Thread by @ms89_meet

Top 50 investing quotes by Peter Lynch. (A mega thread)

All the math you need in the stock market you get in the fourth grade.

Charts are great for predicting the past.

When you sell in desperation, you always sell cheap.

Nobody can predict interest rates, the future direction of the economy or the stock market. Dismiss all such forecasts and concentrate on what’s actually happening to the companies in which you’ve invested.

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.

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.

In our society, it's been the men who've handled most of the finances, and the women who've stood by and watched men botch things up.

If a picture is worth a thousand words, in business, so is a number.

During the Gold Rush, most would-be miners lost money, but people who sold them picks, shovels, tents and blue-jeans (Levi Strauss) made a nice profit.

In the long run, it's not just how much money you make that will determine your future prosperity. It's how much of that money you put to work by saving it and investing it.

All you need for a lifetime of successful investing is a few big winners, and the pluses from those will overwhelm the minuses from the stocks that don’t work out.

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

Gentlemen who prefer bonds don't know what they're missing.

In business, competition is never as healthy as total domination.

Know what you own, and know why you own it.

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.

It's human nature to keep doing something as long as it's pleasurable and you can succeed at it, which is why the world population continues to double every 40 years.

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

The typical big winner in the Lynch portfolio generally takes three to ten years to play out.

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.

Long-term investing has gotten so popular, it’s easier to admit you’re a crack addict than to admit you’re a short-term investor.

It would be wonderful if we could avoid the setbacks with timely exits, but nobody has figured out how to predict them.

My high-tech aversion caused me to make fun of the typical biotech enterprise: $100 million in cash from selling shares, one hundred Ph.D.'s, 99 microscopes, and zero revenues.

Time is on your side when you own shares of superior companies.

I'm always fully invested. It's a great feeling to be caught with your pants up.

Invest in what you know.

There is always something to worry about. Avoid weekend thinking and ignoring the latest dire predictions of the newscasters. Sell a stock because the company’s fundamentals deteriorate, not because the sky is falling.

A stock market decline is as routine as a January blizzard in Colorado. If you’re prepared, it can’t hurt you. A decline is a great opportunity to pick up the bargains left behind by investors who are fleeing the storm in panic.

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.

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

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

Far more money has been lost by investors preparing for corrections, or trying to anticipate corrections, than has been lost in corrections themselves.

Visiting stores and testing products is one of the critical elements of the analyst’s job.

The worst thing you can do is invest in companies you know nothing about. Unfortunately, buying stocks on ignorance is still a popular American pastime.

If you're prepared to invest in a company, then you ought to be able to explain why in simple language that a fifth grader could understand, and quickly enough so the fifth grader won't get bored.

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

You have to keep your priorities straight if you plan to do well in stocks.

People who want to know how stocks fared on any given day ask, "Where did the Dow close?" I'm more interested in how many stocks went up versus how many went down. These so-called advance/decline numbers paint a more realistic picture.

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.

In stocks - as in romance - ease of divorce is not a sound basis for commitment.

The basic story remains simple and never-ending. Stocks aren't lottery tickets. There's a company attached to every share.

Your investor's edge is not something you get from Wall Street experts. It's something you already have. You can outperform the experts if you use your edge by investing in companies or industries you already understand.

The junior high schools and high schools of America have forgotten to teach one of the most important courses of all. Investing.

When people discover they are no good at baseball or hockey, they put away their bats and their skates and they take up amateur golf or stamp collecting or gardening. But when people discover they are no good at picking stocks, they are likely to continue to do it anyway.

If u can follow only one bit of data, fllw the earnings (assuming the co in question has earnings). I subscribe to the crusty notion that sooner or later earnings make or break an investment in equities. What the stock price does today, tmrrw, or next week is only a distraction.

The natural-born investor is a myth.

The simpler it is, the better I like it.

Everyone has the brain power to make money in stocks. Not everyone has the stomach.

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

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.