Guru Speak: Famous Quotes by Peter Lynch

Peter Lynch was a mutual fund manager for Fidelity Investments, famous for managing the Magellan Fund from 1977 to 1990. He often was a proponent of the theory that individuals were better placed than institutions to identify good investments. He was also author of two famous books, One Up on Wall Street and Beating the Street, which describe his theories and applications on investing. Here are a few famous words:

1. The key to making money in stocks is not to get scared out of them.

2. I think you have to learn that there’s a company behind every stock, and that there’s only one real reason why stocks go up. Companies go from doing poorly to doing well or small companies grow to large companies.

3. In this business if you’re good, you’re right six times out of ten. You’re never going to be right nine times out of ten.

4. You get recessions, you have stock market declines. If you don’t understand that’s going to happen, then you’re not ready, you won’t do well in the markets.

5. When stocks are attractive, you buy them. Sure, they can go lower. I’ve bought stocks at $12 that went to $2, but then they later went to $30. You just don’t know when you can find the bottom.

6. I’ve found that when the market’s going down and you buy funds wisely, at some point in the future you will be happy. You won’t get there by reading ‘Now is the time to buy.’

7. Go for a business that any idiot can run – because sooner or later, any idiot probably is going to run it.

8. The person that turns over the most rocks wins the game. And that’s always been my philosophy.

9. It’s human nature to keep doing something as long as it’s pleasurable and you can succeed at it – which is why the world population continues to double every 40 years.

10. Everyone has the brainpower to follow the stock market. If you made it through fifth-grade math, you can do it.

11. Don’t bottom fish.

12. Although it’s easy to forget sometimes, a share is not a lottery ticket… it’s part-ownership of a business.

13. If all the economists in the world were laid end to end, it wouldn’t be a bad thing.

14. Improved turnout will give parliament and government the appearance of being more legitimate.

15. People have been looking for recessions for the last five years.

16. People have all this data and they go through it and make up their minds in four seconds, … We’re forcing people to do the wrong things. They look at what’s hot. They spend so much time trying to figure out if the market is going up. That’s so unimportant. It’s about earnings. They need to follow the earnings.

17. It’s absolute crap that people need to spend 60 hours a week analyzing companies, … All you need are a few stocks to make money. If you find one stock a year, that’s plenty. When I was running Magellan I had to find one a week but that was because I had billions of dollars. The average person needs only a few good stocks in a lifetime.

18. I don’t go near the money and the money doesn’t go near me.

19. I spend about 15 minutes a year on economic analysis. The way you lose money in the stock market is to start off with an economic picture. I also spend 15 minutes a year on where the stock market is going.