There was no plan to write a follow-up to yesterday’s Your Worldview Matters post. But today’s revelations about Ken Fisher are too on point to not bring them into the discussion.
According to this MarketWatch report, "Wealth manager Ken Fisher shocks with off-color comments, doesn’t apologize":
A well-known investor so scandalized attendees at a high-profile financial industry event with sexually offensive comments that several of them broke non-disclosure agreements they signed to attend in order to speak out.
Making matters worse, it appears to be a long-standing pattern of behavior (although I’d never seen or heard anything about it before). Which Fisher essentially admitted to with his non-apology response: “I have given a lot of talks, a lot of times, in a lot of places and said stuff like this and never gotten that type of response,” Fisher said.
For those who aren’t familiar with Fisher, he’s the billionaire founder of Fisher Investments, one of the world’s largest investment advisors with $112 billion in assets under management. He’s clearly a smart guy and SMI has featured some of his work in the past (which won’t be happening anymore!). His advertising is everywhere.
But at the end of the day, most Christian investors probably prefer to not entrust their nest egg to a firm whose founder apparently uses sexually offensive examples in his talks, or holds views like "Charities are immoral," which was another gem he reportedly dropped at the conference two nights ago.
Fisher is obviously operating out of a different worldview than most SMI investors. The sexual stuff is offensive on its face and is enough to send most Christians running. But there are real-world implications to the less obvious worldview differences too.
Take Fisher’s charities comment — how likely is it that an advisor, paid a percentage of the assets in your account, coming from a firm with an anti-charity perspective, is going to encourage you to lower the assets in your account by giving generously? Or bring up with you the idea that making Qualified Charitable Distributions might make sense for you in light of your values and stated goals, and then help you set those up?
Make sure the financial people you’re working with are operating from the same worldview you are. It matters.
