19 Best Philip Fisher Quotes On Investing
Investopaper
Philip A. Fisher is the main advocate of growth investing. As Benjamin Graham is to Value Investing, so is Philip Fisher to Growth Investing. Warren Buffett, a loyal follower of Graham ideology in his former years gradually leaned towards Fisher’s ideas later on. In a sense, Buffett is a growth investor with the foundation of value investing in his core.
Philip A. Fisher is the author of the famous book “Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits” which explains his investment philosophy. He was mainly focused on investing in superior companies with long term growth.While searching for stocks for investment, he looked into several factors such as long-term sales growth potential, capable management, effective research and development team, competitive edge, strong profit margins, and internal company relations.
Fisher insists on holding an outstanding investment for a long period of time. He is famous for holding ‘Motorola’ stock from 1977 until his death in 2004.
Here, we have compiled the best investing quotes by the legendary growth investor Philip A. Fisher.
Best Philip Fisher Quotes
1. “The successful investor is usually an individual who is inherently interested in business problems.”
2. “I don’t want a lot of good investments; I want a few outstanding ones. If the job has been correctly done when a common stock is purchased, the time to sell it is almost never.”
3. “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.”
4. “The stock market is filled with individuals who know the price of everything, but the value of nothing.”
5. “The reason why the growth stocks do so much better is that they seem to show gains in value in the hundreds of per cent each decade. In contrast, it is an unusual bargain that is as much as 50 per cent undervalued. The cumulative effect of this simple arithmetic should be obvious.”
6. “There is the need for patience if big profits are to be made from investment. Put another way, it is often easier to tell what will happen to the price of a stock than how much time will elapse before it happens. The other is the inherently deceptive nature of the stock market. 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.”
7. “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.”
8. “Be extra careful when buying into companies and industries that are the current darlings of the financial community.”
9. “The ability to see through some majority opinions to find what facts are really there is a trait that can bring rich rewards in the field of common stocks. It is not easy to develop, however, for the composite opinion of those with whom we associate is a powerful influence upon the minds of all of us.”
10. “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?”
11. “Practical investors usually learn their problem is finding enough outstanding investments, rather than choosing among too many.”
10. “Usually a very long list of securities is not a sign of the brilliant investor, but of one who is unsure of himself.”
11. “The true investment objective of growth is not just to make gains but to avoid loss.”
12. “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.”
13. “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.”
14. “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.”
15. “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?”
16. “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.”
17.”My mistake was to project my skill beyond the limits of experience. I began investing outside the industries which I believe I thoroughly understood, in completely different spheres of activity, situations where I did not have comparable background knowledge.”
18. “The heart of successful investing is knowing how to find the minority of stocks that in the years ahead will have spectacular growth in their per-share earnings.”
19. “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?”
