Discover the Best Books Written by Peter Lynch

Peter Lynch is an American investor, mutual fund manager, and philanthropist. As the manager of the Magellan Fund at Fidelity Investments between 1977 and 1990, Lynch averaged a 29.2% annual return, consistently more than double the S&P 500 stock market index and making it the best-performing mutual fund in the world. During his 13-year tenure, assets under management increased from US$18 million to $14 billion.

A proponent of value investing, Lynch wrote and co-authored a number of books and papers on investing strategies, including One Up on Wall Street, published by Simon & Schuster in 1989, which sold over one million copies. He coined a number of well-known mantras of modern individual investing, such as "invest in what you know" and "ten baggers." Lynch has been described as a "legend" by the financial media for his performance record.

Peter Lynch was born in Newton, Massachusetts, on January 19, 1944. In 1951, when Lynch was seven, his father was diagnosed with cancer. He died three years later, and Lynch's mother had to work to support the family. Lynch reports that from his early teens, he worked as a caddie to help support the family. During Lynch's time as a sophomore at Boston College, he used his savings to buy 100 shares of Flying Tiger Airlines at $8 per share. 

The stock would later rise to $80 per share, profits from which helped pay for his education. In 1965, Lynch graduated from Boston College (BC), where he studied history, psychology, and philosophy. He later earned a Master of Business Administration from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania in 1968. In 1966, Lynch was hired as an intern with Fidelity Investments partly because he had been caddying for Fidelity's president, D. George Sullivan, (among others) at Brae Burn Country Club in Newton, Massachusetts.

He initially covered the paper, chemical, and publishing industries, and when he returned after a two-year Army stint, he was hired permanently in 1969. This time Lynch was charged with following the textiles, metals, mining, and chemicals industries, eventually becoming Fidelity's director of research from 1974 to 1977. In 1977, Lynch was named head of the then-obscure Magellan Fund which had $18 million in assets. 

By the time Lynch resigned as a fund manager in 1990, the fund had grown to more than $14 billion in assets with more than 1,000 individual stock positions. Taking over when Magellan was a small fund, Lynch had no restrictions on what assets he could buy (other than laws, such as an SEC-enforced federal law that prohibits investment company funds that are registered as "diversified" from holding more than 5% of total portfolio assets in a single company at the time of purchase ).

He focused on individual companies rather than any overarching strategy, starting with large US companies and gradually emphasizing smaller and international stocks. From 1977 until 1990, the Magellan fund averaged a 29.2% annual return and, as of 2003, had the best 20-year return of any mutual fund ever. Lynch found successes in a broad range of stocks from different industries; according to Beating the Street, his most profitable picks were Fannie Mae, Ford, Philip Morris, MCI, Volvo, General Electric, General Public Utilities, Student Loan Marketing, Kemper, and Lowe's.