Peter Lynch Quotes

It’s when you’ve decided to invest on your own that you ought to try going it alone. That means ignoring the hot tips, the recommendations from brokerage houses, and the latest “can’t miss” suggestion from your favorite newsletter — in favor of your own research. It means ignoring the stocks that you hear Peter Lynch, or some similar authority, is buying.

The combination of new equipment and new chemicals turned the American farm into the most efficient food bank on earth, capable of producing more wheat, corn, and so forth, per acre than any other country's farms in the history of agriculture.

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.

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

A person who owns property and has a stake in the enterprise is likely to work harder and feel happier and do a better job than a person who doesn’t.

My diaries are full of such missed opportunities, but the stock market is merciful — it always gives the nincompoop a second chance.

In college, except for the obligatory courses, I avoided science, math, and accounting — all the normal preparations for business. I was on the arts side of school, and along with the usual history, psychology, and political science, I also studied metaphysics, epistemology, logic, religion, and the philosophy of the ancient Greeks. 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. Investing in stocks is an art, not a science, and people who’ve been trained to rigidly quantify everything have a big disadvantage

Understand the nature of the companies you own and the specific reasons for holding the stock. (“It is really going up!” doesn’t count.)

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. A lot of investors sit around and debate whether a stock is going up, as if the financial muse will give them the answer, instead of checking the company.

My advice for the next decade: Keep on the lookout for tomorrow’s big baggers. You’re likely to find one.

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.

While catching up on the news is merely depressing to the citizen who has no stocks, it is a dangerous habit for the investor.

This is a crucial safeguard of our capitalist system, because if shareholders could be sued whenever a company made a mistake, people like you and me would be afraid to buy shares and become investors. Why would we want to run the risk of being held responsible for another big oil spill, or a rat hair in a hamburger, or the endless variety of mishaps that occur in business every day? Without limited liability, nobody would want to buy a single share of stock.

When somebody says, "Any idiot could run this joint," that's a plus as far as I'm concerned, because sooner or later any idiot probably is going to be running it.

In dieting and in stocks, it is the gut and not the head that determines the results.