Graeme Roberts's Reviews > One Up On Wall Street: How to Use What You Already Know to Make Money in the Market

I have the impression that books about investing are generally awful—greedy, crass, self-promoting, illogical, and mediocre. It must have something to do with money. This one, written in the late 1980s, and published in this edition in 2000, is none of those things. It's just out of date.

Peter Lynch is a nice guy who talks in a relaxed way about picking stocks, providing numerous examples of his investments that failed as well as the occasional "multibagger" successes that returned ten times or more of the original investment. They enabled him to establish a stellar reputation as the young manager of the Fidelity Magellan Fund who maintained average returns of around 25 percent over a long period. Most of the companies mentioned have long since disappeared, and the stock price charts look like ancient Babylonian scrolls, but Lynch found enough good performers (out of portfolios of 1200 to 15oo stocks) to set himself apart in a financial industry that is notorious for disappointing performance.

I read the book aloud to my wife, who is not a native English speaker, and despite skipping over ancient anecdotes, golf talk, cigarette companies, brokerage businesses that long preexisted modern online brokerage firms, and portrayals of the 1960s man that make me feel as outmoded as polyester leisure suits and white shoe/belt combos, we felt that we distilled out enough really valuable advice to make it worthwhile. I tried to find a summary PDF that gathered those points together, but all of the ones I looked at were just very poorly written excuses to gather contact information from hapless investors who were foolish enough to download them.

Money is a dirty game, but we (my wife and I) still love investing because we learned to avoid "financial advisers", like Ebola or the Black Plague, thus making a little money.