Fisher Investments | The Ten Roads to Riches

Fisher Investments Press brings the research, analysis, and market intelligence of a research team, headed by CEO and New York Times best-selling author Ken Fisher of Fisher Investments, to all investors. Fisher Investments Press will introduce a series of books covering a range of investing and market-related topics for a wide audience-from novices to enthusiasts to professionals.

The first Fisher Investments Press title, The Ten Roads to Riches by Ken Fisher of Fisher Investments, is slated for publication on October 20, 2008 and focuses on various methods of wealth accumulation, from old-fashioned saving to inheritance and business enterprise. The book is filled with career and lifestyle advice interspersed with compelling and real-world examples of successes and failures. Ken Fisher of Fisher Investments is a self-made billionaire, #281 on the 2008 Forbes 400 list of richest Americans, and founder and CEO of $40+ billion money management firm, Fisher Investments.

The following is an extract from The Ten Roads to Riches preface:

Wouldn't it be wonderful if everyone were rich and no one poor? If poverty didn't exist? If the only wealth disparities were whether she had $20 million, he had $7 million, and another one had $7 billion? Feel free to disagree, but I don't see much merit in poverty. Sadly, I can't see poverty being eliminated in your lifetime or mine. Still I believe you can do your little part toward that goal by making yourself wealthy in a way that creates wealth for society as well. If you get yourself rich in one of a handful of appropriate ways, you make the world a better place. Others benefit as you get rich, as you will read later. I, for one, would like you to do that.

But how? Well, that's what this book is about. There are really only 10 ways to get rich. This book details them and shows you the good and bad qualities of each so you can pick among them and decide which is right for you. Then, the book teaches and guides you on the basics of each.

It's true not everyone can become rich. But it's clear to me that most people can-they just don't know how. If more people knew how, we would have more rich people and the world would be a better place. I'm asking you to read this book and then do your part.

Now, if you know me from past books or my long-running Forbes "Portfolio Strategy" column, you may not know I'm a roads scholar. Not a Rhodes Scholar who got money to study at Oxford, but the more important kind-that studies the various roads leading folks to financial success and failure.

It started as a kid in the 1950s, dreaming of becoming a professional baseball catcher and simply adoring Yogi Berra who famously said, "When you come to a fork in the road, take it." For decades I've kept a large version of that quote on a note board within three feet of me at my desk, collaged with photos and notes of people that are and have been important to me. Takes decades of wisdom to get life down that simply. Pretty much sums up how to get super wealthy, once you understand the roads.

Berra later decried most all his most famous Yogisms. He claimed this particular quote was simply driving directions to his home, and when you got to the fork it didn't matter which way you went because they reconnected later and either fork got you there. If so, it's kind of a Zen-like statement about continuing-sort of like the command, "Further"- and we can use that too. But growing up I assumed Berra's was a comment about making quick, fundamental, timely decisions without great road signs. Maybe I was wrong all this time. But I still prefer my interpretation of the great American Yogi. In life there are roads leading to riches and roads not. There's nothing wrong with ones that don't, but if you travel them you'll go where they take you. Don't be surprised.

To methodically get rich there are only 10 basic roads. Find one making sense for you, get to that fork in the road, take it, and stick to it. But 10 roads can be confusing. Ten! Hence the need for this book. Reading it may not make you a roads scholar, but you'll know enough to get the rest of the way down your chosen road (or roads) on your own.

One point: If you've read any of my prior books, this isn't like them. They were largely about capital markets, primarily stocks and bonds. That is my main background as founder and CEO of [Fisher Investments] running over $45 billion in stock and bond money for institutions and wealthy individuals. But this isn't a capital markets book at all. It's a detailed micro and macro inspection of how very wealthy people get that way-and how you can too!

Why 10 roads? Why not five? Or 100? It's just the observation of this roads scholar from studying wealthy people all my 36-year investment career. I've got over 25,000 wealthy clients I've studied carefully-some for decades. As a 24-year Forbes columnist I've studied and written about the annual Forbes 400 list of richest Americans for decades-and been on it and the Forbes global billionaire list myself since 2005-and know people on both lists in and out of America, and interacted with many more very wealthy people. From all my observation, I can tell you they all fit into 10 basic categories.

But this book isn't about "what most rich folks have in common." There are plenty of those books and they're perfectly fine. They're usually about one road-"live frugal and save." Like The Millionaire Next Door, Rich Dad Poor Dad, The Automatic Millionaire, on and on. They tell stories from a traditional American Calvinist, Christian background-about down-to-earth, frugal folks with great work ethic who own gas stations and trailer parks and sock away a few million. Or your typical, middle-class, modest homeowner in a modest neighborhood driving a modest, used car, working 70-hour weeks, saving and investing well. These books admonish you to be like them. That's a fine road, to be sure. It's the most common way people get wealthy, though it doesn't generate the biggest fortunes. I call it "The Road More Traveled," and it's this book's last chapter. It's a perfectly valid road-the preferred road for many and the only for some. While fine, it's just one road and generally not how the mega-rich did it. The richest can be frugal or not-it doesn't much matter because they create so much wealth mastering one of the other nine roads. Frugality is a virtue but isn't necessary to becoming super wealthy, as you'll see.

Fisher Investments Press' The Ten Roads to Riches