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Hi, it's Lucas, your host at the Strange World of Econ. And today we'll be beginning a new series on Peter Lynch's investment philosophy. Peter Lynch is a legendary investor who helmed Fidelity Investments flagship mutual fund, the Fidelity Mellin Fund between 1977 to 1990, delivering an astounding 29.2% 2% average annual return for the 13-year period, besting the S&P 500 in 11 out of 13 years.
Such returns made the Fidelity Mellin fund one of the most successful funds during this period, which grew the fund from a poultry $20 million in assets when Peter Lynch took over to $14 billion in assets when he left. Peter Lynch has authored three books on investing, One Up on Wall Street, Beating the Street, and Learn to Earn.
We will be drawing on investment wisdom he lays down in his initial book, OneUp on Wall Street, which was published in 1989. So, the financial examples and companies he cites in OneUp on Wall Street, may be outdated, but his downto-earth and easy to understand investment guides are timeless. Even fellow legendary investor Warren Buffett has quoted Peter Lynch's investment wisdom in his annual letter to shareholders.
I first encountered one up on Wall Street in my younger days, if I remember correctly, before I even went off to university. I remember I was at a bookstore browsing the economics and business section, looking for a book that unlocked the secrets to the investment game when I stumbled onto Peter Lynch's One Up on Wall Street.
I was initially impressed with his track record and figured I should be learning from a practitioner from the investment world rather than a theoretician or an academic. I remember reading the first few pages and I was instantly hooked because he wrote an easy to understand almost folksy style that was largely devoid of arcane symbols and formulas.
It was easy enough and logical enough for my tiny young mind to understand. I quickly devoured the book. And while my knowledge on finance and economics has grown since then, I still gained a lot of insight from Peter Lynch's book when I reread it recently for preparation for this YouTube series. If you're able to get your hands on a copy of Peter Lynch's OneUp on Wall Street, the book is readily available on Amazon, your local bookstore, and probably library.
I highly recommend it. In order to understand the investor, we need to understand the man. Peter Lynch was born on January 19th, 1944 in Newton, Massachusetts. Peter's father passed away due to cancer when he was 10, and as a result, his mother took over financial responsibility of the household. Peter Lynch's mother was the youngest of seven children and had uncles and aunts that still remember the crash of 29 and the subsequent depression.
This created an environment of distrust in stocks and the stock market in his family. Nobody was recommending stocks around our household. The only stock purchase I ever heard about was a time my grandfather Jean Griffin bought City Services. He was a very conservative investor and he chose City Services because he thought it was a water utility.
When he took a trip to New York and discovered it was an oil company, he sold immediately. To help out with the financial situation at home, Peter Lynch took a fortuitous part-time job as a golf caddy at exclusive country club outside of Boston, where he would be catting for powerful CEOs from major corporations Gillette, Polaroid, and most importantly, Fidelity.
As Peter Lynch put it, in helping D. George Sullivan, then president of Fidelity Funds, find his ball, I was helping myself find a career. Peter Lynch described his canning experience as educational. In a single round of play, I might give out five golf tips and get back five stock tips. Peter Lynch continued catting throughout high school and into Boston College.
He avoided all the usual suspect of courses expected from one that would go on to have an analytic career as a financial analyst and eventual fund manager. Peter Lynch preferred history, psychology, political science, metaphysics, epistemology, logic, and ancient Greek philosophy to science, math, and accounting.
Peter Lynch noted, "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. Investing in stocks is an art, not a science. And people who have been trained to rigidly quantify everything have a big disadvantage.
During his sophomore year in college, Peter Lynch bought his first stock, Tiger Airlines, for $7 a share. He purchased Tiger Airlines after reading an article highlighting the promising future of air freight. Tiger Airlines turned out to be a great stock. Due to the Vietnam War, Tiger Airlines made a fortune moving cargo and troops in and out of the Pacific.
He sold Tiger Airlines at $32.75, which helped fund his graduate studies at Wharton, the fame business school that claims fellow legendary investor Warren Buffett as an alumni. Peter Lynch applied for a summer position at Fidelity during college. And I'm sure catting for the president of Fidelity didn't hinder his chances.
He was accepted as one of three summer positions amid a 100 applications. Peter Lynch's firsthand experience at a realworld investment management company would prove to be transformative and shaped how he approached the investment business. After that interlude at Fidelity, I returned to Wharton for my second year of graduate school, more skeptical than ever about the value of academic stock market theory.
It seemed to me that most of what I learned at Wharton, which was supposed to help you succeed in investment business, could only help you fail. I studied statistics, advanced calculus, and quantitative analysis. Quantitative analysis taught me the things I saw happening at Fidelity couldn't really be happening.
It also was obvious that the Wharton professors who believe in quantum analysis and random walk weren't doing nearly as well as my new colleagues at Fidelity. So, between theory and practice, I cast my lot with the practitioners. It's very hard to support the popular academic theory that the market is irrational when you know somebody who just made a 20fold profit in Kentucky Fried Chicken and furthermore who explained in advance why the stock was going to rise.
My distrust of theorizers and prognosticators continue to the present day. After graduate school, Pier Lynch had a short stint in the army and was sent to Korea. He married his wife while in the army on May 11th, 1968. He returned from Korea in 1969 and rejoined Fidelity as a full-time research analyst.
Peter Lynch was subsequently promoted to assistant director of research in 1974 and in May 1977, he was promoted to fund manager of the Fidelity Mellan Fund. When Peter Lynch took over the Fidelity Mellant Fund in 1977, it was quite a different beast than how he would leave it 13 years later. Not only was the fund a lot smaller, $20 million in assets, but the fund was only invested in 40 stocks.
and Fidelity's head man, Ned Johnson, recommended that he reduce this number to 25. Peter Lynch ignored the advice, and eventually the fund invested in 1,400 different stocks. Join me in the next set of videos as we dive deeper into Peter Lynch's investment philosophy, how he evaluates a company for potential investment, how to construct an investment portfolio, what makes a good investor, and the investing edge the amateur investor possesses over professional investor Peter Lynch. c.
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