Fisher Investments is again part of a public firestorm after media heavyweights report it has entered sale talks; Fisher fires off heated denial, but one analyst still sees smoke on the horizon

Ken Fisher, known for years as a skilled media and marketing maven, has lost control of his own narrative… again. 

He is being rocked by reports – not of his making – in two major publications that his firm, Fisher Investments (FI), could be for sale.

The reports, based on unnamed Wall Street Journal and Bloomberg “sources,” have left him uncharacteristically scrambling to get ahead of the media news cycle.  

Both publications claimed Fisher had entered into talks to sell to Advent International, a Boston private equity firm that focuses on corporate buyouts and restructurings across multiple sectors. 

The Plano, Texas super RIA, with $236 billion in global assets under management, took the immediate and unusual step of issuing a full-on press release.

“Fisher Investments is not being bought by Advent International, or anyone else — plain and simple,” read the release.

It pulled no punches. 

It was titled “The Wall Street Journal Publishes False Story on Fisher Investments Sale.”

For its part, Advent also chimed in, stating to Bloomberg, unequivocally, it is “not buying Fisher Investments.”

M&A temptation

Still, Mike Wunderli, managing director of ECHELON Partners, a Manhattan Beach, Calif., investment bank, told RIABiz by email that current RIA M&A market conditions and the quality of the publications make it hard to dismiss the reports. 

“I haven’t heard anything about the legitimacy of the Fisher/Advent rumors,” he said.

"However, given the media sources, the rumor probably isn’t baseless, and it wouldn’t surprise me at all if they were seriously exploring some sort of transaction. 

“It’s not difficult to understand why Fisher might be tempted to take advantage of a very favorable market and take some chips off the table.”

Wunderli says Fisher Investments is worth big bucks.

“Making some basic assumptions on financials and circumstances, the firm could potentially trade in the $8-10 billion valuation range, or potentially even higher.”

The company has never laid out its vision for a succession plan for its founder and chairman. Fisher owns 100% of voting interests in FI (as co-trustee, with his wife, in a family trust) holding non-voting interests.

Fisher, 73, has showed no signs of slowing down. He has three children, and son, Nathan Fisher, is senior executive vice president of Fisher's 401(k) Solutions.  

Nathan built the unit from almost nothing to more than $2.5 billion in assets under management for more than 1,000 employers, according to his LinkedIn profile. 

Chicken and biscuits

Weighing against the possibility of a sale is the fact that Advent is not a heavy hitter in the financial services sector. 

In 1985, the firm was spun out of TA Associates, then run by the legendary VC investor, Peter Albert Brooke, who died in 2020. It raised $14 million that year to invest in Nabisco. 

It has expanded globally and grown into a multi-billion-dollar fund since then. 

But its only significant foray into financial services was its March 2009 acquisition of Fifth Third Bank's payment processing arm for $2.35 billion. 

Most of its other investments have been in minerals, health and retail companies and a firm called “Bojangles' Famous Chicken 'n Biscuits.”   

Advent's lack of in-depth financial services experience would be enough to raise eyebrows, given Fisher Investments' size and stature in the industry. 

Aggressive moves

But Advent has been very public, of late, that it is aggressively seeking to buy financial advice holdings – particularly with human advisors.

The Boston private equity firm put out a lengthy press release in November when it hired Tricia Rothschild to assess RIA opportunities in 2024. 

Her job was described as using her network and insights to bird-dog “opportunities” around the “increasing democratization of access to investment services” and the “evolution of the financial advisor role.” 

Rothschild was president of Apex Fintech Solutions before joining Advent.  · 

Hedging bets

Perhaps, not surprisingly, neither media outlet would go so far as to claim the sale was a done deal. Rather, they reported Fisher had engaged in “talks” regarding a possible deal.

“Advent International is in talks to acquire Fisher Investments, the money-management firm known for its ubiquitous advertisements, according to people familiar with the matter," The Journal proclaimed in the lead of its article.

Bloomberg parsed its words more tentatively. It only said Advent “has held talks to acquire billionaire Ken Fisher’s eponymous Fisher Investments.”

“An agreement hasn’t been reached, and it’s possible no deal will transpire," Bloomberg said, citing a person who asked not to be identified discussing confidential information.

Bloomberg also took shelter by reporting that the “Wall Street Journal earlier reported talks as ongoing.”

RIABiz emailed Wall Street Journal reporter Laura Cooper, one of two bylines on their story, for comment, but she has not responded. Cooper has covered M&A for the Journal since 2022.

Fisher -- known to be feisty with the media – was himself a Forbes magazine columnist from 1984 to 2016. See: How Ken Fisher's 'girl's pants' remarks set off an RIA-led tweet firestorm that became a slow-burn PR disaster that remains uncontained

Cult on the Hill

Fisher Investments stands largely alone in scaling an RIA business model that serves 269,000 accounts largely from remote call centers in Texas, Washington and California. See: See: Fisher Investments surpassed $100 billion in AUM in early 2019, contained the flames of a late-2019 PR crisis and has a legit shot at hitting $200 billion in AUM this year

That model puts most of the sales pressure on its “ubiquitous” advertising and maintains a focus on investment management rather than financial planning.

Known back in its Silicon Valley days as the “Cult on the Hill,” it makes an ardent statement on its website about what culture it seeks to inculcate.

“The bedrock of FI's business is based on maintaining a culture of ethics and integrity with the highest possible emphasis on clear and transparent communications with the investing public.”

Fisher is ranked 144 on the Forbes 400 of rich people with about $8 billion of net worth.

Near death experience

Fisher, for years, was both the name and face of his eponymous company, appearing in countless television ads and on the speaker's circuit. 

But in 2019, Fisher lost control of the narrative for the first time after a speech at an exclusive, off-the-record event attended by industry bigwigs. See: Fisher Investments surpassed $100 billion in AUM in early 2019, contained the flames of a late-2019 PR crisis and has a legit shot at hitting $200 billion in AUM this year

Conference attendee Alex Chalekian tweeted by video that he had made allegedly inappropriate remarks about women's "genitalia," dropping acid, late pedophile Jeffrey Epstein and the "immorality" of charities, Forbes wrote

He also compared using financial planning to win investment management accounts to insidious tactics for "trying to get into a girl’s pants."

The ensuing media firestorm cost an estimated $4 billion in lost assets, but he pulled his firm out of the fire with an aggressive public relations campaign, though it knocked him off the air as the face of his company. See: Ken Fisher goes back on offense by attacking 'completely false' media claims and letting readers know the lost $4-billion of assets were easily replaced