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Fisher Investments Background

Fisher Investments can trace its investment management background to 1931, the year in which Philip Fisher founded Fisher & Co. as an investment counselling business. Rarely giving interviews, little known to the public and accepting few clients, Philip Fisher is still widely admired and respected as one of the pioneers of modern investment theory. His investment philosophies, introduced over fifty years ago, are still studied and applied by today's investment professionals. He recorded them in Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits, a book first published in 1958 which still remains in print today, and is considered an investment classic.

More than three decades ago Ken Fisher, Phil's son, began his investment management career based on a fundamental belief in capitalism and how free capital markets function. His early training within his father's firm, Fisher & Co., led to the subsequent founding of Fisher Investments in 1979 (the firm was later incorporated in 1986 and reorganised as a limited liability company in 2005). Fisher Investments has continued to develop capital markets technologies with the primary goal of providing excess return relative to benchmarks. In the early 1980s, Ken Fisher pioneered the use of the Price to Sales Ratio and detailed its relevance as a tool for investment analysis in his influential book, Super Stocks, a best seller first published by Dow Jones-Irwin. Now a common tool in financial analysis, this technique is still used to help manage Small Cap portfolios for Fisher Investments' institutional clients.

Since 1986, Fisher Investments has been a pioneer in effective Small Cap Value equity management. It has since broadened into a full-scale investment management firm with an array of products oriented toward specific styles. In the early 1990s, Fisher Investments contributed to the recognition of distinct investment styles and cycles and used these advancements as the foundation for a new series of broad mandate institutional strategies: Global Total Return, US Total Return and International Equity.

In 1995, Fisher Investments began offering global investment management services directly to high net worth individuals via the Fisher Investments Private Client Group. The firm now has clients throughout North America and the United Kingdom.

Innovations are backed by experience, as Fisher Investments' portfolio management team has been successfully working together for over 20 years in its current form, with two of the three members of the Investment Policy Committee together for over 25 years. Recently, focus has been on the emerging field of behavioural finance and understanding not just the tools of finance, but also how investors use these tools. Fisher Investments' research has led to the development of practical applications of behavioural finance that currently play an active role in its investment management process, thus continuing the tradition of innovation in developing new capital market technologies.

Throughout the firm's history, Fisher Investments' research has been published in numerous financial journals, including The Financial Analysts Journal and The Journal of Portfolio Management. In addition, in 1984 Ken Fisher began writing the "Portfolio Strategy" column for Forbes magazine, offering his market perspective to the general reader. In the 25+ years Ken Fisher has been writing for Forbes, he has made many accurate market calls, which have earned him a strong reputation for forecasting market trends. Learn more about what makes Fisher Investments unique.