Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits and Other Writings by Philip Arthur Fisher
Hidden Lesson: Great investments aren’t found in spreadsheets—they’re found by asking better questions, listening deeply, and thinking independently about the future.
What the CFA Curriculum Teaches You
The CFA Program will teach you how to model, measure, and dissect a company’s financials. You’ll analyze return on equity, review income statements, and assess capital structures. The curriculum champions objectivity, and rightly so. It trains you to be an analyst in the classical sense—a decision-maker grounded in data.
You’ll know the price-to-earnings ratio of every stock in the index, but it won’t tell you which companies will still be dominating ten years from now.
What Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits Reveals Instead
Fisher flips the script. He argues that the most powerful edge in investing comes from qualitative insight—not quantitative metrics. His secret weapon? “Scuttlebutt”: a technique involving in-depth conversations with a company’s customers, competitors, employees, and suppliers to form a mosaic of its long-term potential.
Forget P/E ratios for a moment. Fisher wants you to ask: Is management honest and forward-looking? Are they investing in innovation? Are they building something that will still matter in a decade? These aren’t things you’ll find in a financial model—they live in the culture of the company and in the whispered opinions of those who know it best.
His iconic “15 Points to Look for in a Common Stock” is less a checklist and more a mindset. It urges investors to think like investigative journalists, not just analysts. This is investing as an act of curiosity and discernment—not just calculation.
Real-World Trigger
Let’s say you’re an analyst at a fund that’s considering two companies in the same industry. One has better recent earnings, the other has a reputation for innovation, strong employee morale, and industry respect. Your model favors the first. But a quiet conversation with an ex-employee of the second reveals it’s about to launch a product that could reshape the space.
This is where Fisher’s lesson hits hard: the best opportunities often appear “expensive” on paper—until the future reveals how cheap they really were. If you only look at numbers, you’ll miss the companies that are becoming great before the data reflects it.
Why This Book Still Matters
We live in an era of algorithmic trading, macro factor models, and data-driven decision-making. But Fisher’s message is timeless: human insight still matters. In fact, it may be the only edge left.
Understanding a company from the outside in—not just through its filings, but through its ecosystem—is a discipline that’s hard to scale and impossible to automate. That’s why it works. The CFA designation might land you the job. But this kind of thinking will make your ideas indispensable.
Reflection for CFA Candidates
How much of your investment process relies on secondhand data vs firsthand inquiry?
When was the last time you sought qualitative insight before forming a valuation view?
Are you training to be an analyst who interprets the past—or one who anticipates the future?
Final Thought
Put down the spreadsheet for a moment. Read Fisher. Because the next ten-bagger won’t announce itself in the footnotes—it’ll whisper its potential in the voice of a supplier, a customer, or a competitor… if you know how to listen.
