Why Conventional Investing Wisdom Is Usually Wrong, and How You Can Leverage It: Beat the Crowd: A Recipe for Outsmarting the Herd

    PORTLAND, OR, May 21, 2015 /24-7PressRelease/ -- When one of the world's most successful investors offers to share his investment strategies, it's likely to be a profitable read. When it's Ken Fisher, it's also likely to be an enjoyable one. Now, in Beat the Crowd: How You Can Out-Invest the Herd by Thinking Differently (Wiley, hardcover, $29.95), the best-selling author, billionaire, and Forbes "Portfolio Strategy" columnist brings his keen wit and keener intelligence to the art of being a contrarian investor.

Contrarianism is an investment strategy premised on the empirical fact that following the herd is a good way to get slaughtered. "Few truths," says Fisher, "are self-evident, but here's one as close as they get: in investing, the crowd is wrong much more often than right." There's money to be made in being a contrarian. And the first step, not surprisingly, is tossing aside the conventional wisdom of what a contrarian is.

Wall Street's definition of contrarian investing is simplistic and wrong, says Fisher, one of the most successful money managers in history, whose Fisher Investments controls nearly $65 billion in assets. True contrarianism isn't merely doing the opposite of the crowd. It's being smarter than the crowd--finding and leveraging valuable information that isn't already priced into a stock. Therein lies a real contrarian, as opposed to the curmudgeonly caricature that does the opposite of the herd even when the herd is right.

The trick to being a real--and successful--contrarian investor is to think originally. And that means training your brain to battle the media, the crowd, your friends, and your neighbors. "Armed with a few basic principles, internal alarm bells and an instinct for independent thought, [anyone] can be a true crowd-beating contrarian investor," Fisher reassures us. The rest of Beat the Crowd is Fisher rewiring the reader's brain until he or she is able to be ferret out nuggets of unbiased, unemotional, and unexplored information that lead to being right when everyone else is wrong.

Along the way he offers clear, eye-opening, and amusing instruction on everything from spotting elephants in the room to why political gridlock and debt are actually good for the stock market.

Fisher, on the Forbes 400 list of richest Americans and one of the country's largest investors, is a firm believer in the humbling power of the market--aka The Great Humiliator, or TGH. Markets are cruel, cold, and efficient. They think nothing of slicing our pride to ribbons, laughing at our hubris as they make mockery of our pretentions. You will be wrong, Fisher counsels. It will hurt and it could be costly. The good news is that in order to do fine you just need to be right more often than wrong. "Contrarians know that and accept it," Fisher says. "A 60% . . . success rate keeps you well ahead of most . . . if you're right 70% of the time . . . you become an absolute living legend."

Read Beat the Crowd and learn why:

- The next 30 months is all markets care about
- It's invariably a good idea to ignore the media when choosing stocks
- Why most of the things we think matter--GDP, debt, inflation, even politicians--aren't important for stocks

Beat the Crowd nicely upends the notion of the grumpy pessimist with a coda that's an inspiration for anyone interested in making money in the stock market. "Every day," he reminds us, "technologies collide in marvelous ways we couldn't have dreamed of before. The potential here is endless. Life will get better in ways you can't imagine. . . . Creativity will win out for as long as free markets exist--and the human spirit is amazing at preserving capitalism and building wealth. Stocks are your long-term way to own all of this."

About Ken Fisher

Forbes columnist and best-selling author Ken Fisher is the founder, CEO, and co-chief investment officer of Fisher Investments, a multi-billion dollar money management firm serving large institutions and high net worth individuals throughout most of the developed world.

Known for his prestigious Forbes "Portfolio Strategy" column, Ken has 30 years of high-profile market calls that make him the third-longest running columnist in Forbes history. His Forbes market forecasts are among America's most accurate as measured by independent third-party CXO Advisory Group.

Ken has also been published, interviewed and/or written about in numerous publications globally. He writes a weekly column for Germany's Focus Money magazine and monthly columns in the UK's Financial Times.

Beat the Crowd is Fisher's 11th book. Four, so far, have been New York Times bestsellers.

His early 1970s theoretical work pioneered an investment analysis tool called the Price-to-Sales Ratio, now a core part of financial curriculum. A prize-winning researcher, Ken has credits that span a multitude of professional and scholarly journals--a paper he co-authored with Meir Statman in 2000 received the Journal of Portfolio Management's Bernstein Fabozzi/Jacobs Levy Award.

In 2010, ThinkAdvisor recognized Ken on its prestigious Thirty for Thirty list as among the industry's 30 most influential individuals of the last three decades. Tiburon Strategic Advisors also recognized Ken, awarding him with their 2009 CEO Summit Award for Challenging Conventional Wisdom.

Ken is ranked #225 on the 2014 Forbes 400 list of Richest Americans and #663 on the 2015 list of Global Billionaires.

He and his wife, Sherrilyn, have three adult sons.

For more information, visit www.wiley.com/WileyCDA/WileyTitle/productCd-1118973054.html.

Media contact: Victor Gulotta
Gulotta Communications, Inc.
617-630-9286
http://www.booktours.com
victor(at)booktours(dot)com

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