Words matter. These are the best Kenneth Fisher Quotes, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
In the early days, I promoted the idea of spending time in libraries to gain facts that other investors didn’t have. Not many people did that kind of research, so it worked.
Both cheap value stocks and more glamorous growth stocks can work well in a portfolio – if done right.
People do dollar cost averaging because they have regret of making one big mistake. But the fact of the matter is that, mathematically, the market rises more of the time than it falls. It falls, but it rises more of the time than it falls.
The average mutual fund holding period for equity or fixed income is only about three years. It’s too short.
In a bubble, anyone who argues pessimistically is seen as crazy.
To me ‘The Big Easy’ is shorthand for owning big stocks that are easy for wary investors to buy into. These stocks tend to outperform during the back half of bull markets.
Buy into good, well-researched companies and then wait. Let’s call it a sit-on-your-hands investment strategy.
A constant in my approach to investing: You should think politically but unconventionally.
What is the most common investor mistake? Trading – getting in and getting out at all the wrong times, for all the wrong reasons.
Generally, variations in earnings aren’t nearly as impactful on glamour growth stocks as are changes in image and, well, sexiness. I often think of glamour stocks as though they are attractive women dressing to the nines.
Indeed, bull markets are fueled by successive waves of prior skeptics finally capitulating as their fears fade. Eventually, fear turns to euphoria, and that’s the stuff of bubbles.
Fundamentally cheap stocks are often held in low regard by market participants. Something may be tainting their perception in investors’ minds.
I can find only one bull market, in 1935, that didn’t have some material indigestion within its first 12 months.
I never liked quantitative easing. It’s misunderstood by almost everybody. Flattening the yield curve is not stimulative; flattening the yield curve is anti-stimulative.
Having different types of stocks in your portfolio can enhance returns.
I’ve long loved emerging markets airlines because they usually sell at bargain prices. The troubled history of developed market airlines unfairly taints these stocks. In the emerging world, they’re growth stocks.
If you’ve taken Econ 101, you know that the quantity of money rises only when the banking system makes a net loan.
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!
The stock market is a discounter of all known information.
The upward move at the beginning of a bull market is almost always huge compared with the vacillations late in the bear market. If you try to pick a bottom, you will miss a good part of the action.
If you’re 35, 45, or even 55 – you have a very long time horizon – 40 years or vastly more. That is you, and/or your spouse, are likely to live about that long, and you’ll be investing the whole way.
Hundreds of investors ask me questions each year about the dilemmas they confront. Their worst problem? Uncertainty. They are traumatized and become emotional or confused to the state of inaction. Even worse, they try to solve a short-term problem in a way that hurts them financially in the long run.
I’m sometimes accused of being hostile to mutual funds. That’s not fair, really. There is a place for them. Still, I am hostile to one thing, which is trying to use funds to time your way in and out of the market. That’s a recipe for very bad results.
Plenty of funds have fine long-term returns despite being tax-inefficient and generally costly. But a dirty secret is this: Average, no-load fund investors do much worse than the funds – or the market.
Normally, if you have a huge category that leads a bear market all the way down to the bottom – like tech after 2000, or energy in the ’80-’82 bear market – you get one quick pop, and then years of lag as we fight the old war.
China’s stock market is inextricably tied to politics.
Despite its many critics, hydraulic fracturing will change the nature of energy production.
In history, the evidence is overwhelming: Stock market bottoms happen, and then stocks jolt upwards while the economy keeps getting worse – sometimes by a lot and for a long time.
If you can predict where the market’s going, just do what you can predict. If you can’t, which is the presumption of dollar cost averaging or time cost averaging, either one, then you’re trying to ease in. But if the market rises more than it falls most of the time, easing in is, by definition, a loser’s game.
When I was a young man in the 1970s, tech firms were scattered across the developed world. Since then, America has come to dominate tech almost totally.
Originally, I thought Republican. Now I’m an equal opportunity politician-hater.
Many follow a rule of thumb – no more than 5% in one stock. But that’s not the entrepreneurial road to riches.
Most investors give too much credence to the theory that prices are rational; they presume that a market collapse must have been justified by serious economic trouble.
Investors covet past improvements but also always believe pricing unimaginable future creativity and efficiency gains is Pollyannaish. And they’re always wrong. Bet on it.
Windmills and solar cells are carbon-free sources of electricity. But they are costly. If you’ve been investing in those, give it up. That game is effectively over.
The bubble, as investing phenomenon, has been well studied ever since the 17th-century tulip bulb frenzy. Its counterpart in bear markets is not well understood.
Fracking opens up vast tracts of the U.S. to exploitation by gas drillers. There’s enough energy under our feet to last us for decades, maybe centuries.
If some stock categories get too hot-and-pricey, mass supply is created via stock offerings to tap that cheap money – and, when overdone, drives it all down.
Environmentalists should like fracking for its relative cleanliness. But they don’t. They have made a bugaboo out of the chemicals in fracking fluids, which supposedly can leach into groundwater sources. I’m convinced they’re dead wrong. Ultimately, good technology with a cost advantage will win out over paranoia.
The world is filled with successful small businesses that stay small.
