Peter Lynch

Peter Lynch- "Never invest in any idea you can’t illustrate with a crayon."


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

Peter Lynch

The list of qualities [an investor ought to have] include patience, self-reliance, common sense, a tolerance for pain, open-mindedness, detachment, persistence, humility, flexibility, a willingness to do independent research, an equal willingness to admit mistakes, and the ability to ignore general panic.

Peter Lynch

Never invest in any idea you can’t illustrate with a crayon.

Peter Lynch

If you stay half-alert, you can pick the spectacular performers right from your place of business or out of the neighborhood shopping mall, and long before Wall Street discovers them.

Peter Lynch

Investing without research is like playing stud poker and never looking at the cards.

Peter Lynch

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

Peter Lynch

If you spend more than 13 minutes analyzing economic and market forecasts, you’ve wasted 10 minutes.

Peter Lynch

Absent a lot of surprises, stocks are relatively predictable over twenty years. As to whether they’re going to be higher or lower in two to three years, you might as well flip a coin to decide.

Peter Lynch

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

Peter Lynch

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

Peter Lynch

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.

Peter Lynch

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.

Peter Lynch

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

Peter Lynch

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

Peter Lynch

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.

Peter Lynch

Suicide is a permanent solution to a temporary problem. Suicide is a choice and I think if we work with that with kids, we’ll get somewhere.

Peter Lynch

I got positive feelings when I saw that Taco Bell’s headquarters was stuck behind a bowling alley. When I saw those executives operating out of that grim little bunker, I was thrilled. Obviously they weren’t wasting money on landscaping the office.

Peter Lynch

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

Peter Lynch

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.

Peter Lynch

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.

Peter Lynch

Don’t bottom fish.

Peter Lynch

Stocks aren’t lottery tickets. There’s a company attached to every share.

Peter Lynch

Thousands of experts study overbought indicators, oversold indicators, head-and-shoulder patterns, put-call ratios, the Fed’s policy on money supply, foreign investment, the movement of the constellations through the heavens, and the moss on oak trees, and they can’t predict markets with any useful consistency, any more than the gizzard squeezers could tell the Roman emperors when the Huns would attack.

Peter Lynch

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

Peter Lynch

When it comes to stocks you should stick around as long as the original story makes sense.

Peter Lynch