Peter Lynch

Peter Lynch studied history and philosophy at Boston College before joining Fidelity Investments in 1966 as a summer research intern. He became manager of the Fidelity Magellan Fund in 1977 — at the time a small fund with $18 million in assets. Over the next 13 years Lynch produced an extraordinary track record: annualised returns of 29.2% per year, compounding the fund from $18 million to $14 billion in assets and making Magellan the world's largest actively managed mutual fund by the time Lynch retired in 1990. His investment philosophy was grounded in fundamental analysis with a bottom-up, stock-picking approach. He favoured companies he could understand and where he could identify a specific competitive advantage — a philosophy he summarised with the phrase "invest in what you know." He preferred growth-at-reasonable-price (GARP) stocks and was willing to hold concentrated positions in companies with clear earnings growth trajectories. Lynch popularised investment for ordinary people through his books "One Up on Wall Street" (1989) and "Beating the Street" (1993), which described his investment process in accessible language and argued that individual investors could outperform professional managers by focusing on simple businesses they understand from daily life. These books have sold millions of copies and remain among the most widely read investment texts ever published. Lynch retired from fund management at age 46 and has devoted much of his time since to philanthropy, donating tens of millions of dollars to educational causes.