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
I've done well over time but made lots of mistakes, too. Learn from your mistakes.
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.
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.
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'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 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.
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.
Readers regularly ask what can go wrong but almost never what could positively surprise.
Originally, I thought Republican. Now I'm an equal opportunity politician-hater.
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.
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.
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.
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.
My firm has 25,000 high-net-worth clients. A typical account would be that of a couple aged 65 and 60 who need their money to last the rest of their lives, 25 to 35 years.