American stock investor Ken Fisher has an estimated net worth of $2.9 billion as of May 2015 according to Forbes. He is a 28-year portfolio strategy columnist for Forbes where he writes a monthly column for the magazine. He also contributes to other financial magazines and the author of eight finance-related books. He has written research papers in the field of behavioral finance. He is the founder, chairman and CEO of Fisher Investments, a money management firm located in Woodside, California. He also owns several commercial properties in Northern California and Washington State.

Fisher is included in the 2011 Forbes 400 list of richest Americans and Forbes list of world billionaires. He was named to Investment Advisor Magazine’s “30 for 30” list of the 30 most influential people on the investment advisory business over the last 30 years in 2010. His firm manages $41.3 billion in 38, 521 customer accounts as of 2010. He has been called the largest wealth manager in the United States.

In 2012, Ken Fisher and his wife gave $7.5 million to John Hopkins University to fund a new infectious disease center.     He gave $3.5 million to fund the Kenneth L. Fisher Chair in 2006 in Redwood Forest Ecology at his alma mater, northern California’s Humboldt State University.

Born Kenneth L. Fisher on November 29, 1950 in San Francisco, California, he is the third and youngest son. His mother, Dorothy White, was from Arkansas and his father, Philip A. Fisher, was an investor and author of three books and the most notably Common Stocks and Uncommon Profits. He attended Humboldt State University to study forestry but graduated with a degree in economics in 1972. He was recognized by the university with its Distinguished Alumni Award in 2007.

In the same year, Fisher and Thomas Grüner founded the Grüner Fisher Investments. He received the inaugural Tiburon CEO Summit award for Challenging Conventional Wisdom in 2009. He also has a Bernstein Fabozzi/Jacobs Levy Award for published research. Forbes published an accounting of his stock pick performance in 2010, as made in his columns over the last 14 years. His stock picks beat the S&P 500 overall on average and have beat the S&P in 11 years out of 14 as measured by Forbes. He was ranked as one of the top25 most influential figures in the financial industry by Investment Advisor Magazine in 2011.