Philip Fisher

“Change creates opportunities to grow, but it also creates opportunities to slip.”

“It’s my job to find unusual companies and then judge whether the price they’re selling at is too high.”

“If you are in the right companies, the potential rise can be so enormous that everything else is secondary.”

“Even a great company can be priced too high if there’s a lot of glamour attached to it.”

“I have stressed management, but even so, I haven’t stressed it enough. It is the most important ingredient.”

“It’s not what industry you’re in, it’s what you’re doing right that your rivals haven’t yet figured out.”

“My stocks sometimes get overpriced, but in the long run this kind of company, if you can find it, will outperform the market and the economy. The worst thing you can do is try to catch the swings, sell out too soon and be afraid to buy back in.”

“The big profits I have made were through very long planning, waiting and watching.”

“Common stocks properly selected and long-range will prove so attractive that I don’t believe that other forms of assets are a more attractive or suitable vehicle.”

“Buy slowly stocks of companies that will capitalize on the problems of scarcity and social need. Companies with excellent management.”

“I think it is more conservative in the long run to be in a company that is really progressing and really has an edge.”

“I am vitally interested in companies that are going to survive, but I don’t think a big cap company is necessarily one that will.”

“I want companies that welcome dissent, rather than stifle it, that don’t penalize people who criticize what management is doing.”

“The things most companies boast about are yesterday’s story.”

“My business is to find unusual companies and judge whether the price is too high.”

“I don’t want to spend my time trying to earn a lot of little profits. I want very, very big profits that I’m ready to wait for.”

“It is just appalling the nerve strain people put themselves under trying to buy something today and sell it tomorrow. It’s a small-win proposition. If you are a truly long-range investor, of which I am practically a vanishing breed, the profits are so tremendously greater.”

“It is true that you don’t go broke taking a profit, but that assumes you will make a profit on everything you do. It doesn’t allow for the mistakes you’re bound to make in the investment business.”

“I know plenty of guys who consider themselves to be long-term investors but who are still perfectly happy to trade in and out and back into their favorite stocks.”

“I think a weakness of many people’s approach to investment is that they try to be jacks of all trades and masters of none.”