The cold calls go out, hundreds a day, from a dank basement in the redwood hills south of San Francisco.
Inside the rambling, rustic-chic house, the billionaire Kenneth Fisher has deployed a division of his mostly young, mostly male acolytes on a single, high-pressure mission: sell.
Worn carpets, musty smells, poor insulation: It’s not what you might expect from a money-management empire that’s been overseeing more than $100 billion. But then, this is the private kingdom of Ken Fisher, where Fisher’s way is the only way.
For decades, the idiosyncratic money manager has sold himself as a brilliant stock picker with the help of almost a dozen books, torrents of direct mail, seminars, videos, ads, magazine columns and more. His happy message for investors: “We do better, when you do better.”
Indeed, Fisher Investments has done very well -- most of all for Ken Fisher. Over the past decade, as the firm filled mailboxes across America with tens of millions of marketing flyers, it has employed aggressive sales tactics to sell stock investments with relatively steep fees. Fisher, meantime, has grown fabulously rich: He’s now worth about $3.8 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.
Few who’ve passed through his private-residence-turned-office in Woodside, California, or headquarters on a tree-lined campus in Camas, Washington, were surprised when Fisher let loose with a string of sexist and vulgar remarks at an industry conference this month. At Fisher Investments, such language isn’t unusual.
At a staff meeting in 2008, for example, as financial markets were reeling, a woman asked Fisher if he’d considered shifting into defensive holdings.
“Why would I want half a dick?,” Fisher replied, according to two people who attended the meeting.
Fisher, 68, initially said he was surprised by the recent uproar because he’s spoken like that plenty of times. He later apologized.
But for Fisher, the man, as well as Fisher, the firm, the fallout is piling up. Already, more than $1 billion in assets has drained away since his remarks on Oct. 8: Pensions for Michigan and Iowa and for the city of Boston have fired the firm. Fidelity and others have said they’re reviewing their relationships.