Peter Lynch Quotes

#1. Ex-Fidelity mutual fund manager Peter Lynch was certainly brilliant in one respect: he knew to get out when the gettin' was good.

Bill Gross

#2. All the time and effort people devote to picking the right fund, the hot hand, the great manager have, in most cases, led to no advantage.

Peter Lynch

#3. In business, competition is never as healthy as total domination.

Peter Lynch

#4. You have to keep your priorities straight if you plan to do well in stocks.

Peter Lynch

#5. But my system for over 30 years has been this: 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.

Peter Lynch

#6. If you go to Minnesota in January, you should know that it's gonna be cold. You don't panic when the thermometer falls below zero.

Peter Lynch

#7. In the summer of 1990, I was buying stocks and I was probably three or four months early there. But we had a great rally in 1991.

Peter Lynch

#8. You should not buy a stock because it's cheap but because you know a lot about it.

Peter Lynch

#9. Just because you buy a stock and it goes up does not mean you are right. Just because you buy a stock and it goes down does not mean you are wrong.

Peter Lynch

#10. Most investors would be better off in an index fund.

Peter Lynch

#11. In the long run, it's not just how much money you make that will determine your future prosperity. It's how much of that money you put to work by saving it and investing it.

Peter Lynch

#12. Searching for companies is like looking for grubs under rocks: if you turn over 10 rocks you'll likely find one grub; if you turn over 20 rocks you'll find two.

Peter Lynch

#13. Time is on your side when you own shares of superior companies.

Peter Lynch

#14. That's not to say there's no such thing as an overvalued market, but there's no point worrying about it.

Peter Lynch

#15. I always say that in my career as an actress, I've always worked with people like David Lynch or Guy Maddin or Peter Weir who are considered not mainstream directors and that could be because they are like my dad. They are pioneers, and pioneers, by definition, invent something new.

Isabella Rossellini

#16. If you hope to have more money tomorrow than you have today, you've got to put a chunk of your assets into stocks. Sooner or later, a portfolio of stocks or stock mutual funds will turn out to be a lot more valuable than a portfolio of bonds or CDs or money-market funds.

Peter Lynch

#17. Gentlemen who prefer bonds don't know what they're missing.

Peter Lynch

#18. You can't see the future through a rearview mirror

Peter Lynch

#19. Invest in businesses any idiot could run, because someday one will.

Peter Lynch

#20. There's a company behind every stock and a reason companies - and their stocks - perform the way they do.

Peter Lynch

#21. I deal in facts, not forecasting the future. That's crystal ball stuff. That doesn't work.

Peter Lynch

#22. 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

#23. As I look back on it now, it's obvious that studying history and philosophy was much better preparation for the stock market than, say, studying statistics.

Peter Lynch

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

Peter Lynch

#25. Charts are great for predicting the past.

Peter Lynch

#26. The S&P is up 343.8 percent for 10 years. That is a four-bagger. The general equity funds are up 283 percent. So it's getting worse, the deterioration by professionals is getting worse. The public would be better off in an index fund.

Peter Lynch

#27. Whenever you invest in any company, you're looking for its market cap to rise. This can't happen unless buyers are paying higher prices for the shares, making your investment more valuable.

Peter Lynch

#28. Your investor's edge is not something you get from Wall Street experts. It's something you already have. You can outperform the experts if you use your edge by investing in companies or industries you already understand.

Peter Lynch

#29. Invest in what you know.

Peter Lynch

#30. 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

#31. A stock market decline is as routine as a January blizzard in Colorado. If you're prepared, it can't hurt you. A decline is a great opportunity to pick up the bargains left behind by investors who are fleeing the storm in panic.

Peter Lynch

#32. Behind every stock is a company. Find out what it's doing.

Peter Lynch

#33. Investing in stocks is an art, not a science, and people who've been trained to rigidly quantify everything have a big disadvantage.

Peter Lynch

#34. Investing is fun and exciting, but dangerous if you don't do any work.

Peter Lynch

#35. I've always said, the key organ here isn't the brain, it's the stomach. When things start to decline - there are bad headlines in the papers and on television - will you have the stomach for the market volatility and the broad-based pessimism that tends to come with it?

Peter Lynch

#36. My high-tech aversion caused me to make fun of the typical biotech enterprise: $100 million in cash from selling shares, one hundred Ph.D.'s, 99 microscopes, and zero revenues.

Peter Lynch

#37. The biggest winners are surprises to me, and takeovers are even more surprising. It takes years, not months, to produce big results.

Peter Lynch

#38. There is always something to worry about. Avoid weekend thinking and ignoring the latest dire predictions of the newscasters. Sell a stock because the company's fundamentals deteriorate, not because the sky is falling.

Peter Lynch

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

Peter Lynch

#40. You can find good reasons to scuttle your equities in every morning paper and on every broadcast of the nightly news.

Peter Lynch

#41. Know what you own, and know why you own it.

Peter Lynch

#42. People who want to know how stocks fared on any given day ask, "Where did the Dow close?" I'm more interested in how many stocks went up versus how many went down. These so-called advance/decline numbers paint a more realistic picture.

Peter Lynch

#43. It would be wonderful if we could avoid the setbacks with timely exits, but nobody has figured out how to predict them.

Peter Lynch

#44. There's no shame in losing money on a stock. Everybody does it. What is shameful is to hold on to a stock, or worse, to buy more of it when the fundamentals are deteriorating.

Peter Lynch

#45. All you need for a lifetime of successful investing is a few big winners, and the pluses from those will overwhelm the minuses from the stocks that don't work out.

Peter Lynch

#46. Owning stocks is like having children - don't get involved with more than you can handle.

Peter Lynch

#47. 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

#48. When people discover they are no good at baseball or hockey, they put away their bats and their skates and they take up amateur golf or stamp collecting or gardening. But when people discover they are no good at picking stocks, they are likely to continue to do it anyway.

Peter Lynch

#49. Imagine if you borrowed your parents' car without permission and ran it into a tree, how much better you'd feel if you were incorporated.

Peter Lynch

#50. My method for picking stocks has never changed. When businesses go from crappy to semicrappy, there's money to be made.

Peter Lynch

#51. Never invest in any idea you can't illustrate with a crayon

Peter Lynch

#52. It isn't the head but the stomach that determines the fate of the stockpicker.

Peter Lynch

#53. I don't go near the money and the money doesn't go near me.

Peter Lynch

#54. Well, I think the secret is if you have a lot of stocks, some will do mediocre, some will do okay, and if one of two of 'em go up big time, you produce a fabulous result. And I think that's the promise to some people.

Peter Lynch

#55. When you start to confuse Freddie Mac, Sallie Mae and Fannie Mae with members of your family, and you remember 2,000 stock symbols but forget the children's birthdays, there's a good chance you've become too wrapped up in your work.

Peter Lynch

#56. During the Gold Rush, most would-be miners lost money, but people who sold them picks, shovels, tents and blue-jeans (Levi Strauss) made a nice profit.

Peter Lynch

#57. An important key to investing is to remember that stocks are not lottery tickets.

Peter Lynch

#58. The simpler it is, the better I like it.

Peter Lynch

#59. I like to buy a company any fool can manage because eventually one will.

Peter Lynch

#60. 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.

Peter Lynch

#61. The most important organ in the body as far as the stock market is concerned is the guts, not the head. Anyone can acquire the know-how for analyzing stocks.

Peter Lynch

#62. The more cash that builds up in the treasury, the greater the pressure to piss it away.

Peter Lynch

#63. You only need a few good stocks in your lifetime. I mean how many times do you need a stock to go up ten-fold to make a lot of money? Not a lot.

Peter Lynch

#64. Never invest in a company without understanding its finances. The biggest losses in stocks come from companies with poor balance sheets.

Peter Lynch

#65. The natural-born investor is a myth.

Peter Lynch

#66. In our society, it's been the men who've handled most of the finances, and the women who've stood by and watched men botch things up.

Peter Lynch

#67. More money is lost anticipating the changes in the overall stock market than any other way of investing.

Peter Lynch

#68. The stock market really isn't a gamble, as long as you pick good companies that you think will do well, and not just because of the stock price.

Peter Lynch

#69. Twenty years in this business convinces me that any normal person using the customary three percent of the brain can pick stocks just as well, if not better, than the average Wall Street expert.

Peter Lynch

#70. Visiting stores and testing products is one of the critical elements of the analyst's job.

Peter Lynch

#71. Debt is saving in reverse. The more it builds up, the worse off you are.

Peter Lynch

#72. When even the analysts are bored, it's time to start buying.

Peter Lynch

#73. I've always been a great lover of baseball.

Peter Lynch

#74. 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

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

Peter Lynch

#76. If you can follow only one bit of data, follow the earnings - assuming the company in question has earnings. I subscribe to the crusty notion that sooner or later earnings make or break an investment in equities. What the stock price does today, tomorrow, or next week is only a distraction.

Peter Lynch

#77. Never invest in anything that cannot be illustrated with a crayon

Peter Lynch

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

Peter Lynch

#79. A lot of people got in at the wrong time. A lot of people did very well and some people said, "This is it. I'll never get back in again." And they maybe meant it, but they probably got back in again anyway.

Peter Lynch

#80. You shouldn't just pick a stock - you should do your homework.

Peter Lynch

#81. The Rule of 72 is useful in determining how fast money will grow. Take the annual return from any investment, expressed as a percentage, and divide it into 72. The result is the number of years it will take to double your money.

Peter Lynch

#82. Long-term investing has gotten so popular, it's easier to admit you're a crack addict than to admit you're a short-term investor.

Peter Lynch

#83. The typical big winner in the Lynch portfolio generally takes three to ten years to play out.

Peter Lynch

#84. The old Wall Street adage "never invest in anything that eats or needs repairs" may apply to racehorses, but it's malarkey when it comes to houses.

Peter Lynch

#85. When you sell in desperation, you always sell cheap.

Peter Lynch

#86. 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.

Peter Lynch

#87. If you're lucky enough to have been rewarded in life to the degree that I have, there comes a point at which you have to decide whether to become a slave to your net worth by devoting the rest of your life to increasing it or to let what you've accumulated begin to serve you.

Peter Lynch

#88. I talk to hundreds of companies a year and spend hour after hour in heady pow-wows with CEOs, financial analysts and my colleagues in the mutual-fund business, but I stumble onto the big winners in extracurricular situations, the same way you do.

Peter Lynch

#89. Nobody can predict interest rates, the future direction of the economy or the stock market. Dismiss all such forecasts and concentrate on what's actually happening to the companies in which you've invested

Peter Lynch

#90. Spend at least as much time researching a stock as you would choosing a refrigerator.

Peter Lynch

#91. First, you find the "market capitalization" ("market cap" for short) by multiplying the number of shares outstanding (let's say 100 million) by the current stock price (let's say $100 a share). One hundred million times $100 equals $10 billion.

Peter Lynch

#92. The best stock to buy is the one you already own.

Peter Lynch

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

Peter Lynch

#94. So while I was in college I did a little study on the freight industry, the air freight industry. And I looked at this company called Flying Tiger. And I actually put a thousand dollars in it and I remember I thought this air cargo was going to be a thing of the future.

Peter Lynch

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

Peter Lynch

#96. I'm always fully invested. It's a great feeling to be caught with your pants up.

Peter Lynch

#97. The basic story remains simple and never-ending. Stocks aren't lottery tickets. There's a company attached to every share.

Peter Lynch

#98. Long shots almost always miss the mark.

Peter Lynch

#99. In other words, I continue to think like an amateur as frequently as possible. GOING IT ALONE

Peter Lynch

#100. Hold no more stocks than you can remain informed on.

Peter Lynch