Philip A. Fisher Quotes

“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.”

“Be extra careful when buying into companies and industries that are the current darlings of the financial community.”

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

“Companies that have failed to go uphill have invariably gone downhill.”

“Conservative investors sleep well.”

“Don’t assume that the high price at which a stock may be selling in relation to its earnings is necessarily an indication that further growth in those earnings has largely been already discounted in the price?”

“Don’t be afraid of buying on a war scare.”

“Don’t follow the crowd.”

“Don’t overstress diversification.”

“Every significant price move of any individual common stock in relation to stocks as a whole occurs because of a changed appraisal of that stock by the financial community.”

“Finding out which physician had lost the smallest percentage of his practice through death would not be a good way to pick a superb doctor.”

“For the great majority of transactions, being stubborn about a tiny fractional difference in the price can prove extremely costly.”

“Forecasting is like trying to turn lead into gold.”

“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.”

“He should take extreme care to own not the most, but the best.”

“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.”

“I don’t want a lot of good investments; I want a few outstanding ones.”

“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.”

“I have already made up my mind, don't confuse me with facts.”

“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?”

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

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

“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.”

“In the stock market a good nervous system is even more important than a good head.”

“In what other line of activity could you put $10,000 in one year and ten years later (with only occasional checking in the meantime to be sure management continues of high caliber) be able to have an asset worth from $40,000 to $150,000?”

“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.”

“It is my observation that those who sell such stocks to wait for a more suitable time to buy back these same shares seldom attain their objective. They usually wait for a decline to be bigger than it actually turns out to be.”

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

“Long term investors best stay away from low profit-margin or marginal companies.”

“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.”