7 Secrets Wealthy People Know About Amassing And Maintaining A Fortune -
posted on
Apr 26, 2013 02:04PM
http://news.yahoo.com/7-secrets-wealthy-people-know-133755925.html
Some here said they haven't sold a share. Friday humor? .. Delete it ?
5. Find Stocks You'll Never Sell
At the forefront of investing royalty in the last century was an intense man with round glasses from northern California named Philip Fisher. He became the first to author an investing book that cracked The New York Times bestseller list with Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits in 1958. It became an establishing text for modern growth investing, laying out a 15-point strategy that wound up catching the attention of a young man from Nebraska: Warren Buffett, who would make tens of billions of dollars through a combination of Fisher's tenets and those by value investing founding father Benjamin Graham.
Today, Fisher's son, Ken, is also a billionaire. He manages a $42 billion asset management company, and still calls northern California home. The younger Fisher is perhaps more value oriented than his father--especially favoring the price/sales ratio when assessing a company's worth--but there's a particular point in his father's work that he says is never far from his mind. Probably because it plays well in value investing, too. It's the idea that you buy a stock with the mentality to own it forever.
Papa Fisher had good reason to buy and never let go. He faced capital gains rates that topped 45%. (Today's, by contrast, cap gains are much lower at 20% or so.) He bought DuPont and Dow Chemical in the 1930s, selling them only four decades or so later. He picked up Motorola in the 1980s, and still owned shares when he died at age 96 in 2004.
Does such a mentality have a place in today's world of milisecond trading? "If done right, yes," says the younger Fisher. "People aren't perfect, though."