du Pont's nylon and synthetic-fibre franchise during and after the Second World War met Fisher's tests for product-line durability, management depth, and R&D productivity.

International Business Machines (IBM)

Held through much of Fisher & Co.'s early decades during IBM's dominance of the mainframe era. The position is documented in Fisher's published case studies as a positive example of long-running management depth and customer-relationship moats.

Raychem Corporation

A later-period scuttlebutt success. Fisher's conversations with Raychem customers and ex-employees convinced him the company's polymer-cross-linking technology offered a durable advantage. Held for decades and ultimately acquired by Tyco in 1999.

How invest-like scores the Fisher framework

invest-like applies a Fisher-Fit Score to every public stock, with pillars for durable demand, management depth, R&D efficiency, margin trajectory, and valuation relative to long-run earning power. Stocks are graded A+ through D with reasoning written out per pillar. The cohort cannot replicate scuttlebutt mechanically; what it can do is test for the indirect quantitative signals that good scuttlebutt would uncover (capitalised R&D versus incremental gross profit, ten-year insider-ownership trajectory, customer concentration). Read the live cohort at /fit/fisher/ and the methodology at /methodology/.

Famous quotes

Sixteen widely cited quotes attributed to Fisher's published canon.

The stock market is filled with individuals who know the price of everything, but the value of nothing.

Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits (1958)

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. This matchless tool, however, is not used effectively often enough.

Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits (1958), Chapter 8

I don't want a lot of good investments; I want a few outstanding ones.

Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits (1958)

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

Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits (1958), Chapter 6

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 colourful practice of trying to buy them cheap and sell them dear.

Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits (1958), Introduction

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.

Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits (1958)

Conservative investors sleep well.

Conservative Investors Sleep Well (1975), title page

Doing nothing requires more discipline than doing something.

Attributed in Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits (1958)

It seems logical that even before thinking of buying any common stock, the first step is to see how money has been most successfully made in the past.

Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits (1958), Chapter 1

I have always believed that the chief difference between a fool and a wise man is that the wise man learns from his mistakes, while the fool never does.

Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits (1958)

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

Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits (1958)

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

Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits (1958), Chapter on diversification

The wise investor must judge investment policies in light of the most recent evidence.

Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits (1958)

More money has been lost trying to anticipate and protect from corrections than actually in them.

Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits (1958)

The investor with a sound understanding of true investment values can ignore the noise of the marketplace.

Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits (1958)

There is a complicating factor that makes the gathering of investment facts considerably more difficult. This is the matter of integrity of management.

Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits (1958), Chapter 3, Point 15

Books by Philip Fisher

Fisher's complete published canon, plus the Wiley omnibus that bundles the three later titles in a single hardcover.

Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits

First edition 1958, reissued 1996 with new introduction by Ken Fisher

Fisher's masterwork and one of the three or four founding texts of modern stock analysis. The fifteen-point checklist (Chapter 3) and the scuttlebutt method (Chapter 2) define the qualitative-growth tradition that runs through Buffett, Munger, and modern compounder investors. Roughly 270 pages in the 1996 reissue.

ISBN 978-0471445500 (Wiley Investment Classics, 2003)

Paths to Wealth Through Common Stocks

1960

Fisher's second book. Expands on the growth-quality framework and addresses specific applications to industries he understood well. Less famous than Common Stocks but well regarded among Fisher specialists.

ISBN 978-0470414514 (Wiley Investment Classics reprint)

Conservative Investors Sleep Well

1975

Fisher's third book. The title captures the central argument: a portfolio of carefully chosen great businesses, concentrated and held long, generates both better returns and lower psychological stress than the constant trading typical of more aggressive styles.

ISBN 978-0471445500 (often bundled with Common Stocks in the Wiley omnibus)

Developing an Investment Philosophy

1980

A short monograph laying out the personal evolution of Fisher's framework across five decades of running Fisher & Co. The most autobiographical of his published work.

ISBN 978-0471445500 (bundled in the Wiley omnibus)

The Fisher Investment Classics (omnibus volume)

Wiley Investment Classics, 2003

Single-volume hardcover that collects Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits, Conservative Investors Sleep Well, and Developing an Investment Philosophy in one binding. The most convenient way to read Fisher's complete published canon.

ISBN 978-0471445500

Common misconceptions

Misconception: Fisher was a pure growth investor with no valuation discipline.

Correction. He cared about valuation, but his test was relative to long-run earning power and competitive position, not to the current twelve-month P/E. He routinely paid above-market multiples for companies whose growth and R&D efficiency justified them, and equally routinely passed on cheap-looking stocks whose fundamentals failed the fifteen-point test. The framing of Fisher as a growth-at-any-price investor is a caricature.

Misconception: The scuttlebutt method is impractical for retail investors.

Correction. Some forms are; some are not. A retail investor cannot get analyst meetings with senior management, but conversations with customers and ex-employees of the company are increasingly accessible through Glassdoor, LinkedIn outreach, industry trade press, and product-review aggregators. Fisher himself, before his name carried weight, did most of his early scuttlebutt as an unknown analyst making cold calls. The method scales down more than the lore suggests.

Misconception: Fisher and Graham represented incompatible philosophies.

Correction. They emphasised different load-bearing variables (Graham, balance-sheet safety; Fisher, growth and quality) but agreed on the foundational discipline: independent fundamental analysis, scepticism of market prices as a guide to value, and rejection of macro forecasting. Buffett's framework is the deliberate synthesis: roughly 85 percent Graham (margin of safety, independent thinking, the investor-versus-speculator distinction) and 15 percent Fisher (quality, management, long holding periods).

Misconception: Fisher's framework only works for technology stocks.

Correction. His most famous picks were in technology (Motorola, Texas Instruments, IBM) but his earlier and later portfolios held food, chemicals (Dow, Du Pont), industrials (FMC), and consumer-facing businesses. The framework asks for a great business with durable advantages and strong management; the sector is a function of where those qualities happen to exist in any given decade.

Misconception: Fisher was a paper-only theorist who never matched his teaching with real returns.

Correction. Fisher & Co. compounded private client accounts at returns materially above the market for over six decades. The firm was deliberately small (Fisher refused most new client business after the 1950s in order to keep the practice manageable) which is why his name appears less often in retail performance rankings than in the rankings of investors who managed publicly disclosed funds.

Misconception: Fisher was hostile to dividends.

Correction. He was hostile to the assumption that a higher dividend payout was automatically better for the shareholder. His framework asked whether retained earnings were being reinvested at returns above the cost of capital. If yes, retention beat distribution; if no, distribution beat retention. The principle is now standard in modern capital-allocation literature but was contested when Fisher first articulated it in the 1950s.

Today's top stocks passing the Fisher framework

invest-like grades every US-listed stock against the Fisher-Fit framework daily. The live top-ten cohort lives at /fit/fisher/. The page refreshes daily as fundamentals update.

Frequently asked questions

What is Philip Fisher known for?

Fisher is known as the pioneer of growth-quality investing and the developer of the scuttlebutt research method. His 1958 book Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits introduced the fifteen-point qualitative checklist that has shaped a generation of growth-oriented investors. Warren Buffett describes himself as 15 percent Fisher and 85 percent Graham.

What is the scuttlebutt method?

Scuttlebutt is the practice of building an investment thesis by talking systematically to people who know the company from many angles: customers, suppliers, ex-employees, competitors, distributors, and research staff. Aggregating their fragmented observations produces a picture of competitive position and management quality that no published financial statement can convey.

How did Buffett describe Fisher's influence?

Buffett famously said in the 1969 Berkshire Hathaway letter and again in multiple later interviews that he was 85 percent Graham and 15 percent Fisher. The Fisher contribution is the quality-and-management orientation that justifies paying fair (not statistically cheap) prices for great businesses and holding them for the long term.

What are the fifteen points to look for in a common stock?

The fifteen-point checklist appears in Chapter 3 of Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits. The points cover product-line potential, R&D efficiency, sales organisation, profit margins, management depth, labour relations, accounting controls, long-range outlook, equity-issuance discipline, transparency with shareholders in bad times, and management integrity. An honest yes to all fifteen is rare.

How long did Philip Fisher hold his stocks?

Fisher's holding periods were among the longest in documented investing history. His Motorola position, initiated in 1955, was held continuously until his death in 2004, a 49-year hold. Texas Instruments, initiated in 1956, was held for decades. He famously stated that if the job has been correctly done at purchase, the time to sell is almost never.

Who was Philip Fisher's son?

Ken Fisher, founder of Fisher Investments and one of the most prominent modern wealth managers. Ken Fisher worked alongside his father in the firm's later years and inherited a philosophical commitment to concentrated, long-held portfolios, although Fisher Investments today operates at a substantially larger scale than the deliberately small Fisher & Co. of his father's era.

How does invest-like score the Fisher framework?

invest-like applies a Fisher-Fit Score with pillars covering durable demand, management depth (proxied by tenure, R&D-per-engineer signals, and insider ownership), R&D efficiency, profit-margin trajectory, and valuation relative to long-run earning power. Stocks are graded A+ through D with reasoning per pillar. The live cohort is at /fit/fisher/ and the methodology hub at /methodology/.

What were Philip Fisher's most famous stock picks?

Motorola (initiated 1955), Texas Instruments (initiated 1956), Dow Chemical, Du Pont, IBM, FMC, and Raychem. The Motorola and Texas Instruments positions are the two most cited because of the depth of his scuttlebutt work and the decades-long holding periods.

When did Philip Fisher die?

Philip Arthur Fisher died on 11 March 2004 in San Mateo, California, aged 96. He had run Fisher & Co. for 73 years and continued to publish and advise into his nineties. His son Ken Fisher continues the family's investing legacy through Fisher Investments.

Warren Buffett

Read the wiki

Benjamin Graham

Read the wiki

Peter Lynch

Read the wiki

Joel Greenblatt

Read the wiki

Charlie Munger

Read the wiki

Terry Smith

Read the wiki

Methodology

Pillar weights and deal-breakers

Working papers

DOI-anchored methodology

Track record

Live 30-stock model portfolio

Editorial and educational only. Quotes and picks are drawn from primary sources (Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits 1958, Conservative Investors Sleep Well 1975, Developing an Investment Philosophy 1980) and widely cited secondary biographies. invest-like has no commercial relationship with the Fisher estate, Fisher Investments, or any company mentioned. Nothing on this page constitutes investment advice. Past performance does not predict future results.

Investor wiki

Philip Fisher

Born 1907, died 2004, American, founder of Fisher & Co. (1931)

Biography

Investment philosophy in seven principles

1. Scuttlebutt research

2. The fifteen points to look for in a common stock

3. Buy and hold for the long term

4. Concentration in a handful of best ideas

5. Avoid forecasting macro and timing the market

6. When to sell, almost never

7. R&D efficiency, not R&D spend

Famous picks

Motorola

Texas Instruments

Initiated 1956. Another technology-and-engineering position where Fisher's scuttlebutt work identified durable advantages in semiconductors well before consensus. Held for decades.

Dow Chemical

Food Machinery and Chemical Corporation (later FMC)

Du Pont (E. I. du Pont de Nemours)

International Business Machines (IBM)

Raychem Corporation

How invest-like scores the Fisher framework

Famous quotes

Sixteen widely cited quotes attributed to Fisher's published canon.

The stock market is filled with individuals who know the price of everything, but the value of nothing.

Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits (1958)

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. This matchless tool, however, is not used effectively often enough.

Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits (1958), Chapter 8

I don't want a lot of good investments; I want a few outstanding ones.

Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits (1958)

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

Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits (1958), Chapter 6

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 colourful practice of trying to buy them cheap and sell them dear.

Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits (1958), Introduction

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.

Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits (1958)

Conservative investors sleep well.

Conservative Investors Sleep Well (1975), title page

Doing nothing requires more discipline than doing something.

Attributed in Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits (1958)

It seems logical that even before thinking of buying any common stock, the first step is to see how money has been most successfully made in the past.

Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits (1958), Chapter 1

I have always believed that the chief difference between a fool and a wise man is that the wise man learns from his mistakes, while the fool never does.

Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits (1958)

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

Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits (1958)

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

Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits (1958), Chapter on diversification

The wise investor must judge investment policies in light of the most recent evidence.

Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits (1958)

More money has been lost trying to anticipate and protect from corrections than actually in them.

Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits (1958)

The investor with a sound understanding of true investment values can ignore the noise of the marketplace.

Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits (1958)

There is a complicating factor that makes the gathering of investment facts considerably more difficult. This is the matter of integrity of management.

Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits (1958), Chapter 3, Point 15

Books by Philip Fisher

Fisher's complete published canon, plus the Wiley omnibus that bundles the three later titles in a single hardcover.

Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits

First edition 1958, reissued 1996 with new introduction by Ken Fisher

ISBN 978-0471445500 (Wiley Investment Classics, 2003)

Paths to Wealth Through Common Stocks

1960

ISBN 978-0470414514 (Wiley Investment Classics reprint)

Conservative Investors Sleep Well

1975

ISBN 978-0471445500 (often bundled with Common Stocks in the Wiley omnibus)

Developing an Investment Philosophy

1980

A short monograph laying out the personal evolution of Fisher's framework across five decades of running Fisher & Co. The most autobiographical of his published work.

ISBN 978-0471445500 (bundled in the Wiley omnibus)

The Fisher Investment Classics (omnibus volume)

Wiley Investment Classics, 2003

ISBN 978-0471445500

Common misconceptions

Misconception: Fisher was a pure growth investor with no valuation discipline.

Misconception: The scuttlebutt method is impractical for retail investors.

Misconception: Fisher and Graham represented incompatible philosophies.

Misconception: Fisher's framework only works for technology stocks.

Misconception: Fisher was a paper-only theorist who never matched his teaching with real returns.

Misconception: Fisher was hostile to dividends.

Today's top stocks passing the Fisher framework

invest-like grades every US-listed stock against the Fisher-Fit framework daily. The live top-ten cohort lives at /fit/fisher/. The page refreshes daily as fundamentals update.

Frequently asked questions

What is Philip Fisher known for?

What is the scuttlebutt method?

How did Buffett describe Fisher's influence?

What are the fifteen points to look for in a common stock?

How long did Philip Fisher hold his stocks?

Who was Philip Fisher's son?

How does invest-like score the Fisher framework?

What were Philip Fisher's most famous stock picks?

When did Philip Fisher die?

Warren Buffett

Read the wiki

Benjamin Graham

Read the wiki

Peter Lynch

Read the wiki

Joel Greenblatt

Read the wiki

Charlie Munger

Read the wiki

Terry Smith

Read the wiki

Methodology

Pillar weights and deal-breakers

Working papers

DOI-anchored methodology

Track record

Live 30-stock model portfolio

Philip Fisher

Biography

Investment philosophy in seven principles

1. Scuttlebutt research

2. The fifteen points to look for in a common stock

3. Buy and hold for the long term

4. Concentration in a handful of best ideas

5. Avoid forecasting macro and timing the market

6. When to sell, almost never

7. R&D efficiency, not R&D spend

Famous picks

How invest-like scores the Fisher framework

Famous quotes

Books by Philip Fisher

Common misconceptions

Today's top stocks passing the Fisher framework

Frequently asked questions

Related

Philip Fisher

Biography

Investment philosophy in seven principles

1. Scuttlebutt research

2. The fifteen points to look for in a common stock

3. Buy and hold for the long term

4. Concentration in a handful of best ideas

5. Avoid forecasting macro and timing the market

6. When to sell, almost never

7. R&D efficiency, not R&D spend

Famous picks

How invest-like scores the Fisher framework

Famous quotes

Books by Philip Fisher

Common misconceptions

Today's top stocks passing the Fisher framework

Frequently asked questions

Related

Industrien

Rankings

Glossar

Tools & Methodik