One Up On Wall Street

The manager of a top investment fund discusses how individuals can make a killing in the market through research and investment techniques that confound conventional market wisdom.

Anise C. Wallace The New York Times Mr. Lynch's investment record puts him in a league by himself.

Auteur

Peter Lynch managed the Fidelity Magellan Fund from 1977 to 1990 when it was one of the most successful mutual-funds of all time. He then became a vice chairman at Fidelity and more recently has become a prominent philanthropist particularly active in the Boston area. His books include One Up on Wall Street, Beating the Street, and Learn to Earn (all written with John Rothchild).

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THE NATIONAL BESTSELLING BOOK THAT EVERY INVESTOR SHOULD OWNPeter Lynch is America's number-one money manager. His mantra: Average investors can become experts in their own field and can pick winning stocks as effectively as Wall Street professionals by doing just a little research.Now, in a new introduction written specifically for this edition of One Up on Wall Street, Lynch gives his take on the incredible rise of Internet stocks, as well as a list of twenty winning companies of high-tech '90s. That many of these winners are low-tech supports his thesis that amateur investors can continue to reap exceptional rewards from mundane, easy-to-understand companies they encounter in their daily lives.Investment opportunities abound for the layperson, Lynch says. By simply observing business developments and taking notice of your immediate world -- from the mall to the workplace -- you can discover potentially successful companies before professional analysts do. This jump on the experts is what produces "tenbaggers", the stocks that appreciate tenfold or more and turn an average stock portfolio into a star performer.The former star manager of Fidelity's multibillion-dollar Magellan Fund, Lynch reveals how he achieved his spectacular record. Writing with John Rothchild, Lynch offers easy-to-follow directions for sorting out the long shots from the no shots by reviewing a company's financial statements and by identifying which numbers really count. He explains how to stalk tenbaggers and lays out the guidelines for investing in cyclical, turnaround, and fast-growing companies.Lynch promises that if you ignore the ups and downs of the market and the endless speculation aboutinterest rates, in the long term (anywhere from five to fifteen years) your portfolio will reward you. This advice has proved to be timeless and has made One Up on Wall Street a number-one bestseller. And now this classic is as valuable in the new millennium as ever.

Résumé
In his timeless classic, America's number one money manager and bestselling author, reveals the philosophy behind his spectacular record 'think like an amateur'.

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Introduction to the Millennium Edition

This book was written to offer encouragement and basic information to the individual investor. Who knew it would go through thirty printings and sell more than one million copies? As this latest edition appears eleven years beyond the first, I'm convinced that the same principles that helped me perform well at the Fidelity Magellan Fund still apply to investing in stocks today.

It's been a remarkable stretch since One Up on Wall Street hit the bookstores in 1989. I left Magellan in May, 1990, and pundits said it was a brilliant move. They congratulated me for getting out at the right time -- just before the collapse of the great bull market. For the moment, the pessimists looked smart. The country's major banks flirted with insolvency, and a few went belly up. By early fall, war was brewing in Iraq. Stocks suffered one of their worst declines in recent memory. But then the war was won, the banking system survived, and stocks rebounded.

Some rebound! The Dow is up more than fourfold since October, 1990, from the 2,400 level to 11,000 and beyond -- the best decade for stocks in the twentieth century. Nearly 50 percent of U.S. households own stocks or mutual funds, up from 32 percent in 1989. The market at large has created $25 trillion in new wealth, which is on display in every city and town. If this keeps up, somebody will write a book called The Billionaire Next Door.

More than $4 trillion of that new wealth is invested in mutual funds, up from $275 billion in 1989. The fund bonanza is okay by me, since I managed a fund. But it also must mean a lot of amateur stockpickers did poorly with their picks. If they'd done better on their own in this mother of all bull markets, they wouldn't have migrated to funds to the extent they have. Perhaps the information contained in this book will set some errant stockpickers on a more profitable path.

Since stepping down at Magellan, I've become an individual investor myself. On the charitable front, I raise scholarship money to send inner-city kids of all faiths to Boston Catholic schools. Otherwise, I work part-time at Fidelity as a fund trustee and as an adviser/trainer for young research analysts. Lately my leisure time is up at least thirtyfold, as I spend more time with my family at home and abroad.

Enough about me. Let's get back to my favorite subject: stocks. From the start of this bull market in August 1982, we've seen the greatest advance in stock prices in U.S. history, with the Dow up fifteenfold. In Lynch lingo that's a "fifteenbagger." I'm accustomed to finding fifteenbaggers in a variety of successful companies, but a fifteenbagger in the market at large is a stunning reward. Consider this: From the top in 1929 through 1982, the Dow produced only a fourbagger: up from 248 to 1,046 in a half century! Lately stock prices have risen faster as they've moved higher. It took the Dow 8 1/3 years to double from 2,500 to 5,000, and only 3 1/2 years to double from 5,000 to 10,000. From 1995-99 we saw an unprecedented five straight years where stocks returned 20 percent plus. Never before has the market recorded more than two back-to-back 20 percent gains.

Wall Street's greatest bull market has rewarded the believers and confounded the skeptics to a degree neither side could have imagined in the doldrums of the early 1970s, when I first took the helm at Magellan. At that low point, demoralized investors had to remind themselves that bear markets don't last forever, and those with patience held on to their stocks and mutual funds for the fifteen years it took the Dow and other averages to regain the prices reached in the mid-1960s. Today it's worth reminding ourselves that bull markets don't last forever and that patience is required in both directions.

On page 280 of this book I say the breakup of ATT in 1984 may have been the most significant stock market development of that era. Today it's the Internet, and so far the Internet has passed me by. All along I've been technophobic. My experience shows you don't have to be trendy to succeed as an investor. In fact, most great investors I know (Warren Buffett, for starters) are technophobes. They don't own what they don't understand, and neither do I. I understand Dunkin' Donuts and Chrysler, which is why both inhabited my portfolio, I understand banks, savings-and-loans, and their close relative, Fannie Mae. I don't visit the Web. I've never surfed on it or chatted across it. Without expert help (from my wife or my children, for instance) I couldn't find the Web.

Over the Thanksgiving holidays in 1997, I shared eggnog with a Web-tolerant friend in New York. I mentioned that my wife, Carolyn, liked the mystery novelist Dorothy Sayers. The friend sat down at a nearby computer and in a couple of clicks pulled up the entire list of Sayers titles, plus customer reviews and the one-to five-star ratings (on the literary Web sites, authors are rated like fund managers). I bought four Sayers novels for Carolyn, picked the gift wrapping, …