Courtesy of Pam Martens.
Ken Fisher's Ads Are All Over the Internet
It seems like a day doesn’t go by that an advertisement from Ken Fisher doesn’t pop up on my laptop when I’m visiting a business news web site. It’s been going on for months. The ads suggest that I’ll be doomed if I don’t read the latest report from Ken Fisher; it’s a “must read” with research and analysis “you can’t find anyplace else.” And, by the way, if you don’t have $500,000 or more to invest, just fuhgeddaboutit.
Yesterday, I decided to check out this fellow and find out how he can afford all these ads. Turns out, this Ken Fisher is the financial columnist for Forbes magazine and has defied the destiny of most other business writers in America by becoming a billionaire — worth $1.8 billion as of September 2012 according to Forbes.
But Fisher is not your average 1 percenter – he wants to help you also become a billionaire by simultaneously touting stocks in his columns and managing your money if you have $500,000 or more to invest. At first blush, that might seem illegal to the sane among us. Apparently it’s not. Fisher’s bio says he has been writing his column at Forbes for more than 28 years and he says he has been managing institutional money for 33 years and individual clients’ money for 17 years – all while touting individual stocks on the pages of Forbes.
In his latest column, Fisher touts Walmart, saying it continues to “evolve and adapt,” and “It’s also highly efficient and productive despite the fact that it is the globe’s largest non governmental employer. With Wal-Mart you get an awe-inspiring company at 13 times my January 2014 earnings estimate, with a 2.2% dividend yield.”
Fisher does not mention the not awe-inspiring 21 cent an hour wages paid to garment factory workers in Bangladesh, 112 of whom just died a fiery death in the Tazreen Fashions factory outside of Dhaka because there were no outside fire escapes. According to documents obtained by the New York Times, 5 of the 14 production lines were making apparel for Walmart.
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