Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits

Philip Fisher’s *Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits*, first published in 1958, is a foundational text of growth investing. Fisher, a longtime San Francisco money manager whose firm held stocks like Motorola and Texas Instruments for decades, argued that the surest path to exceptional returns is buying a small number of outstanding growth companies and holding them through fluctuations rather than trading on market timing or cyclical forecasts. The book’s best-known contribution is the “fifteen points,” a checklist for evaluating a prospective investment. These include whether a company’s products have enough market potential for sizable sales gains, whether management is developing new products to sustain growth beyond current lines, the firm’s profit margins and what it does to maintain or improve them, its labor and executive relations, whether it has depth in management, and above all whether management has integrity and candor with shareholders. Fisher supplements the checklist with the “scuttlebutt” method: gathering intelligence on a company not from its own reports but by talking to customers, suppliers, competitors, and former employees. Another distinctive chapter, “When to Buy,” rejects trying to time purchases to the business cycle, and “When to Sell” warns against selling good growth holdings for the wrong reasons, listing three legitimate ones. Fisher also contrasts his concentrated approach with excessive diversification, cautioning that owning too many stocks dilutes the gains from the few truly outstanding ones. Warren Buffett has cited Fisher’s ideas, particularly the scuttlebutt technique and the emphasis on qualitative management assessment, as an influence on his own investing philosophy.