Philip A. Fisher Quotes

“As a stock rises to, say, 50 or 60 or 70, the urge to sell and take a profit now that the stock is high becomes irresistible to many people. Giving in to this urge can be very costly. This is because the genuinely worthwhile profits in stock investing have come from holding the surprisingly large number of stocks that have gone up many times from their original cost.”

“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.”

“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.”

“In the competitive world of commerce it is vital to make the potential customer aware of the advantages of a product or service. This awareness can be created only by understanding what the potential buyer really wants and explaining it to him not in the seller’s terms but in his terms.”

“Patience is needed if big profits are to be made from investment. It is often easier to tell what will happen to the price of a stock than how much time will elapse before it happens.”

“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.”

“Recognizing changes in public taste and then reacting promptly to these changes is not enough. In the business world customers simply do not beat a path to the door of the man with the better mousetrap.”

“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.”

“The only true test of whether a stock is cheap or high is not its current price in relation to some former price, but whether the company’s fundamentals are significantly more or less favorable than the current financial-community appraisal of that stock.”

“The stock market has an inherently deceptive nature. 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.”