Peter Lynch Quotes

But rule number one, in my book, is: Stop listening to professionals!

To my mind, the stock price is the least useful information you can track, and it’s the most widely tracked.

more than eight hundred thousand Americans file for personal bankruptcy every year.

Houses, like stocks, are most likely to be profitable when they’re held for a long period of time. Unlike stocks, houses are likely to be owned by the same person for a number of years — seven, I think, is the average. Compare this to the

By now you might be wondering what’s the point of investing in a stodgy old company such as IBM, GM, or U.S. Steel? There are several reasons you might do this. First, big companies are less risky, in that they generally are in no danger of going out of business. Second, they are likely to pay a dividend. Third, they have valuable assets that might be sold off at a profit.

The typical big winner in the Lynch portfolio (I continue to pick my share of losers, too!) generally takes three to ten years or more to play out.

there was no longer an economic benefit in forcing people into a life of servitude.

If my favorite Internet company sells for $30 a share, and yours sells for $10, then people who focus on price would say that mine is the superior company. This is a dangerous delusion. What Mr. Market pays for a stock today or next week doesn’t tell you which company has the best chance to succeed two to three years down the information superhighway.

Ultimately it is not the stock market nor even the companies themselves that determine an investor's fate. It is the investor.

Actually Wall Street thinks just as the Greeks did. The early Greeks used to sit around for days and debate how many teeth a horse has. They thought they could figure it out by just sitting there, instead of checking the horse.

Know what you own, and know why you own it

The trick is not to learn to trust your gut feelings, but rather to discipline yourself to ignore them. Stand by your stocks as long as the fundamental story of the company hasn’t changed.

It’s best to divide your money among three or four types of stock funds (growth, value, emerging growth, etc.) so you’ll always have some money invested in the most profitable sector of the market.

It takes remarkable patience to hold on to a stock in a company that excites you, but which everybody else seems to ignore. You begin to think everybody else is right and you are wrong. But where the fundamentals are promising, patience is often rewarded — Lukens stock went up sixfold in the fifteenth year, American Greetings was a sixbagger in six years, Angelica a sevenbagger in four, Brunswick a sixbagger in five, and SmithKline a threebagger in two.

To me, an investment is simply a gamble in which you’ve managed to tilt the odds in your favor.