Peter Lynch Quotes

I think without a doubt, that what is called "financial genius" is merely a rising market.

You only need to make one big score in finance to be a hero forever.

People are always saying that prices are too high. When they turn out to be right, we anoint them. When they turn out to be wrong, we ignore them. They are typically right and wrong about half the time.

Successful investing is anticipating the anticipations of others.

Everybody thinks that they're going to time the market, they're going to sharpshoot the market, and buy right at the bottom. The truth of the matter is that nobody is good at it.

There's quite a bit of evidence that even professionals don't show any ability to pick stocks or to predict market rollbacks. Most of the people we identify as skilled based on returns have probably just been lucky.

I'm going to reveal the grand secret to getting rich by investing. It's a simple formula that has worked for Warren Buffett, Carl Icahn and all the greatest investment gurus over the years. Ready? Buy low, sell high.

People always come up to me and ask what the next 'big short' will be. The truth is I simply do not have an answer, and do not want to have an answer, to this question.

Entire populations of market strategists, fund managers, and economists are employed to try and intuit for clients which securities to bet on for the best possible return each year - or quarter.

The idea that a bell rings to signal when investors should get into or out of the stock market is simply not credible. After nearly fifty years in this business, I do not know of anybody who has done it successfully and consistently. I don't even know anybody who knows anybody who has done it successfully and consistently. Yet market timing appears to be increasingly embraced by mutual fund investors and the professional managers of fund portfolios alike.

The big money is not in the buying and selling ... but in the waiting.

I think you'll make more money in the end with good ethics than bad. Even though there are some people who do very well, like Marc Rich-who plainly has never had any decent ethics, or seldom anyway. But in the end, Warren Buffett has done better than Marc Rich-in money-not just in reputation.

Donald Trump has a bunch of people who have been able to find the money they need for projects that they wanted to do and succeed at them and show a profit at the same time, and everybody involved wins.

The real fortunes in this country have been made by people who have been right about the business they invested in, and not right about the timing of the stock market.

I look for businesses in which I think I can predict what they're going to look like in ten to fifteen years time. Take Wrigley's chewing gum. I don't think the internet is going to change how people chew gum.

The idea that you try to time purchases based on what you think business is going to do in the next year or two, I think that's the greatest mistake that investors make because it's always uncertain. People say it's a time of uncertainty. It was uncertain on September 10th, 2001, people just didn't know it. It's uncertain every single day. So take uncertainty as part of being involved in investment at all. But uncertainty can be your friend. I mean, when people are scared, they pay less for things. We try to price. We don't try to time at all.

In the financial markets I find it easy to predict what will happen and very difficult to predict when it will happen. I think that things were clear during the bubble as to what would happen eventually.

All the time and effort people devote to picking the right fund, the hot hand, the great manager have, in most cases, led to no advantage.

I bought properties inexpensively and made a lot of money. I began to think it was easy.

Become one of those people who work hard, invest and build, and at the same time create employment and opportunities for others.

If you ask me to name the proudest distinction of Americans, I would choose . . . the fact that they were the people who created the phrase "to make money." No other language or nation had ever used these words before. . . . Americans were the first to understand that wealth has to be created.

I’d say that Berkshire Hathaway’s system is adapting to the nature of the investment problem as it really is. We’ve really made the money out of high quality businesses. In some cases, we bought the whole business. And in some cases, we just bought a big block of stock. But when you analyze what happened, the big money’s been made in the high quality businesses. And most of the other people who’ve made a lot of money have done so in high quality businesses.

I am not in the business of predicting general stock market of business fluctuations. If you think I can do this, or think it is essential to an investment program, you should not be in the partnership.

The idea is to buy when the probability is greatest that the market is going to advance.