Having worked on Wall Street I think this book is great and poor at the same time.

Great because

1)It is ideal to read for the casual to serious investor.
2)Some of Lynch's prominent themes like "Buy what you know" and investigating the companies that you buy are great strategies, especially for non-professionals.
3)He walks you through his thought process on numerous stocks in several industries, highlighting mistakes as well as successes. I found his various rules of thumb with respect to each industry (retail, restaurants, cyclicals) helpful

I say it is poor because Lynch himself used to buy and sell stocks frequently. So while he says "buy and hold" he did that, but he also traded the heck out of stocks he knew inside and out. When they got expensive, he would trim his position and when something got really cheap he would buy the heck out of it. This enabled him to compound his returns by a phenomenal amount

Lynch primarily invested in retail stocks. This was great as brand names and the "homogenization" of retail concepts via chain stores was sweeping the nation with the baby boom wave. However, most of that "easy money" was made along time ago. Current baby boom themes of biotech, health care, along with some financial service industry stuff is tougher to make money at and it doesn't grow as fast as retail. Well, biotech can but it is far riskier.

Lynch never talks about debt. The U.S. economy expanded in the 80's due to 1) heavy government spending, which created a huge national debt (2) consumer spending a ton of money and going into debt and (3) the entrepreneurial spirit. The government actually funded a lot of the developments we see today. The problem with this is that they have mortgaged the future to pay for past wealth creation. He never once mentions the impact of debt. It is great while you are charging the credit card up and enjoying the ride but eventually you have to pay the bills!

Lynch spends a lot of time telling the reader how he went about picking stocks for his Magellan Fund, but he has the ability to talk to CEO's and visit companies on site headquarters, something the average investor certainly does not have. I would say though that Reg FD has made the playing field more even, as now nobody gets a lot of information!

My thoughts on stock picking, having worked in the financial service industry for 3 years in research (got out because my values didn't correlate with the business) is that no one should expect to beat the pros unless they are 1) very observant and 2) willing to commit time to finding new investment concepts/vehicles.

I had read this book back near the beginning of the real boom time (sometime in the mid-90s), and rereading it now made me wish that I had paid much closer attention back then. Even though this book is extremely optimistic about the stock market and was written well before internet mania, there are probably 50 different sentences sprinkled throughout the book that would have kept me out of the market during the next few years and saved me a lot of money had I remembered any of them. When this book is slow, it can be really slow. But when Mr. Lynch does hit gold, it's the motherload. Indeed, the last three pages of the book, "20 Golden Rules," are probably worth the purchase price alone (particularly since you can almost certainly buy this book used for less than $5 at any time). The last third of the book, where Mr. Lynch gives advice on investing in a number of different industries, ranges from incredibly useful to skippable, depending on what you already have some knowledge about.

I have two particular criticisms of this book. One is that, although Mr. Lynch's tales of his days running Magellan make it clear that he was selling only a little less often than he was buying, he doesn't give much advice about how to go about that side of things. Secondly, although the book starts off with the story of a group of elementary school kids who beat the pros, the rest of the book seems to contradict Mr. Lynch's implication that a 10 year-old can do this. Although this book is very readable, one can't help but come away with the conclusion that investing in stocks is hard (if you don't think so, you may living on luck). Mr. Lynch's main argument is that you don't have to be a pro to invest in stocks, but just about every story that he has about researching a stock includes him talking to the CEO of the potential investment at some point. I'm not expecting to be able to replicate that research technique.

Still, I'd highly recommend this book, and I look forward to reading his other well-known book, "One Up on Wall Street."

Much of what Peter Lynch says in this book is perhaps fairly straightforward for a professional equities analyst - and some of it isn't. For the novice he explains in detail his rationale behind stock picks for Magellan, and for the "expert" he blows away a few myths on ratios, technical analysis and other mechanical means to asses stocks. All the way through the book he reiterates that fundamental analysis is what he based his stock picks on, and that reasonably interested personal investors can do it as well if not better than the professionals. There are no gimmicks, and no "theory" (cf. Soros on Soros), just an explanation of how one of the best fund managers of all time did his homework.