Peter Lynch Quotes

If your investing approach requires that you become Nostradamus to succeed, then you are destined to fail.

We're getting hurt, but I'm a long-term investor.

My advice to the average investor in 1988 is to be patient and think long-term. It will take 18 months for confidence to get better and, in the meantime, this is absolutely no place for short-term money.

Because in the New Normal you are more worried about the return of your capital, not return on your capital.

In the investment business, you must expect to be wrong.

The great skill of investment is to know when the right time is to get out. Getting in's easy.

People with 401(k)s need to be very conservative. Picking bottoms should be for insiders and traders.

Regardless of what happens in the markets, stick to your investment program. Changing your strategy at the wrong time can be the single most devastating mistake you can make as an investor.

I think average investors should not trade a lot. The evidence is overpowering. The more you trade, the less you earn.

It's in the nature of stock markets to go way down from time to time. There's no system to avoid bad markets. You can't do it unless you try to time the market, which is a seriously dumb thing to do. Conservative investing with steady savings without expecting miracles is the way to go.

You could lose hundreds or thousands one day on paper and gain it all back the next, and it has literally no effect on your immediate future, provided the money you have in the market is money you're investing for the long haul (meaning at least three to five years).

I have yet to take capital losses on any company. Then again, it's still early.

I've been in real estate for my whole life, I've been trying to sharpshoot the market with my investments, I'm never right. All you need to do is get near the bottom. That's good enough.

Owning equities is an essential part of anyone's portfolio. You just can't ignore it over time. It's going to add the real pop to anyone's overall performance.

But my system for over 30 years has been this: 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.

Investors have to ask themselves two questions. How much can we grow our investments? And, can we afford our mistakes?

Do not buy the hype from Wall St. and the press that stocks always go up. There are long periods when stocks do nothing and other investments are better.

All of us would be better investors if we just made fewer decisions.

What I'm trying to say is that for the average investor, what I would encourage them to do is to understand that there's inflation and growth. It can go higher and lower and to have four different portfolios essentially that make up your entire portfolio that gets you balanced.

If you can predict where the market's going, just do what you can predict. If you can't, which is the presumption of dollar cost averaging or time cost averaging, either one, then you're trying to ease in. But if the market rises more than it falls most of the time, easing in is, by definition, a loser's game.

I have a million dollars in the stock market, because if I lose a million dollars, I don't personally care.

People often panic when the markets go down and sell off their stocks - but then they aren't in the game when the markets are doing well.

In tennis, you strike a ball just after the rebound for the fastest return. It's the same with investment.

Since we try and take a fairly buy-and-hold approach to our newsletter portfolios and don't sell at every whipsaw, we want to have a mix of stocks that will perform at both ends of the oscillation.

But in practice, if often comes down to not suffering a loss as big as the huge gain you made a while ago.