Kenneth Fisher
Kenneth Fisher
Kenneth Lawrence Fisheris an American investment analyst and the founder and chairman of Fisher Investments, a money management firm with offices in Woodside, California, San Mateo, California, and Camas, Washington. Fisher writes a monthly column in Forbes magazine, contributes to other financial and news magazines, has written eleven books, and has written research papers in the field of behavioral finance. He is on the 2014 Forbes 400 list of richest Americans and Forbes list of world billionaires, and as of...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionBusinessman
Date of Birth29 November 1950
CountryUnited States of America
Normally, the market peaks before bad news emerges. That's what happened in 1929, and that's what happened in 2000.
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.
Many follow a rule of thumb - no more than 5% in one stock. But that's not the entrepreneurial road to riches.
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.
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.
If you are prepared for some risk, junk bonds pay about 5%, but they tend to get whacked when interest rates rise. Same with lower-yielding but higher-quality corporate bonds.
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.
In the world I've known most of my life, old stories quickly lose their power over capital markets and get replaced by new surprises. That which everyone fixates on gets priced into the stock market quickly and can't drag on.
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.
Buying only what you know can end in disaster. Just think about Enron's employees and business partners, the 'locals' who bought lots of its stock because they thought they were in the know.
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.
In a bubble, anyone who argues pessimistically is seen as crazy.
The latter part of bull markets are typically led by stocks that are seen then as high quality, but the ones that do best are the ones that weren't seen as such high quality before.
Both cheap value stocks and more glamorous growth stocks can work well in a portfolio - if done right.