Trader Philip Fisher

If you delve into the success stories of various personalities, then everyone can learn certain lessons for themselves, thanks to which you can avoid stepping on the same rake as your idol.
However, there is a certain cliché in studying the success stories of contemporaries. Thus, almost all traders have at least an excellent education at Harvard or the University of California, on the basis of which they received high positions in already well-known top companies.

However, if you look at the stories of the pioneers, or at least fifty years ago, you can see truly powerful traders who managed to make money from almost nothing, leaving behind huge mega corporations and excellent training manuals.

Trader Philip Fisher is a pioneer in stock market investing. Philip Fisher created a kind of investment philosophy, showed the whole world, through his books, how to select stocks, how to evaluate them correctly, and created the so-called auditory method of selecting companies. Fisher's works had such a profound influence on traders of that time that even Buffet himself admitted the fact that he personally uses the principles that were laid down by Fisher in his books. Fisher was active in trading until he was 91 years old and is the oldest manager with enormous experience.

Trader Philip Fisher was born into a middle-class family in 1907 in San Francisco. His father, being a doctor, earned good money, so he wanted to take care of his son's future. He understood perfectly well that having sent his little boy to a regular school, he would be faced with typical gray everyday life and no bright spot on the career ladder.

Wanting to separate his son from the gray mass, his father sends Philip to college at the age of fifteen, after which he enters the Faculty of Business at Stanford University. Philip was an extraordinary young man and tried to understand the essence of the matter as much as possible.

So, being in his first year, he, to put it mildly, sticks to the professor, who, in turn, was also a consultant. Seeing the young man’s aspirations, the professor dragged him along with him to all lectures and business meetings. Therefore, by the end of the first year, Philip Fisher was excellent at negotiating with investors and even with an entire board.

Start of the career ladder

At the end of his first year, Philip was noticed by the Anglo-London Bank, which offered him the position of analyst. Philip Fisher, without hesitation, quits his studies and begins to fulfill his duties in a new position. However, after working for a fairly short time, in 1929 the company went bankrupt, and Philip joined the ranks of the unemployed.

Many Americans remember that period as the Great Depression, when firms closed one by one, and more and more unemployed people found themselves on the street. Despite all of Philip’s genius, his lack of education made it much more difficult to find a job.

Perhaps most young people in such a situation would fold their hands, but not Philip. At the age of 22, he decided to create his own business and opened a company called Fisher & Co. Having gained excellent experience as a trader, Philip begins to position himself as an investor.

During the Great Depression, when the crisis affected almost all enterprises, the heads of firms and factories were much more accommodating, so they made contact with the young man, wanting to hear at least some kind of solution to their problems. During the same period, many consultants fell into disrepute as clients lost money.

Consequently, investors lacked young blood, and Fisher & Co was such, so on the new wave Philip receives a huge number of clients who give him their money.

Worldwide recognition

Many investors of that time looked only at a company's balance sheet, performing routine accounting audits before buying shares. Philip Fisher became the person who began to walk around the enterprise, communicate with customers and competitors, and talk with workers and management.

Fischer communicated with people so often and a lot that the number of his acquaintances is simply amazing. This method of stock selection was soon called rumor, and the publication of the book “Common Stocks and Extraordinary Returns” made him world famous, since he published the first book with clear recommendations in this area.

Philip Fisher worked all his life in his company Fisher & Co and even at the age of 91 managed part of the assets. In 2007, the famous investor left this world.