An advisor is speaking out on comments made by Ken Fisher at a fireside chat on Tuesday that "truly horrified and disgusted" him. Fisher, however, says his remarks are being taken out of context and apologizes for any offense they may have caused.
In a video posted on Twitter early Wednesday, Alex Chalekian said Fisher's talk in San Francisco at the Tiburon CEO Summit was "a true debacle. It was horrible. Things that were said by Ken Fisher were just absolutely horrifying."
Fisher is the founder and chair of Fisher Investments, which has about $114 billion in client assets. Chalekian is the head of Lake Avenue Financial and practice acquisitions for RIA Integrated Partners, which manages about $6 billion.
(Related: Why Ken Fisher Advertises So Much)
According to Chalekian's video, Fisher referred to "genitalia, picking up a on girl … and [made] other inappropriate comments at the conference."
Chalekian said he had spoken to other men and to women at the conference about the talk. "They were disgusted by this, and many of the women expressed to me that this is why they don't like coming to these conferences," he said. "It makes them very uncomfortable. And this obviously does not help the situation."
After reviewing Chalekian's video, Fisher told ThinkAdvisor in a statement: "While I said most of the words he cited, he wasn't hearing the context of what I was communicating and seems to have misconstrued its essence — certainly misconstrued my intended meaning."
"The rest is just nonsense. … To the extent he or others in that large crowd were offended, I apologize most sincerely," Fisher added.
Rachel Robasciotti, a founder of wealth manager Robasciotti & Philipson who was at the event, told Bloomberg that Fisher — when describing how he built his firm — compared winning a client's trust to "trying to get into a girl's pants."
"I was floored," Robasciotti added. "For me and some of the women sitting nearby we were kind of in shock. We were like: 'Wait, did that really just happen?'"
(A bit later at the event, Fisher moved to distance himself from his earlier remark and told the audience he did not want to be put in the same camp as the late Jeffrey Epstein, Robasciotti shared with RIA Intel.)
ThinkAdvisor was not able to confirm the precise wording and context of Fisher's entire remarks at the industry conference. Tiburon Strategic Advisors did not respond to a request for comment about the matter at press time.
