Ken Fisher: ‘I’m worth £9bn – but still drive a 25-year-old Volvo’

Interview: Ken Fisher shares how he continued to grow his wealth substantially despite being ‘cancelled’ in 2019

Copy link
twitter
facebook
whatsapp
email
Copy link
twitter
facebook
whatsapp
email
It’s a cliché that very rich people are more frugal than those of us on more regular salaries.
Ken Fisher, who is estimated to be worth at least $11bn, certainly lives up to the stereotype. He drives a 25-year-old Volvo, has a briefcase held together by paper clips, and says he would be more than happy to go back to living in a treehouse.
Despite his vast wealth, Fisher – who is also a Telegraph Money columnist – has decided not to leave too much money to his three children.
“I’m not going to make any of them starve”, he says. “[But] I don’t believe in them having so much they never have to work again, so they can do drugs and be profligate and get divorced 15 times. I believe working is therapeutic.
“A lot of people don’t get that because they don’t like what they do, but I believe working is good for you.”
Telegraph Money sat down with 73-year-old Fisher, the founder and chairman of Fisher Investments, a wealth manager with 165,000 customers, to discuss how he built his wealth – and how he’ll be spending his fortune.
Fisher’s wealth has grown substantially in recent years. This is despite being “cancelled” in 2019 after some, he admits, crude comments about sex and money. This led to his columns being dropped by newspapers, including the Financial Times, and several large institutional clients pulling their cash.
Looking back now, he says the episode was “annoying, [but] it wasn’t intimidating. Whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger”.
A one-man marketing machine, he writes syndicated columns for private investors in 26 countries, with Thailand the latest edition.
His frugality, he says, comes from his upbringing in 1950s and 1960s California where he describes he “ripped the silver spoon out of my mouth as a kid”.
His father, Philip, was himself a legend of DIY investing, authoring the best-selling book ‘Common stocks and uncommon profits’. Warren Buffett, the world’s most famous investor and early advocate of what is now known as the “growth” style of stock picking, was a big fan of Fisher senior.
“My father had Asperger’s syndrome before people knew about it. He was very good to me but he could say things that sounded very cruel, and he had no idea they would hurt your feelings. But I never took it personally.
“He was a great guy. He told me when I was young: ‘I won’t give you any money but I’ll give you as much time as you want.’ He told me that he put my two older brothers through college, but that I was going to have to do it on my own.
“I learned that I needed to compete in the world.”
Fisher lived near San Francisco at the peak of the hippy movement, in the 1960s in the wake of anti-Vietnam and civil rights protests. But he quickly became disillusioned.
“When I was very young, around 16, I smoked marijuana, tried LSD a couple of times. At the time, the notion that was widely dispersed was that this was going to enlighten, open up your mind.
“By the time of the ‘Summer of Love’ in 1967 I realised this wasn’t enlightenment, it was just people getting stoned.”
Fisher eventually followed his father into financial publishing. His own book, “Super Stocks”, was a bestseller in the 1980s and introduced the concept of the “price-to-sales ratio” as a way to value listed companies.
As a result, he got a column in Forbes, and ended up writing for the magazine for more than 30 years. At this point, Fisher’s fund management business was still tiny, with just £75m under management. He had only just stopped picking up construction jobs on the side to pay the bills.
Today, Fisher manages well over £200bn on behalf of institutions and private investors, focusing on people with at least £250,000 to invest. He is the majority shareholder in the business, and will remain so after American private equity firm Advent International and the Abu Dhabi Investment Authority take a stake later this year.
Aside from the company, Fisher’s own investments include the real estate that the business operates from and a passive portfolio so as “not to compete with my clients”.
As one would expect, Fisher is very bullish on the power of the stock market to deliver returns over the long term. Has he ever been so concerned that he cashed out of the market?
“I’ve gone to cash three times in my career. In 1987 before the crash, before the 1990 bear market and in the early 2000s – before the dot-com crash. But I missed the 2007-2009 bear market because I didn’t believe, and don’t believe, mortgages could cause what they are blamed for having caused.”
Recommended
He also admits to making the wrong call as the Covid pandemic gathered steam. “I believed that bear markets and recessions don’t come from pandemics, as evidenced by what happened with the 1918 Spanish influenza.
“But I missed completely that governments might lock down the economy, something I never thought they would do and I was, again, dead wrong. Fortunately the bear market didn’t last long.”
His biggest winners include Nucor Steel, whose share price rose 15 fold after his investments in the 1970s, and a floppy disc manufacturer that rose 10 times in four years.
He says: “In recent times my winners would be Apple, which I’ve held a long time and added to over the years, Nvidia – the chip maker – more recently of the last five years, but also all the pure mega-tech names which have behaved as you would have expected them to.
“My biggest losers in recent years have been three of the not so liquid, smaller bank stocks in the 2023 supposed banking crisis: Silicon Valley Bank, Signature Bank and First Republic.”
He can certainly afford to splash the cash, but Fisher insists he is not interested in materialism. “The world’s different to when I was a kid. I think it’s a worse world for the kind of features that were beneficial to me. The 1950s and 1960s were spectacularly appropriate for me.
“I’m not a very material guy, I don’t wear fancy clothes and I could live in a treehouse – I still spend a lot of time in tents, in the rain.”
But his real passion is studying redwoods. Before going into finance he studied forestry in northern California. “They are the weirdest tree in the world. It is a tremendously adaptive species – when you cut it down it doesn’t die – it’s the world’s tallest tree and one of the longest that has lived.
“I love that I have been able to contribute to and nudge tree science through largesse and effort in the field. The scientists I support [have learned] many new things we didn’t know when I was in school.”
How do the super-rich decide to pass on their wealth? He plans to give his away within the next two decades. “Most of my money will go in a way that I don’t understand, before my wife and I are dead. I don’t believe in things like The Giving Pledge – Bill Gates and Warren Buffett’s campaign to encourage the wealthy to give away most of their money to charity – it’s too formalised for me.
“But I don’t believe leaving huge amounts of money in an empire for future descendants is a particularly good thing for anybody either. My wife and I are in the process of figuring out how to do that. We just created a foundation – and everything has to be dispersed within 20 years.
“An awful lot of things you can give money to, in my opinion, are just bad. Most people that make a lot of money and put it in a permanent foundation would be rolling in their graves when they see what happens to it three generations later.”
Fisher is a Republican and considers the Democrats “anti-capitalistic”, but he says he doesn’t “like either party having over-the-top control.
“Republicans are a more diverse and raucous group than Democrats and don’t all agree on everything. Some are very stubborn on what they want and are largely prepared to burn the house down when they don’t get their way.
“Donald Trump is going to have a tougher time getting big things through than most people understand.”
While the American economy has relentlessly grown in recent years, Britain has stagnated for at least two decades.
The middle classes have suffered years of real-terms wage cuts, so how can the Government generate American standards of living? “Britain would be better served by supporting creative destruction – but it won’t. Britain has way too much of a culture antagonist to freer markets. But, in its defence, it is far better in that regard than most of the Continent.”
It’s been a good year for stock market investors so far. Interest rates are slowly falling, pushing money out of deposits and back into equities. The London stock market is up around 4pc, while the S&P 500 index, America’s benchmark, is surging – up by more than a quarter since the start of the year.
“In 2025 I continue to believe growth [stocks] will do better and value stocks will do worse than people expect,” says Fisher. But he is still invested in some of these companies, which he thinks may buck the trend.
“Within the value stock category I’m widely focused on fossil fuel stocks, led by Exxon and Chevron but also Shell, Total and Canadian Natural Resources.
“I’m also strong on the big credit card companies, Visa, Mastercard as well as within financials BlackRock [the investment manager] and JP Morgan Chase.”
Copy link
twitter
facebook
whatsapp
email