Quotes from Kenneth L. Fisher

The Commodore taught the financial world how to corner stocks, something illegal these days. But back then it was quite a feat.

Once, early on, while still engaged in shipping and sidetracked by a rare vacation in his lavish, specially built yacht, he came back to find that his partners had ousted him from his firm. The classic Vanderbilt response? I won't sue you for the law is too slow. I will ruin you!

Peabody believed that in the long run, American investments meant sound investments.

Morgan challenged London's established banking firms and eventually surpassed them, becoming the most important American banker in London in the 1860s.

The bubble, as investing phenomenon, has been well studied ever since the 17th-century tulip frenzy. Its counterpart in bear markets is not well understood.

While Morgan-who died in 1890 after falling off his horse-drawn carriage near the Italian border-must be remembered for laying the foundation for the House of Morgan

Drew was the market's first major speculator to venture inside business. Instead of just buying and selling stock as a speculator, he was the first of what we today would see as takeover artists, using the stock market as a way to acquire controlling interests in businesses, then get inside them and alter their destiny.

Girard, who really was a vegetarian, financed America's earliest trade endeavors, becoming America's first richest man.

Instead of being described in the investment banking section, J.P. Morgan could as easily have been included in this section, as the last of the Dinosaurs, and perhaps the greatest and most powerful of them all.

Mayer Rothschild created a financial dynasty that grew to finance the development of western civilization. Because of Rothschild and the banking house he built with his five sons, money flowed throughout Europe with ease, enabling the industrial revolution to take place and lift Europe from the dark ages.

Orphaned at age 11 in 1755, Mayer followed the sound of clinking coins rather than his parents' idea that he become a rabbi.

Back then, being a pawnbroker-merchant was one of the only career options available to Jews. Thanks to a papal decree centuries earlier, usury laws forbade Christians from lending for profit. So Jews took over the moneylending trades, becoming pawnbrokers, small trade merchants, and wizards of finance.

Operating from his house, Mayer and sons Amschel, Salomon, Nathan, Carl, and James built the business into a strong importing house.

Mayer, still not content with the excess, next began operating a money exchange bureau in their yard. What's considered the very first Rothschild bank appeared to be a nine-square-foot hut-but things weren't quite what they appeared to be. Mayer installed a large iron chest that, when opened from the back, revealed a stairway leading to a secret storage cellar.

The obvious never moves markets; surprises almost always do.

ike the Rothschilds before him in Europe, August Belmont helped transform America from a provincial and almost purely agricultural nation to a prosperous industrial country.

Within four years, Belmont's name was on the lips of every New Yorker. He was the city's leading investment banker and the hottest thing to hit society-and he was a Jew.

En route, Perkins revolutionized insurance sales, replacing the agency system with branch offices, and offered employees profit sharing.

My special job is the most interesting I know of anywhere. More fun than being king, pope, or prime minister anywhere-for no one can turn me out of it and I don't have to make any compromises with principles, Morgan once said. His principles-Do your work; be honest; keep your word; help when you can; be fair-were the words he lived by.

He even invented being fashionably late.

harting the rise of Lehman Brothers, one of Wall Street's greatest investment banking houses, essentially traces the gradual emergence of a powerful, industrial United States. Beginning as cotton brokers in an agricultural society, the first Lehmans to arrive in America helped finance the Confederacy during the Civil War, and then turned to Wall Street to dabble in commodities well into the 1900s.

Buy straw hats in the winter, when nobody wants them, and sell them in the summer when everybody needs them.

In investing, the crowd is wrong much more often than right.

Graham was not only the original quantitative analyst, to whom today's whole school of such thinking owes its heritage, but he was also a source of much of the fundamental analysis and lore that Wall Streeters follow today.