[Это - укороченная версия аналитической статьи про крупную американскую финансовую фирму Fisher Investments из Калифорнии, которая повсеместно рекламирует свои услуги, предлагая помочь Вам выгодно вложить деньги. К сожалению, опыт общения с компанией и анализ ее деятельности нашим издателем показывают, что действительность плохо совпадает с представлением, которое вы можете получить от рекламы компании. Похоже, что Fisher Investments крупно повезло, когда они вынули деньги из рынка в 2001 и пропустили большое падение после 11 сентября. Никогда больше за время своего существования они не смогли предотвратить больших потерь, добиваясь лишь весьма средних результатов. Полная версия статьи на Интернет сайте нашей газеты www.OdessaPage.com]

Disclosure: Established in 1995, Fisher Investments Private Client Groupis a division of Fisher Investments that offers money management services to qualified individuals on a separately managed account basis. All mentions of Fisher Investments in this article are in reference to their Private Client Group. Fisher Investments account performance analyzed for this article applies to Global Total Return modeled accounts that have no client restrictions. In addition to having clients in the US, Fisher Investments now also services clients in Canada, the UK and through an affiliate in Germany. Laws and Fisher Investments business practices may differ significantly outside of the United States. Therefore, this article may not apply to non US based investors. Also, Fisher Investments has grown in part through significant acquisitions. Fisher Investments may have different obligations towards clients obtained through such acquisitions and may handle such accounts differently. Furthermore, Fisher Investments clients that indicate lower risk tolerance or shorter investment time horizons may experience results or strategies which are significantly different from the ones discussed in this article.This article expresses opinions about Fisher Investments based on one client's short experience working with Fisher Investments as well as on analysis of the limited data available from public sources and directly from the company.Since Fisher Investments only offers services to qualified individuals, it is not subject to the same rigorous regulatory oversight and reporting standards (including daily pricing) as are the mutual funds. Fisher Investments denied requests for additional data, which would have allowed for a more thorough and direct analysis of their performance.

Introduction: Fisher Investments is an independent money management firm with over $45 billion in assets under management. In existence since 1979, it first began offering money management services to individuals in 1995. Fisher Investments advertises widely on financial websites and is an amazingly well run marketing machine. Fisher Investments staff and marketing materials position Fisher Investments as the country's leading wealth money manager with stellar performance. CEO of Fisher Investments, Kenneth Fisher is a son of the legendary investor and author of Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits, Philip A. Fisher.Ken in his monthly column in Forbes magazine, picks stocks among random musings on the state of the economy. Some years these stock picks have done reasonably well, however, according to Ken Fisher's January 2008 column in Forbes, 2007 was not one of those years, with his stock picks yielding less than a 1% return. Turns out that just like their boss, Fisher Investments also fails to impress with consistent performance. In fact, analysis of Ken Fisher and Fisher Investments money management strategy, style and stock picks yields surprising results.

Fisher Investments Basics: Fisher Investments traders use sophisticated software to route buy and sell orders to brokerages. Each security's daily average per share execution price is assigned to the affected client account's transactions at the end of the trading day. For this reason, clients can see the day's transactions only after US markets close and never in real time. Fisher Investments accounts are fully discretionary, which means that at any time Fisher Investments may buy or sell any security that they believe will benefit clients. Clients, however, are able to direct Fisher Investments to not buy or not sell certain stocks, or stocks in certain industries. Beyond this and other items listed in the disclosure, Fisher Investments intends for all accounts to be the same at all times, with neither consideration given to the date when each account was first set up, nor the cost basis of securities in each of the accounts. It makes sense that each customer should equally benefit from Fisher Investments "best ideas." However, this simplistic approach fails to recognize that some positions in current clients' portfolios are neither "buys," nor "sells." For example, if Fisher Investments should decide that a certain account position must be reduced over a given time period, clients starting with Fisher Investments over that time period would instead see this position added to their accounts. By ignoring "holds" Fisher Investments appears to simplify their work, but may compromise performance of their clients’ portfolios.

Purisima fund: In addition to being the CEO of Fisher Investments, Kenneth Fisher also manages Purisima Total Return (PURIX) mutual fund, which, just like the Fisher Investments accounts, is benchmarked against MSCI World Index and which, incidentally, according to Morningstar as of February 15th, 2008 lags behind both that index and other funds in the category for average 3 and 5 year performance. There are claims circulating on the Internet that PURIX and Fisher Investments accounts are the same. Of course, to verify this unequivocally would require cooperation from Fisher Investments, which we have not been able to obtain. Nevertheless, we can get sufficiently close by simply looking at the data. Fisher Investments built a 69 position account for me between December 20th, 2007 and January 7th, 2008. Of these, 46 positions were also PURIX top 55 holdings from over a month before! (This, according to the latest publicly available information from a 1/29/08 PURIX filing. Also, these 46 holdings accounted for more than 61.6% of that fund's value on 11/30/07.) In addition, there are only small differences in annual performance between PURIX and Fisher Investments accounts, with PURIX beating Fisher Investments Global Total Return by 0.7% a year on average. Such small performance differences could, potentially, be explained by the differences in fee structures. In any case, that these two sets of annual performance numbers correlate 99.85% with each other and far better than either of them correlates with the MSCI World Index for the ten years from 1997 to 2006 is hardly an accident. This data leaves very little doubt that even if not identical, Purisima Total Return (PURIX) mutual fund and Fisher Investments accounts are at least identical twins.

(Please note that I did not have full year 2007 performance numbers to use in this article. Those of our readers who have read Ken Fisher's latest book, The Only Three Questions that Count, probably noticed Fisher Investments account performance numbers published in Appendix K. If they had also looked at the PURIX fund prospectus, they would have noticed that the two sets of performance numbers look nothing alike. The only reason for this is that the performance numbers, as published in the book (but not in the prospectus) are for the years ending on June 30th, instead of December 31st, as is customary in the industry. We expect that many of Ken's book readers missed the small print explaining this fact and would have been mislead as a result.)

Exchange Traded Funds (ETFs): ETFs are essentially mutual funds that can be traded on exchanges, just like stocks. Fisher Investments allocated 8.5% of my portfolio not to individual stocks, but to four ETFs.Two of these were by far the largest positions taken out by Fisher Investments on my behalf. Fisher Investments account representative claimed that this was the most cost effective way to build my portfolio. However, each of these funds has their own management expense and three of the four were not in Emerging Markets. Of course, it would be cost prohibitive to take out miniscule positions in each of the underlying securities directly. However, that's hardly necessary and purchasing the best stocks included in each of the ETFs would yield better results. Of course, identifying which individual stock will perform best is a more difficult job to do. But that's why clients hire money managers in the first place!

World stocks - US markets: Roughly half of all the individual stocks purchased for my portfolio by Fisher Investments were American Depository Receipts (ADRs) and American Depository Shares (ADSs), which represent ownership in the shares of a foreign company, but trade on US exchanges. No securities were purchased directly on any foreign exchange. Fisher Investments client service representative told me that the reason Fisher Investments purchases ADRs and ADSs instead of the underlying securities is that it is the most cost effective way for their clients to own these companies. That may well be, but there are also many more worthwhile foreign companies that do not trade on any US exchange and owning shares in some of these could greatly benefit Fisher Investments clients. Filtering out foreign companies simply on the basis of them not being available on US exchanges, appears to defeat the goal of going international.

The Pink Sheets: The "Fisher penalty" would be even larger on low trading volume positions, such as the 5 Pink Sheets ADRs/ADSs that Fisher Investments included in my portfolio. These were actually purchased for my account at an average of 3.79% above their December 20th closing prices! No wonder. As of December 31st Fisher Investments controlled almost 5 million shares of the Pink Sheet traded BASFY, almost 5 times as many as the next largest holder, and about 80 times this Pink Sheet's average daily volume. Another one of the Fisher Investments Pink Sheet favorites, FJTSY, on average trades about 11 thousand shares a day, yet Fisher Investments controlled more than 2.5 million shares of it as of December 31st. Yet another one, CHEUY trades under 130 thousand shares a day, yet Fisher Investments controlled almost 17 million shares of it. Some days, these stocks have zero volume and on other days, much of their volume should be coming from Fisher Investments transactions. That would make them rather illiquid and their true market price, difficult to ascertain. So, why does Fisher Investments like these Pink Sheets enough to pay a larger premium for them? The most likely explanation is that it is far easier for Fisher Investments to deal with these Pink Sheets,than with the underlying securities trading on different continents, in different time zones, in different currencies, subject to different laws and perhaps even requiring different software to transact. So, who cares that it negatively impacts portfolio performance in the short term? It is a small price to pay for owning stock in such great companies and long term it will not matter, or so Fisher Investments would like you to believe.

Diversification: Out of the 69 total positions that were purchased for my accounts by Fisher Investments, the largest individual stock position was just over 3% of the portfolio, the smallest about 0.5%. Fisher Investments says that they put a large number of positions in every portfolio in order to properly represent the world / industry allocations that they are targeting. Of course, another good reason for diversification is that it tends to reduce volatility when the various components are weakly correlated and ensures that a single bad pick is not disastrous to overall portfolio performance. But while a 0.5% position in a large cap stock makes sense for an index fund and large actively managed mutual funds, adding it to relatively small actively managed separate accounts seems rather pointless. It is virtually guaranteed to not significantly impact portfolio results. Aggressive diversification with smaller accounts increases costs and appears to say that Fisher Investments is afraid to be wrong and thus is not willing to make any big bets on any specific individual stocks.

Dollar-cost averaging: Fisher Investments Client Owner Manual claims that dollar-cost averaging generates lower returns on average than the lump sum approach. Long term, markets do go up, so there is no doubt that given a statistically large number of investors acting over a long period of time, on average they will achieve better results with lump sum investments. So why is dollar-cost averaging being religiously preached by most of the industry gurus? Shorter term markets can and do turn bear for months and even years at a time. Investment legend of our time, Warren Buffet, when asked about his secret for success, said that he only has two rules. "Rule No.1: Never lose money. Rule No.2: Never forget rule No.1." Nobody can reliably predict when the next bear will roar and for how long. Accidentally investing a lump sum at a market peak can lead to a financial disaster, while dollar-cost averaging can reduce the risk of a large loss. In any case, Fisher Investments would not dollar-cost average and it is too early to tell whether Fisher Investments lump sum approach would have worked out in my case. However, with the market down significantly in January, so far, it looks highly unlikely.

Long Term Fisher Investments Performance: (Note: Fisher Investments did not provide me with performance data beyond Q3 of 2007.) Fisher Investments cumulative results from 1995 to Q3 2007 look good vs. both the MSCI World Index and the S&P 500 Index. However, this is but one way to measure performance. Let's dissect and consider other starting and ending points, for one never knows where along the performance curve a particular investor will enter. This more granular approach to analyzing the data will also provide further insight into Fisher Investments strengths and weaknesses.Fisher Investments did reasonably well in their first 6 years of managing individual investors money, growing their clients accounts by 197.4%, but they lagged behind the S&P 500, which returned 219.4% over the same time period. Then in 2001, Fisher Investments pulled nothing short of a miracle: they timed the market and won, turning in 3.2% return in the year when virtually every index and mutual fund produced double digit losses. This amazing feet earned Fisher Investments recognition and high accolades throughout the financial world. Yet, even these miraculous results fell short of one of the Fisher Investments goals for bear markets, as stated in their Client Owner's Manual, to "beat cash and perhaps fixed income alternatives." In any case, they were not able to repeat this performance the following year, instead underperforming both the MSCI World and the S&P 500 Index in 2002. In fact, over the last six years from 9/30, 2001 to 9/30, 2007 Fisher Investments accounts gained 58.4%, lagging behind both the S&P 500 Index gain of 63.1% and the MSCI World Index gain of 95.1%.

Fisher's darkest 5 months: When I evaluate mutual funds' past performance, in addition to the usual parameters, I also like to see how they did during the most difficult times. It is no different for private money managers, like Fisher Investments. For Fisher, as for so many others, the worst annualized performance in absolute terms came as the technology bubble deflated in 2002. From the charts Fisher Investments provides, it is apparent that in the five months from the beginning of May to October, Fisher Investments clients lost more than 30% of their account values. Certainly not the kind of performance we would expected from the "best money manger" under any circumstances. But how does this compare with performance of some of the other mutual funds I track and Ken Fisher's own PURIX? The table below shows mutual fund performance during those five months of 2002.

* Estimate, precise data for the exact time period in the table is not readily available.

In the 2002 time frame, Kenneth Fisher's PURIX fund decidedly stands out as the group's laggard, while the leader of the pack is the Morningstar five star rated Fidelity Contrafund (FCNTX). A closer look shows that Contrafund is one of the very few funds that long term and consistently has been able to achieve Fisher Investments' top two goals for bear markets, as spelled out in their Client Owner Manual: 1) reduce risk consistent with portfolio theory and 2) beat the equity benchmark. Fisher Investments doesn't always have problems achieving these goals. However, they have not been able to do so consistently and 2002 is just one example, when they have failed especially badly.

Fisher Investments Advisory Fees: Fisher Investments standard fee for clients with $500,000 - $1,000,000 in assets under management is 1.25%. This is 0.25% above what appears to be the industry standard for this size accounts. Nevertheless, it would still be reasonable had it not been for rather poor past performance implied for Fisher Investments accounts by the above analysis, the "Fisher penalty" previously discussed, the higher relative commission costs for smaller positions and perhaps most importantly, availability of viable lower cost alternatives. Also, in what appears to be a rather unusual move, Fisher Investments starts the fee clock from the date of account signing, rather than from the date they begin trading in your account. Be aware that in some cases a significant amount of time may pass between these two dates. Fisher Investments sales people may assure you that if it takes "too long," they would change the effective date. To help avoid problems down the road, you should get such promises in writing.

Conclusion: Despite their claims to the contrary, Fisher Investments appears to be too large of an organization to give each client the personalized account servicing they deserve. Apparently, instead of concentrating their efforts on first rate stock research and implementing stock trading strategies to benefit their individual client needs, Fisher Research uses their massive resources to build and maintain a well oiled, flashy and bureaucratic marketing machine that functions similar to a worldwide mutual fund, but with less regulation, higher expenses and less predictable results than low cost mutual funds. Fisher Investments has delivered mediocre results for their clients throughout the 13-year history of their Private Client Group. A big exception to this was their amazing call to stay out of the market and/or hedge in 2001. As a result of that call they also missed the steep market decline immediately following the tragedy of 9/11. Those who believe in miracles and truly think that Fisher Investments will be able to time the market around the next disaster, I recommend sticking with Fisher Investments. The rest of us will likely be better of going with a more consistent money manager. People with nontaxable retirement accounts and with smaller taxable accounts, should also consider investing in a low cost Mutual Fund, such as the Fidelity Contrafund, which by consistently beating indexes, outperformed Fisher Investments over the past ten years, without resorting to market timing.