Fisher held some stocks for decades and set no numeric rules at all. He judged a company by the quality of its business and its management, built up from talking to everyone around it. His is the one SageRanks lens with no hard limits, by design.
While Graham counted assets, Philip Fisher studied businesses. His 1958 classic, Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits, made the case that a truly great growth company, bought and held, beats a lifetime of trading in and out of cheap ones. Buffett famously described himself as "85% Graham and 15% Fisher," and that 15% is the part that learned to pay up for quality. Fisher bought Motorola in 1955 and held it until he died almost fifty years later.
Fisher's research method has a name of its own: scuttlebutt. Rather than rely on financial statements alone, he went and asked. He talked to a company's customers, suppliers, competitors and former employees to build a picture the numbers could never show him.
"The business grapevine is a remarkable thing. It is amazing what an accurate picture of the relative points of strength of various companies can be obtained."
He distilled what to look for into his fifteen points, a checklist covering products with a long runway of demand, serious research and development, a strong sales organisation, worthwhile profit margins, and above all management with integrity and a long-term outlook.
Fisher wanted companies growing faster than the market believed, with the margins to fund their own expansion, so that growth compounded for years without constant trips to raise money. Once he owned such a company, he held on. Selling a wonderful business for a small, quick gain was, to Fisher, one of the costliest mistakes an investor could make.
The Fisher lens is built for long-term compounding: exceptional companies with real runways, strong margins and capable management. Its difficulty is that its most important inputs cannot be put in a spreadsheet. Scuttlebutt and the quality of management resist measurement, so any numeric screen can only ever approximate Fisher. Qualitative judgment also invites bias, and a runway that looks long can turn out to be an illusion. Fisher would have said the answer is more research, not more rules.
Fisher mode has no hard limits, and that is deliberate: he set none, and pretending otherwise would misrepresent him. The ranking leans hardest on revenue growth, the one genuinely Fisher-like signal in our data, supported by analyst upside, gross margin, analyst conviction and a touch of momentum. We are candid that the consensus and momentum inputs sit a little against his "do your own scuttlebutt" ethos; revenue growth is what carries the mode. Because there is no numeric screen, there is no Fisher list. You can still rank any market through his lens by choosing Fisher mode on any index page. The full weighting is on the methodology page.
Rank the S&P 100 through Fisher's lens →