One Up On Wall Street: How To Use What You Already Know To Make Money In The Market Paperback – April 3, 2000

The 1% of people who don't like this book consist of 1. Some printing problems. 2 The majority don't like the book because it is too "outdated, not current information, won't work today." Blasphemy! "This time it's different," the most dangerous words in investing.I am 40 years as an investor and advisor. This book is the most accessible, very fun to read, more-so if you golf. I use his original formulas as do many hundreds of money managers. He is a national treasure.Those 1% are mostly new investors that are "mistaking a bull market for brains," as Buffett says. They fancy themselves as "traders." They will change, or fail. They want to know where technical analysis is in the book. Well, Lynch has a famous quote about that. It doesn't work. The proof is that of 10's of thousand of managed funds, not one uses technical analysis day to day for choosing stock. Technical Analysis is for magical thinkers and pattern seekers. Buy it! You will make money and have fun doing it.

Decided to pick up this book after reading Kiyosaki's bestseller, Rich Dad, Poor Dad. I've lost a bit of money in the market (2001 - 2004, but who hasn't?) and resolved to myself that I would learn more about investing. Kiyosaki's recommendation was for Lynch's other book, "Beating the Street" but "One Up on Wall Street" looked more interesting and timely.Given that I'm from the Boston area, I was already familiar with Peter Lynch and Fidelity Investments. Lynch's claim to fame was managing Fidelity's flagship mutual fund, Magellan, to stellar returns over many years. Lynch's advice in this book is based around the premise that most mutual fund managers while professionals, are often conservative in nature as compared to individual investors. They are bound to rules and regulations within their industry and trying to move a billion dollars worth of equities can be slow and tedious. Also their tendency to protect their capital and follow the pack means that most fund managers only perform adequately and don't really earn their pay.According to Lynch, an informed and educated individual investor can match or beat most fund managers. He has a much better chance of beating these professionals if he looks for undervalued stocks and stays in for the long-haul. Not that much different from Warren Buffet's investing mantra, it's all about assets and earnings. Lynch recommends going for the smaller growth stocks with strong fundamentals to really impact your portfolio since they are typically under most fund managers' radar screens. Once they are discovered, you can ride the stock up as they take positions. Finding these diamonds in the rough requires a bit of screening and research but all the tools and information are now available to the average investor on the internet. Oftentimes, these diamonds are right under your nose, businesses that you are familiar with as an every-day consumer.I really enjoyed Lynch's writing style, he mixes substantive graphs and real-life examples with self-deprecating wit and personal stories. It's comforting to know that even a investment guru like himself is capable of making (and learning from) mistakes. There are a handful of chapters and pages that are particularly useful providing broad guidelines and metrics that one should use when analyzing stocks.The bottom line is if you want to make money investing, you need to identify what type of investor you are, do your research and homework on companies, invest in stocks that meet your criteria/goals and keep an eye on things. The work required is not insignificant but if you don't do your homework, you're better off going to Las Vegas and betting on red. Overall, Beating the Street is not only an enjoyable read but a really wonderful overview of how to create a personal investment strategy. I tip my hat to Mr. Lynch for this great primer, all beginner investors should have this book on their bookshelf...

Really great book to kickstart your journey as an investor and really this book is easy to absorb and I am glad to know about this book

This is a good read for beginner and experienced investors because it gives you a historical perspective of the stock market and sets a good ground work for diving deeper into learning about investing. The main issue here is the fact that the book was written in 1989 which makes it somewhat irrelevant to today's market in certain instances. There is a new foreword written in the late 90s but it's still a far cry from being an in depth look at modern markets.The good news is that most of the advice in the book is relatively timeless and can still be applied to stock analysis today. The first part of the book goes into detail about Lynch's investing career and his best and worst stock moves. The idea behind this is interesting but it didn't work for me sometimes in execution. It's quite easy to look back at an investment five years later and say this is why it was a good or bad idea in hindsight but it doesn't tell us much about what we can do to make sure we're making the right choices in the future. Still this part of the book is good because it gives you a good look at how people reacted to stock market news back in the 80s and it's quite similar to how the markets react to news now. It was interesting to read about the paranoia around stock market crashes and how expensive securities were thought to be back and how that compares to current market conditions.The second part of the book goes into more detail on Lynch's personal investing philosophy which is relatively simple but a good start for someone new to investing. It's a relatively easy process to follow and it all makes sense and can certainly give individual investors a slight advantage over those who don't do the same type of research but for me this book was just a starting point and that's what makes it good. It's a good introduction to investing - giving historical insights to the market conditions in the 80s and 90s as well as a way for individual investors to evaluate the prospects of a stock.I'm not sure I cared for all the analysis of Lynch's personal trades as I feel like they were cherry picked to look good or bad in hindsight but I don't see how that adds any value to the individual investors as they naturally weren't so obvious when the investments were made or Lynch wouldn't have made them. The type of 'of course stock A went down 50% because of A,B,C now that I look back on it' and 'of course stock B was a good investment and went up 5x because of D,E,F' just didn't work for me because it felt like fluff to pad the length of the book. Still, I think learning about the viewpoints others had about the market in the 90s and how it mirrors how we look at our markets now was interesting and the investing theory presented in the 2nd part of the book had value too.