Ken Fisher

Kenneth Lawrence Fisher is an American billionaire investment analyst, author, and the founder and chairman of Fisher Investments, a fee-only financial adviser. Fisher's Forbes "Portfolio Strategy" column ran from 1984 to 2017, making him the longest continuously-running columnist in the magazine's history. Fisher is now known for writing monthly, native language columns in major media outlets spanning Western Europe and Asia. 

The list includes the UK's "Financial Times"; Germany's "Focus Money"; Denmark's leading business newspaper, "Børsen"; the Netherlands' largest newspaper, "De Telegraaf"; Switzerland's leading business paper, "Handelszeitung"; Spain's largest business website and newspaper, "elEconomista"; Italy's third largest newspaper and number one business paper, "Il Sole 24 Ore"; France's "L'Opinion"; Belgium's "La Libre"; Austria's "Trend; Caixin"; the "Hong Kong Economic Journal"; Taiwan's "Business Weekly"; South Korea's largest business paper, "Chosun Mint"; Japan's "Diamond Weekly"; and Singapore's "The Business Times", among others.

Fisher has authored eleven books on investing, and research papers in the field of behavioral finance. As of August 2022, his net worth is estimated at US$5.1 billion. In 2010, he was included in Investment Advisor magazine's "30 for 30" list of the 30 most influential people in the investment advisory business over the last 30 years. As of December 2021, Fisher's firm managed $208 billion.

Kenneth Fisher was born in San Francisco, California, the son of influential stock investor Philip A. Fisher. Fisher was raised in San Mateo, California. As a 13-year-old, he earned $1.20 an hour picking fruit, sawing and fertilizing. He dropped out of high school and went to Humboldt State University to study forestry, and graduated with an associate degree in economics in 1972. 

Humboldt State recognized Fisher with its Distinguished Alumni Award in 2007. In 2015, Fisher was appointed to the board of advisors of the Forbes School of Business at Ashford University. Over the past few decades, Fisher has helped Fisher Investments become one of the largest independent money managers in the world. He started his firm in 1979 with $250 and it has grown to over $100 billion in assets under management.

In 2007, Fisher and Thomas Grüner founded Grüner Fisher Investments in Germany. In 2009, Fisher received the inaugural Tiburon CEO Summit award for Challenging Conventional Wisdom. Fisher also has a Bernstein Fabozzi/Jacobs Levy Award for his research on market forecasting, which he published in 2000 with Meir Statman of Santa Clara University.

In 2011, Fisher was ranked as one of the top 25 most influential figures in the financial industry by Investment Advisor Magazine. He writes for USA Today and the Financial Times. Fisher is married, with three adult sons, Nathan, Jesse and Clayton. He lives in Dallas, Texas. Nathan Fisher is the senior executive vice president of Fisher Investments 401(k) Solutions.

Fisher's theoretical work identifying and testing the price-to-sales ratio (PSR) is detailed in his 1984 Dow Jones book, Super Stocks. James O'Shaughnessy credits Fisher with being the first to define and use the PSR as a forecasting tool. In Fisher's 2006 book, The Only Three Questions That Count, he states that the PSR is widely used and known, and no longer as useful as an indicator for undervalued stocks.

According to The Guru Investor by John P. Reese and Jack M. Forehand, in the late 1990s, Fisher defined his investment philosophy after studying the stock returns and P/E Ratios between January 1976 and June 1995 of six investment categories: large-cap value, mid-cap value, small-cap value, large-cap growth, mid-cap growth, and small-cap growth.

Small-cap value was not defined as an investing category until the late 1980s. Fisher Investments was among the institutional money managers offering small-cap value investing to clients in the late 1980s.