Wisdom of Peter Lynch

 1. "In the stock market, the most important organ is the stomach. It's not the brain." (Lynch explained that investors need to know their pain tolerance, and often succeed if they simply hang on to their holdings.)

2. "You've got to look in the mirror every day and say, 'What am I going to do if the market goes down 10%? What do I do if it goes down 20%? Am I going to sell? Am I going to get out?' If that's your answer, you should consider reducing your stock holdings today."

3. "Stocks aren't lottery tickets. Behind every stock is a company. If the company does well, over time the stocks do well, and vice versa. You have to look at the company — that's what you research."

4. "The public's careful when they buy a house, when they buy a refrigerator, when they buy a car. They'll work hours to save a hundred dollars on a roundtrip air ticket. Yet they'll put $5,000 or $10,000 on some zany idea they heard on the bus. That's gambling. That's not investing. That's not research. That's just total speculation."

5. "In baseball terms, you want to buy in the second or third inning and get out in the seventh or eighth." (Lynch gave the example of Walmart, which only had stores in 15% of the US as a 10-year-old public company, spent the next 30 years expanding nationwide, and its stock skyrocketed 50-fold during that period.)

6. "When the business goes from semi-crummy to better to good, I'm probably out. You sell the company that was the growth story when there's no room to grow."

7. "Theoretically, the individual's edge has improved in the last 20, 30 years versus the professional. The problem is people have so many biases. They won't look at a railroad, an oil company, a steel company. They're only going to look at companies growing 40% a year. They won't look at turnarounds. Or companies with unions. You have to really be agnostic."

8. "Long term, the stock market's a very good place to be. But more people have lost money waiting for corrections and anticipating corrections than in the actual corrections. Trying to predict market highs and lows is not productive."

9. "I think if you spent over 13 minutes a year on economics, you've wasted over 10 minutes. It's not helpful. Everybody wants to predict the future, and I've tried to call the 1-800 psychic hotlines. It hasn't helped. The only thing I would look at is what's happening right now."