Peter Lynch Quotes - Page 2

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

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.

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.

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

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.

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.

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

If you can't find any companies that you think are attractive, put your money in the bank until you discover some.

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

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

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

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

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.

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

What makes stocks valuable in the long run isn't the market. It's the profitability of the shares in the companies you own. As corporate profits increase, corporations become more valuable and sooner or later, their shares will sell for a higher price.

Stocks are a safe bet, but only if you stay invested long enough to ride out the corrections.

Hold no more stocks than you can remain informed on.

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.

The simpler it is, the better I like it.

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.

You have to let the big ones make up for your mistakes.

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.

Logic is the subject that has helped me most in picking stocks, if only because it taught me to identify the peculiar illogic of Wall Street. 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 just by 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.

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

The person that turns over the most rocks wins the game. And that's always been my philosophy.