Quotes from Philip A. Fisher

I have already made up my mind, don't confuse me with facts.

Even in those earlier times, 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.

Never promote someone who hasn't made some bad mistakes, because if you do, you are promoting someone who has never done anything.

But his very best questions always popped out of his mind, unprepared, never having been written down in advance because they were the angle he picked up on the fly, as he heard an answer to a lesser question. Those creative questions were the art. It is what, in my mind, made his querying great.

When profit margins of a whole industry rise because of repeated price increases, the indication is not a good one for the long-range investor.

One, which I mention several times elsewhere, 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.

In a new plant for even established processes or products, there will probably be a shake-down period of six to eight weeks that will prove rather expensive. It takes this long to get the equipment adjusted to the required operating efficiency and to weed out the inevitable "bugs" that seem to occur in breaking in modern intricate machinery.

control its own destiny. It was later that I was to build on this base to conclude that even a strong sales arm is not enough. For a company to be a truly worthwhile investment, it must not only be able to sell its products, but also be able to ?appraise changing needs and desires of its customers; in other words, to master all that is implied in a true concept of marketing.

For example, among investors with common stock holdings having a market value of a quarter to a half million dollars, the percentage who own twenty-five or more different stocks is appalling. It is not this number of twenty-five or more which itself is appalling. Rather it is that in the great majority of instances only a small percentage of such holdings is in attractive stocks about which the investor or his advisor has a high degree of knowledge.

The only true test of whether a stock is "cheap" or "high" is not its current price in relation to some former price, no matter how accustomed we may have become to that former price, but whether the company's fundamentals are significantly more or less favorable than the current financial-community appraisal of that stock.