Peter Lynch: How To Invest For Beginners

peter lynch one of the greatest investors of his generation he achieved a 29.2 percent annualized return over 13 years at fidelity making him the greatest mutual fund manager of all time no one has achieved a return that high with that large amount of money now he did this by following simple rules and principles to invest in which i'm gonna let him explain now i'm gonna try and say some words on the things i've used over the years when i was a amateur when i ran magellan i still use today i think they make sense i think they make a lot of sense for investors and i frankly think it's a tragedy in america that the small investor has been convinced by the media the print media the the radio the television media that they don't have a chance they don't the big institutions with all their computers and all their degrees and all their money have all the edges and it just isn't true at all and when they're convinced when this happens when this occurs people act accordingly they when they believe it they buy stocks for a week and they buy options and they buy the chile fund this week and next week it's the argentina fund and they get results proportioned to that kind of investing and that's very bothersome i think the public can do extremely well in the stock market on their own i think the fact that institutions dominate the market today is a positive for small investors these institutions push stocks on usual lows they push it unusual highs for someone they can sit back and have their own opinion know something about industry this is a positive the single single most important thing to me in the stock market for anyone is to know what you own i'm amazed how many people own stocks they would not be able to tell you why they own it they couldn't say in a minute or less why they don't actually you really press them down they'd say the reason i own this is the sucker is going up and that's the only reason that's the only reason they own it and if you can't explain i'm serious you can't explain to a 10 year old and two minutes or less why you own a stock you shouldn't own it and that's true i think about 80 percent of people that own stocks and this is the kind of stock people like to own this is the kind of company people adore owning is a relatively simple company they make a very narrow easy to understand product they make a one megabit sram cmos bipolar risk floating point data io array processor with an optimizing compiler a 16 dual port memory a double diffused metal oxide semiconductor monolithic logic chip for the plasma matrix vacuum fluorescent display it has a 16 bit dual memory it has a unix operating system four whetstone megaflop poly silicone emitter a high bandwidth that's very important six gigahertz double metallization communication protocol and asynchronous backward compatibility peripheral bus architecture four wave interleaved memory a token ring interchange backplane and it does in 15 nanoseconds of capability now if you don't want a piece of crap like that you will never make money never somebody will come along with more wet stones or less wet stones or a bigger mega flop or a smaller mega flop you won't have the farthest idea what's happening and people buy this junk all the time i made money in dunkin donuts i can understand it i uh when there was recessions i didn't have to worry about what was happening i could go there and people were still there i didn't have to worry about low price korean imports i mean i just stand out you know i can understand it and you laugh i made 10 or 15 times my money in dunkin donuts those are the kind of stocks i can understand if you don't understand it doesn't work this is the single biggest principle and it bothers me that people are very careful the money the public when they buy a refrigerator they get a consumer reports they buy a microwave oven they do that they ask people what's the best kind of radar range or what kind of car to buy they do research on apartments when they go to when they go on a trip to wyoming they get the mobile travel guide or california when they go to europe they get the michelin travel guide people will hear a tip on the bus on some stock and they'll put half their life savings in it before sunset and they wonder why they lose money in the stock market i'm trying to convince people there is a method there are reasons for stocks that go up coca-cola this is very magic it's a very magic number easy to remember coca-cola is earning 30 times per share what they did 32 years ago the stock has gone up 30-fold bethlehem steel is earning less than they did 30 years ago the stock is half its price of 30 years ago stocks are not lottery tickets there's a company behind every stock the company does well the stock does well it's not that complicated people get too carried away and first of all they try and predict the stock market that is a total waste of time no one can predict the stock market they try to predict interest rates i mean this is a if anybody predict interest rates right three times in a row they'd be a billionaire concerned there's not that many billionaires on the planet it's very you know i took i had logic so i had a syllogism and uh studied these when i was at boston college they can't be that many people who can bring interest rates because there'd be lots of billionaires and no one can predict the economy i had a lot of people this room were around in 1981 and 82 when we had a 20 prime rate with double-digit inflation double digit unemployment i don't remember anybody telling me in 1981 about it i didn't read i studied all stuff i remember every time we had the worst recession since the depression so what i'm trying to tell you it'd be very useful to know what the stock market is going to do it'd be terrific to know that the dow jones average a year for now would be x then we're going to have a full scale recession our interest rate is going to be 12 that's useful stuff you never know it though you just don't get to learn it so i've always said if you spend 14 minutes a year in economics you've wasted 12 minutes and i i really believe that now i have to be i'd be fair i'm talking about economics in the broad scale predicting the downturn for next year or the upturn or m1 and m23b and all these all these m's the i'm talking about economics to me is when you talk about scrap prices when i own auto stocks i want to know what's happening use car prices when you use car prices going up it's a very good indicator when i own hotel stocks i want to load hotel occupancies well i know chemical stocks i know what's happened the price of ethylene these are facts if aluminum inventories go down five straight months that's relevant i can deal with that home affordability i want to know about i own uh fannie mae or i own a housing stock these are facts you can they're economic facts and it's economic predictions and economic predictions are a total waste but you should study history and history is the important thing you learn from what you learn from history is the market goes down it goes down a lot the math is simple there's been 93 years of century this is easy to do the markets had 50 declines of 10 or more so 50 declines in 93 years about once every two years the market falls 10 percent we call that a correction that means that's a euphemism for losing a lot of money rapidly we call it a correction and uh uh so 50 declines in 93 years about once every two years the market falls 10 all those 50 declines 15 have been 25 or more that's known as a bear market we've had 15 declines in 93 years so every six years the market's gonna have a 25 decline that's all you need to know you need to know the market's gonna go down sometime if you're not ready for that you shouldn't own stocks and it's good when it happens if you like a stock at 14 it goes to six that's great you understand the company you look at the balance sheet they're doing fine you're hoping to get to 22 with it 14 to 22 is terrific 6 to 22 is exceptional so you take advantage of these declines they're going to happen no one knows when they're going to happen it would be very people tell you about it after the fact that they predicted it but they predicted it 53 times and so you can take advantage of the volatility market if you understand what you own another key element is that you have plenty of time people are an unbelievable rush to buy a stock i'll give an example of a well-known company walmart went public in october of 1970 1970 went public already had a great record it had 15 years performance great balance sheet you could have waited 10 years saying you're a very conservative investor you're not sure this walmart can make it you want to check your you see them operating small towns you're afraid they can only make it in seven or eight states you want to wait till they go to more states you keep waiting you can about walmart 10 years after they went public and made 35 times your money if you bought it when they went public you would have made 500 times your money but you can wait 10 years after walmart went public and made 30 over 30 times your money you could wait three years after microsoft went public and made ten times your money now if you knew something about software i know nothing about software if you understand my software you would said these guys have it i don't care who's gonna win compact ibm i don't know who's gonna win japanese computers i know microsoft ms-dos is the right thing you could buy microsoft again i'm repeating myself stocks are not a lottery ticket there's a company behind every stock and you can just watch it you have plenty of time people are in an amazing rush to purchase the security they're out of breath when they call up you don't need to do this it's uh you need an edge to make money too people have incredible edges and they throw them away i'll give you a quick example of uh smith klein this is a stock that had taggement now you didn't have to buy smith klein when tag met was doing critical trials you don't have to buy smith klein with tagmet was talked about in the new england journal of medicine or the british version lancet you could have bought smith klein when tagamet first came out a year after came out let's say your spouse your mother your father you're a nurse you're a druggist you're writing all these prescriptions tagamet was doing an amazing job of curing ulcers and it was a wonderful pill for the company because if we just stopped taking it the ulcer came back see it was it would have been a crummy product that he took it for a buck and it went away but it was a great product for the company but you could have bought it two years after the product was on the market and made five or six times your money i mean all the drugs all the nurses all the people millions of people saw this product and they're all buying oil companies you know or drilling rings you know it happens and then three years later four years later black so even a bigger company's a huge company british company brought zantac which was a better at that time an improved product and you could have seen that take market share do well you could buy blacks on triple your money so you only need a few stocks in your lifetime they're in your industry i think of people if you've worked in the auto industry let's say you're an auto dealer the last 10 years you would've seen chrysler come up in the minivan you've seen if you're a buick dealer or a toyota deal honda dealer you would have seen the chrysler dealership packed with people you could have made 10 times your money on chrysler a year after the minivan came out ford introduces the tourist sable the most successful line of cars in the last 20 years ford went up seven fold on the tour stable so if you're a car dealer you only need to buy a few stocks every decade when your lifetime's over you don't need a lot of five baggers to make a lot of money starting with ten thousand dollars or five thousand dollars so in your own industry you're gonna see a lot of stocks and that's what bothers me they're good stocks out there looking for you and people just aren't listening and they're just not watching it and uh they have incredible edges people have big edges over me they work in the aluminum industry i see aluminum industries coming down inventories coming down six straight months they see demand improving in america today you know it's hard to get an epa permit for a bowling alley never mind an aluminum smelter so you know when aluminum gets tight you just can't build seven aluminum spellers so when when you see this coming you could say wait a second i can make some money when an industry goes from terrible to mediocre the stock goes north when it goes from mediocre to good the stock goes north and it goes from good to terrific the stock goes north there's lots of ways to make money in your own industry you can be a supplier in the industry you can be a customer this thing this thing happens in the paper industry it happens in the steel industry it doesn't happen every week but if you're in some field you'll see a term you'll see something in the publishing industry these things come along and it's just mind-blowing people throw it away you see peter did not receive his over 29 return by mere luck investing is not lotto if you know what you are doing if you can learn to understand the business behind the stock buy when things are cheap and stick to the areas that you have an advantage in you too can achieve a very high return

Channel: Cooper Academy

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Keywords: peter lynch, peter lynch investing, one up on wall street, peter lynch how to invest, peter lynch how to invest for beginners, peter lynch interview, how to invest for beginners, investing rules, investing 101, how to invest, beginner investing, peter lynch speech, peter lynch stock picking, cooper academy, peter lynch how to pick stocks

Id: MLIxSL1v79g

Length: 13min 20sec (800 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 30 2020