Investors in Peter Lynch’s Fidelity Magellan fund in 1977 must have thought it even easier than just handing over their cash, as it piled on an average 29 per cent a year, beating the S&P 500 in 11 of the 13 years he ran it – usually by some distance.
In essence this made him better, alone, at growing wealth than the CEOs of America, and all their boards of directors, more than 80 per cent of the time.
In 1977 the tiddler fund’s assets totted up to around $20m.
And then, in 1990 at the very top of his game, he abruptly retired, aged 46, to enjoy investing his own now estimated $350m wealth. His investors were left to do as they wished with the $14bn he left for them.
Not bad for a lad born in Newton, Massachusetts in 1944 whose childhood was no easy ride.
His father died of cancer when he was a kid and so he worked odd jobs to help his mother; one of these was a golf caddy at his local course, Brae Burn.
It was here that he first heard the jargon of the investment world and the strategies he later deployed as he listened to the conversations of the investment managers as he carried their clubs.
All this helped him win a scholarship to Boston College where he acquired a degree in finance, then served a compulsory two years in the military before grabbing his MBA from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania in 1968.
Joining Fidelity as an intern first he then graduated to investment analyst, then for three years from 1974 he was Fidelity’s director of research.
Not for Lynch the modern, often obscure investment styles; he used them all. Frequently described as a chameleon, he would use whatever style best fitted the picture at the time. It was that single word that marked him out: Research.
Perhaps most famously, he wrote: "Investing without research is like playing stud poker and never looking at the cards."
Style, workaholism, an eye for detail, and a total conviction in his approach, Lynch looked down upon US business as the Eye of Sauron and bought big with a very straightforward checklist and a few well-chosen observations.
"Go for a business any idiot can run," he famously wrote in his 1989 book One Up on Wall Street, "because sooner or later some idiot probably is going to run it."
He may as well have summed up his own investment philosophy: Keep it simple, stupid.
His work ethic was spectacular, colleagues saying his business day had no beginning and no end: he talked to anyone who could give him an angle – executives, analysts, investment managers, whoever – around the clock.
Lynch picked stocks with similar, breathtaking simplicity. He looked at what he could understand and dedicated himself to researching it – a trait he shares with another titan of investment, Warren Buffett.
Lynch shut out market noise and rigorously deployed the bottom-up approach, beginning with the company’s fundamentals and sticking in for the long-run, not much caring about market fluctuations.
Again, he famously wrote: "If you spend 13 minutes analysing economic and market forecasts, you've wasted 10 minutes."
An American investment adviser visiting a conference in New York in 2005 once published a checklist of eight principles to which Lynch told the assembled acolytes he always adhered. They are worth repeating.
- Know what you own
- It's futile to predict the economy and interest rates
- You have plenty of time to identify and recognise exceptional companies
- Avoid long shots
- Good management is very important – buy good businesses
- Be flexible and humble and learn from mistakes
- Before you make a purchase, you should be able to explain why you're buying
- There's always something to worry about
He was also, in 2007 at least, serving as vice chairman of Fidelity’s investment adviser Fidelity Management & Research Co.
But at the end of the day, now in his late 60s, Peter Lynch can do whatever he damned well pleases and that, ultimately, is what it is all about.