While most consider Fisher's Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits to be his classic, I believe this book to be superior. The timing of the book is outstanding. Written at the bottom of the '73-'74 bear market, Fisher makes a case to buy stocks. A quote from the introduction makes this clear. "This book will, I hope, throw light on whether the problems that helped produce the recent bear market have created a condition where stock ownership is just a trap for the unwary or whether, as in every prior major bear market in U.S. history, they have created a magnificent opportunity for those with the ability and the self-discipline to think for themselves and to act independently of the popular emotions of the moment." Fisher goes on to state the many factors which make a great company. Being on Wall Street for 12 years, I have read many investment books, most of which are quite lacking. Along with his work done in 1980, Developing An Investment Philosophy, this is a must read for serious investors, and should be required reading in business schools.

Too bad this book is out of print!! I read this book avidly from cover to cover. As a parent I was disappointed by the plethora of plastic toys for babies and toddlers, especially things that used to be wood, metal or some other material when I was a child. Author Fisher writes concisely, giving good instructions (not easy to do in this pseudo "cookbook" for toys). One disappointment: some of the materials used frequently are not easily available where I live, so one needs to check local supply stores. For first-time parents this is also an excellent introduction to child development.

Phillip Fisher is the father of qualitative analysis. This book changed my life like no other. It has made me settle down as an investor and think as a businessman, and put all notions of trading aside. From reading Fisher, I now understand that one should only invest in a small number of stocks, but these stocks must be perfect in all aspects. He shows one what signs to look for in a company and how to analyze it . From reading Mr. Fishers book I have put all my money in Coca Cola, and have been well rewarded. Mr Warren Buffett who read this book in the 1960's found it to be one of the best investment books ever written. I myself consider it my family bible. Life as an investor was pure hell until I read this book, and after reading it I feel that nothing can stop me from becoming very wealthy. All I have to do is follow the steps that are in this book. Thank You Mr. Fisher.

MYCROFT

For the long term value investors who will be investing in a company for 20-30 years, it is vital to understand and evaluate the management of a company who is directly responsible for the long term well being of the company. The author will help the reader achieve this by guiding the reader through systematically. Philip Fisher's insights are penetrating, straight to the point, and thought provoking. This book is a real tour de force and its philosophy on excellent business economics had a great influence on Warren Buffet's investment philosophy. This is a classic that should be read by all long term value investors.

Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits is one of the classic investment texts written for the lay person.

Rather than just seeking value, Fisher realized that even a greatly "undervalued" company could prove a horrible investment. Sure, you might occasionally buy a stock for less than the company's cash-in-the-bank (back then, at least!). But what if the business is horribly run? It might not take long for the company to lose all that cash!

Even if the company returns to "fair" value, that ends the potential profit from investing in such a business. Holding an average company, because it was once undervalued, but is no more, makes little sense.

Fisher points out that the largest wealth via investing has been made in one of two ways. First, buying stocks when the markets crash and holding them until the markets recover. Secondly, with less risk and more potential return, you can also just invest in a small portfolio of companies which continue to strongly grow sales and earnings over the years. Then, if the company was correctly selected, you might never have to sell, while accruing a huge return on your initial investment.

Fisher pioneered the school of growth stock investing. In Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits, Fisher explains how he selects a growth company. He lists fifteen points which a company must have to be considered a superior investment.

Fisher's first point seems obvious: "Does the company have products or services with sufficient market potential to make possible a sizeable increase in sales for at least several years?"

Fisher shows that some companies might have potential substantial sales increases for only a few years, but after that have limited potential due to some factor, such as market saturation. For example, Fisher mentions the growth in sales of TV's until the U.S. market was saturated.

He also wisely suggests looking behind the products to seek other superior investments. While many TV manufacturers were competitive and it was difficult to tell which was best, Fisher points out that Corning Glass Works was, by far, the company most capable of producing the glass bulbs used in TVs.

Fisher tries to clearly distinguish between companies which are "fortunate and able" and those which are "fortunate because they are able." The second kind, the superior investments, are highly innovative and create new products which have growth potential. Fisher uses Dow Chemical as one example of a "fortunate because they are able" company.

The second point wants to know if management has the drive to innovate new products. A man ahead of his time, Fisher wonders about how much of a company's future sales might come from products not yet invented.

A constant theme of Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits is examining what the company is doing to prepare for the future. Is the company spending wisely on Research and Development? Or, is the company just trying to maximize its current profit and reinvesting nothing for future growth?

Fisher explains why answering that question is difficult in practice. What different companies account for under R&D is one problem. Another is that some companies are more successful than others at turning money spent on R&D into future marketable products. Today, we must assume this question is far more difficult to answer!

In addition to questioning a company's R&D, Fisher wants to see a company with a strong sales organization and distribution efficiency. "It is the making of a sale that is the most basic single activity of any business," he writes.

Yet, why don't investors focus upon such key factors instrumental to a company's future growth? Fisher points out that certain issues are not quantifiable. That is why many investors tend to focus upon financial issues which can be expressed in a simple ratio.

How does the investor go about answering the "unquantifiable"? How does the investor know how well-managed the company is? Or, how does one evaluate the people factors, which Fisher says are the real strength of a superior growth company?

Fisher suggests the "scuttlebutt" method. This involves talking to suppliers, customers, company employees, and people knowledgeable in the industry, and, eventually, company management. From this information, an investor can get a good feel for the quality of the company as a growth investment. Fisher teaches us how to learn to ask the correct, company-specific questions.

Fisher acknowledges the "scuttlebutt" method is a lot of work. But, he asks, should it be easy to find such great companies, when finding only a few can easily lay the foundation for building huge future wealth?

I tend to think the average individual investor will not use the "scuttlebutt" method. And, for most investors and most companies, even if the investor had the desire to use this method, it would not be practical.

Yet, for investors seeking to make investments in smaller, local companies, the "scuttlebutt" method might be of value. For angel investors or mini-venture capitalists, reading "Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits" is probably also worthwhile.

The book also has some excellent thoughts about buying-and-holding a stock and when to sell a stock. Fisher's thoughts on diversification are also well worth reading, although I would recommend more diversification than Fisher claims is adequate.

Overall, this is a great book for the individual investor. You will not be able to follow the "scuttlebutt" method in practice, for most investments, and, maybe, the complexity of today's companies and scientific research in many growth companies make Fisher's method less practical today than in the past, but there is much to learn about business and investing from this book.

Peter Hupalo, Author of "Becoming An Investor: Building Wealth By Investing In Stocks, Bonds, And Mutual Funds"

If you buy "Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits and Other Writings" published by Wiley Investment Classics, you will find that the 'Other Writings' are the full text of this book, "Developing an Investment Philosophy" and the full text of his other popular book "Conservative Investors Sleep Well".

This book contains good information, but the best bargain is to buy just the one book.

Let me first give the obligatory warning that you can get the entire text of this 47-page "book" as part of "Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits and Other Writings" (itself 271 pages in length). To be fair to the work itself, I don't think you can get a more concise and clear description of growth investing than this monograph, which was published in 1980, when it is remarkable to recall that there had been an "unfortunate trend of recent years away from common stock investing".

There have been two prominent pioneers in the growth-investing field from its beginnings in the 1950s, T. Rowe Price and Philip A. Fisher. However, to my knowledge, Price did not write publicly about his methods. Fisher has, in an excellent manner.

Fisher interestingly commends the alternative school of investment, value investing, personified by Benjamin O. Graham. I think Fisher makes a good case that an excellent growth investor can achieve better results under the right conditions than an excellent value investor (Fisher quotes Shakespeare: "There is a tide in the affairs of men which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune"). By definition, Fisher suggests that there can be few truly great growth investors in the universe at any one time, because [p. 30] "companies with truly unusual prospects for appreciation are quite hard to find for there are not too many of them." Fisher's work also gives the impression that growth investors need to operate at a particularly high-Watt level of intensity that perhaps few can match. In fact, it seems that growth investors often need to know more about an industry's and company's prospects than the CEOs themselves.

For those that are thinking of picking up Fisher's methodology and storming into the world of growth stocks, let me offer a few words of caution. First, Fisher valued highly the honesty of the managements that he quizzed about their firms' prospects: [p.17] "...the kind of honesty that caused [the company manager] not to conceal repeated bad news that could not fail to be embarrassing for him to tell. He saw to it that those interested in his company understood all the unfavorable aspects of what was happening, and not just the favorable potentials." In our age where most corporate managements are "control freaks" about their company images, true honesty seems hard to find. Secondly, during the first half of Fisher's career, particularly in the 1950s, there existed a whole class of institutional investors who as a matter of policy did not invest in growth stocks. As they said of Motorola in those days, [p.18] "...this was not the type of company on which they spent time; therefore they had no opinion of it." This is not true in our day. Millions of investors, large and small, are looking for great growth companies. To the extent that you find one, it may be too richly priced for your portfolio's health.

its hard to find so much experience (over 50 years) of a great mind in less than 50 pages.

I am not impressed by anything that Berg writes. He is no kabbalist. This book demonstrates a real lack of understaning about some of the most fundamental issues.

It is no wonder that (on his website - ...) that he now sells bottles of "kabbalistic water" which have been "blessed" by Berg.

This book is shallow and has nothing to offer.

this is the first of many amazing Kabbalah books by Rav Berg. Each one is more & more amazing

Many people that write about Kabbalah. Here is someone that knows what it is. Great Start & should get more of latest books

This book is a collection of new perspections to access to American literary and cultural studies after the Civil War. Each essay in this book represents how American literary and cultural identity have been redefined through the several times of civil wars.

There is a rather peculiar book. Thompson's main goal is to criticize consequentialism but it appears that most consequentialists don't even accept the consequentialism that is her target, namely some kind of view that says we should promote *goodness simpliciter*, NOT goodness for sentient beings, goodness for persons, other states that are intrinsically good or whatever. Thompson has an odd target and even if she refutes it, it's not clear what difference it makes to most other consequentialist theories. (Thompson's view seems like it could be classified as a consequentialism anyway).

Four people give comments on Thompson's main text but two of them are't even philosophers (I think they are from English departments!??). Nussbaum's comments interesting though.

Some of Thompson's articles on these topics are a bit better than this book. I'd recommend checking them out first.

I wish I had read the on-line reviews of this book before wasting my money on it. It won a big award and had decent blurbs, and when I dipped into it in the bookstore it seemed interesting. Then I took it home and read it, or tried to. The problem with it is that the author doesn't stay with a topic long enough to say anything meaningful about it. What might seem like range is merely superficiality. And the reviewer who noted that the author gets his facts wrong is putting it mildly. This is perhaps the most disappointing academic book I've read in the last ten years.

The very first sentence of Philip Fisher's book says a lot. It reads, "Of all American literature the scene that stays longest in many reader's minds is the one in which Tom Sawyer paints Aunt Sally's fence." The irony is, of course, delicious. Tom Sawyer paints Aunt Polly's fence, not Aunt Sally's. Aunt Sally is neither in Missouri nor in _The Adventures of Tom Sawyer__; she's in Arkansas and __Adventures of Huckleberry Finn__, published eight years later. And just so that the reader will not think this a typo, Fisher repeats his huge gaff twice a few pages later. Why does this matter? Because scholars feel, quite reasonably, that if a critic cannot even get the basic facts of a text correct, then such sloppiness extends to that critic's interpretations. In this case, they do. In __Still the New World__, Fisher is attempting to give us the grand picture, much like such earlier critics like Alfred Kazin and Edmund Wilson were wont to do. But he possesses neither the insight of such critics, nor their extraordinary grasp of the field. And so, Fisher's book breaks down into a lot of impressive sounding but ultimately groundless assertions about American literature and culture, many of which are culled, without attribution, from the works of less ambitious but much more credible scholars. Reading this book, I had the uncanny feeling that I had heard this all before. And so I had, in different places. A final irony. This book shared the inaugural Truman Capote Award for literary criticism with a terrific book on creativity by Elaine Scarry. Both authors are professors at Harvard, and Harvard chooses the recipients of the award. Fisher's book is also published by Harvard University Press. A little incestuous? Perhaps. Would that there were someone at that distinguished press who had a background in American literature and who could edit. Then Fisher would have been spared his embarrassing goof, and the press would have been spared this rehash of what has been said before.

_Still the New World_ was published to rave reviews and won awards, but it's a book that should be approached with a good deal of skepticism.

Fisher's thesis is that American democratic and technological society presents us all with a level playing field. Apparently the speed of technological change makes us immigrants of us all, since every generation is presented with a new world, a new set of challenges. Apparently, again, we all have equal access to this new world; we can all make use of it to the same degree and profit from it en masse.

Fisher goes further to celebrate the sameness of American culture--claiming that suburbs from Boston to LA are all essentially the same: people live in the same houses, drive the same cars, buy the same products, watch the same shows on TV, eat the same food. This isn't a problem for Fisher, but is instead something to be celebrated as the triumph of a Cartesian democratic space.

I would suggest that Fisher has been closeted within Harvard Yard for too long. It seems flippant at best, arrogant and ignorant at worst, to suggest that we're all immigrants and have access to the same opportunities. Would Mr. Fisher care to think about being a non-white immigrant into this country he might realize that all immigrants are not equal. To claim that being faced with new technologies is kin to being an immigrant to the country is implausible, as if being unable to set the VCR is as serious a problem as facing a prejudiced and often racist immigration process.

He glosses over the detrimental effects of the sameness of American culture (even as he overstates that sameness). Large, multi-national corporations and chain stores have ruined small businesses nationwide, and the goods that we are fortunate enough to buy in most of this country are made at the expense of people in other countries or poorer regions of this one.

To suggest that all suburbs are the same is ludicrous: even without leaving the Boston area Fisher should compare Cambridge to some of Boston's poorer working class neighborhoods.

Fisher celebrates America's greatness, but in fact he's performing a dangerous sleight of hand, ignoring many of the social problems that we're facing.