What are Peter Lynch’s investment strategies? Are they sound and effective? What are some alternative approaches to investing?
In Beating the Street, famed mutual fund manager Peter Lynch presents principles and strategies by which non-professional, individual investors can beat the pros. We examine several of his recommendations and see how they stand the test of time. We also compare them with the advice of other investment gurus.
Read more for an analytic look at Peter Lynch’s investment approach.
Investment Professionals Are Overrated
Peter Lynch’s investment strategies are based largely on a key insight he drew from his decades of success managing the Magellan Fund at Fidelity. He asserts that all of the information anyone needs to become a successful investor is readily available—you just need to be willing to put in the hard work to translate that information into well-researched and timely stock investments.
| Don’t Trust the Stock Gurus—But Don’t Try to Beat the Market Yourself Either In recent years, part of Lynch’s core insight—that professional stockpickers and fund managers are vastly overrated—appears to have largely borne out. One 2022 study of actively managed equities funds (mutual funds composed of individual corporate stocks selected by fund managers) showed that not one of the 2,000+ funds analyzed delivered higher returns than the market as a whole over the five-year period studied. Even if some of the funds managed to deliver higher returns in a given year, none were able to do so consistently over time. According to the researchers, this strongly indicated that the high-performing years were due to luck and not to any insight or savvy on the part of the fund managers. However, the authors of this study take a different lesson from this finding than Lynch does. Where Lynch argues that the poor track record of Wall Street fund managers shows that you can do a better job than them through smart research and timely investments, the study authors write that no one can consistently outperform the market on a year-over-year basis. Instead of trying to assemble your own portfolio of individual stocks, the study authors urge ordinary investors to put their money into index funds: low-fee investment vehicles designed to mirror the performance of the market as a whole. And, rather than constantly buying and selling individual stocks, they recommend simply holding your shares in an index fund over decades. |
Stocks Are Superior to Bonds
Lynch warns that are fraught with risk because their real returns are highly vulnerable to inflation and interest rate changes. These bond risks, writes Lynch, highlight why stocks are the superior investment option over bonds. He writes that the historical performance of the stock market, as measured by popular stock indexes like the S&P 500, Dow Jones Industrial Average, and Nasdaq, shows that sustained investment in stocks yields higher returns than bonds over time. This is because stocks are an equity investment, not a debt investment like bonds. When you open stock in a company, you become a shareholder—a partial owner of that company. And, as a shareholder, you have the opportunity to enjoy both dividends (payments companies make to shareholders out of profits earned) and annual increases in the stock prices themselves.
Lynch cautions that this superior performance is over the long term: In a given quarter or year, bonds may yield higher returns than stocks. But, he emphasizes, over the course of decades, stocks always win out.
| The Case for Bonds Although Lynch generally derides bonds as an inferior investment option compared with stocks, other investment experts make a case for including bonds as part of your overall investment strategy. In The Little Book of Common Sense Investing, John Bogle makes three arguments for why bonds can be a superior investment to stocks: Bonds can beat stocks over short periods of time. According to Bogle, from 1900 to 2017, bonds provided a better return on investment than stocks in 42 of those years. Bonds provide protection during market drops because they’re less volatile than stocks: A one-year Treasury bond at 4% interest effectively guarantees a 4% return on your investment. Consequently, bonds can stabilize your investment portfolio amidst the stock market’s ebbs and flows. Bonds can offer greater yields than dividend yields. For example, in 2017, bond yields (the annual return on bonds relative to their price) remained higher than stocks’ dividend yields: The average bond yield was 3.1%, while the average dividend yield was 2.0%. So, bonds can generate a greater flow of liquid income for investors than stocks. |
Select Your Stocks Carefully
Lynch writes that amateurs can pick stocks as well as—and often better than—professional portfolio managers. But, he cautions, outperforming the pros isn’t easy. It requires researching the financial and market fundamentals of the companies whose stocks you buy.
| Alternate View: Focus on Overall Market Data, Not Specific Stocks Some successful investors have taken the opposite approach from Lynch—forgoing detailed analysis of individual companies and instead focusing on large-scale, market-wide price fluctuations. In The Man Who Solved the Market, Gregory Zuckerman tells the story of Jim Simons, a former mathematician who became one of the most successful hedge fund managers in history. The key to Simons’s success, writes Zuckerman, was his insight that price fluctuations within financial markets followed recognizable and predictable patterns. When identified, these patterns could be used to strategically buy and sell the right stocks, bonds, currencies, and other financial instruments at the right time. For Simons, it wasn’t necessary to know anything substantive about the underlying stocks, bonds, commodities, or currencies being traded or why their prices fluctuated the way they did: What mattered was the integrity of the data and the reliability of the patterns identified by his trading algorithm. If the algorithm could detect a non-random pattern and make bets that paid off more often than not, the fund would invest even if it followed no apparent economic logic. |
Understand the Fundamentals Behind the Companies
Your job as an investor is to understand the fundamentals behind the companies you invest in, writes Lynch. Picking stocks isn’t supposed to be a game of chance: When you buy a stock, you’re not buying a raffle ticket, hoping that your stock is the “lucky” one that rises in value. Instead, behind every stock is a real company, with managers, employees, products and services, and a business strategy. Your job as an investor is to understand the fundamentals behind the companies you invest in—the products or services they bring to market, their strategy for long-term growth, and their overall financial health. If you’re picking stocks without doing this research, you’re effectively just gambling.
Lynch writes that it’s important to get into the details of a company’s operations before you decide to invest in it. In fact, during his time as a fund manager, Lynch often made a point of visiting the headquarters of companies he was considering adding to the Magellan portfolio and meeting with executives. He wanted to know that a company’s leaders had clear plans for future growth, that a company wasn’t saddled by unsustainable levels of corporate debt, and that the people running the firm were generally competent.
| Fundamental vs. Technical Analysis Lynch’s approach of rigorously analyzing individual companies and stocks speaks to the differences between two schools of investing thought: fundamental analysis and technical analysis. Fundamental analysis is the more traditional approach, which Lynch advocates. This school of thought attempts to measure the intrinsic value of a stock. Adherents of this philosophy seek to answer why a particular stock goes up or down in value. They do this, as the name suggests, by delving into the “fundamentals” of the company behind the stock. They’ll look at sector-wide trends and the company’s earnings, expenses, assets, and liabilities to make predictions about what the stock will do. Technical analysis, on the other hand, identifies trends and correlations—how a particular stock goes up or down in value. It’s much closer to what Simons and his colleagues did, as detailed in The Man Who Solved the Market. Technical analysts assume that the “fundamentals” are already factored into the stock price, so it’s a waste of time and effort to analyze them. Instead, they use mathematical analysis to identify patterns and trends within the market and across different types of financial instruments (like stocks, bonds, commodities, and currencies). These trends can signal what a stock will do in the future. |
Don’t Invest in Too Many Companies
Lynch asserts that you should never hold more stocks in your portfolio than you can personally manage or keep track of. A manager of a large fund with a staff of analysts can afford to own stock in hundreds or even thousands of companies; however, as a retail investor, you’ll never have the bandwidth to do the research you need to do to make informed investment decisions in a portfolio that large.
| What’s the “Right” Number of Stocks to Own? Although Lynch recommends keeping a small portfolio so you’ll be able to manage and oversee the stocks in it, there are risks to this approach. In a small portfolio, it takes just a few stocks with low returns to drag your entire position down. Similarly, your portfolio can become overly dependent on just a few high performers. For these reasons, some research suggests that the right number of stocks to hold in a well-diversified portfolio is 25 to 30 companies. In determining how many stocks you should own at once, investment experts also advise that it depends on your stage in life, your investment goals, and your personal risk tolerance. Someone in their 20s may be more comfortable with a relatively small portfolio of only a dozen or so stocks. Although this will likely be a more volatile portfolio because it’s more subject to the ups and downs of just a few companies, at this age you have enough time left before retirement to ride out the short-term fluctuations. Meanwhile, someone nearing retirement may want to hold a larger portfolio of around 30 stocks to reduce the risk of loss if one or two stocks decline. |
Keep Your Portfolio Diversified
Lynch writes that it’s crucial to maintain a balanced portfolio. This means having a mix of stocks from many sectors of the economy. Indeed, warns Lynch, it’s a risky strategy to overload in stocks from companies in any one industry, no matter how stable and secure that sector may seem. Ideally, you want a portfolio whose composition closely reflects the total market—this protects you against a collapse in one industry because your losses there may be offset by gains (or at least smaller losses) in other industries.
Recent history shows why it would be a gamble to bet too heavily in one industry: Putting all your money into tech stocks would have wiped you out during the dot-com crash of the early 2000s; going all-in on cryptocurrency would have been calamitous in 2022 when cryptocurrencies plummeted amid fraud scandals.
| The Risks of Over-Diversification Although many experts agree with Lynch that it’s wise to maintain a diversified portfolio, there’s also a risk in having a portfolio that’s too diversified. Some evidence suggests that the risk-mitigation benefits of a diversified portfolio diminish greatly once you own more than 20 stocks. In other words, there’s only a marginal difference from a diversification standpoint between owning 20 stocks and 10,000. If you own too many different stocks and become too diversified, you can reduce your potential for high returns. In a portfolio consisting of dozens or even hundreds of stocks, a few stocks performing exceptionally well will have only a middling impact on your returns because they would only represent a small share of your total portfolio. But if you had a diversified portfolio of only around 20 stocks, those high performers would have an outsized positive impact on your returns. |
Play the Long Game
Lynch writes that successfully managing your portfolio is largely about staying the course in the market. Don’t worry about the short-term ups and downs—the historical performance of the market over decades shows that consistently owning stocks is a winning strategy.
When you start buying stocks, you’ll inevitably experience market downturns. They can last for a month, a quarter, or even a couple of years. These downturns are often unpredictable and are usually caused by large-scale macroeconomic events and conditions that individual investors have zero control over—from interest rate changes to geopolitical events to natural forces like weather and pandemics.
And, when these bear markets strike, you’re likely to lose money. But, warns Lynch, this isn’t the time to flee the market in a panic. Indeed, he doesn’t think of them as market collapses at all, but rather as market corrections—times when previously overvalued stocks come back to Earth and settle at prices that more accurately reflect their worth. And it’s during these market corrections that savvy investors can seize the opportunity to find bargains and buy stocks at discount prices. By contrast, writes Lynch, bull markets (when stock prices experience a prolonged rise) are often a sign of overpriced stocks, where you’ll be hard-pressed to find good bargains.
| Time in the Market, Not Timing the Market The history of stock prices, as measured by well-regarded indexes like the S&P 500, bears out Lynch’s argument. Many investment experts argue that success is more about time in the market than about timing the market. In other words, continually investing in the stock market is a better strategy for high returns than trying to buy stocks at a low price and sell them at a high price. This is because it’s difficult to predict when the market will go up and down, and, as Lynch points out, you as an individual investor have almost no control over it. But, evidence suggests that playing the long game does work. Over the past 94 years, the S&P 500 has swung back and forth, with 27% of those years having negative returns. So, if you’re buying and selling stock in a one-year timeframe, you have a significant risk of taking a loss. But, the longer the time window of your investment, your chances of positive returns become overwhelmingly likely. Over those same 94 years, through December 31, 2022, 94% of 10-year periods have had positive returns. |
The Case for Index Funds
Lynch recommends stock index funds as a particular type of stock fund for investors who want to enjoy solid returns without having to manage their own portfolio—or see their returns eaten up by high management fees. The stocks in an index-tracking mutual fund are automatically selected based on their position in these indexes. You’re not actively managing it, nor is a fund manager. The fund you invest in purchases shares of companies in proportion to those companies’ positions within whichever index the fund is tracking.
| The Rise—and Risks—of Passive Investing In the years since Lynch wrote Beating the Street, index funds have risen greatly in popularity. These funds are described as being “passively managed.” They don’t have an active manager like Lynch selecting stocks for inclusion in the portfolio based on their financial performance or projections for future growth. Instead, these passively managed funds buy and sell stocks automatically when those stocks enter or exit indexes like the S&P 500 or the Dow Jones Industrial Average. And, because index funds have become such major purchasers of US stocks, index funds now control 20% to 30% of the US equities market. Despite their popularity, some observers are concerned that the growth of index funds represents a dangerous concentration of economic power. Today, for nine in 10 companies listed on the S&P 500, their largest single shareholder is one of the “Big Three” money managers—BlackRock, Vanguard, and State Street. And these three firms control 80-90% of the index fund market. With this level of concentration, we could soon be facing an economic future where a small handful of individuals would have vastly disproportionate power over most publicly traded companies. |
