Peter Lynch

Peter Lynch was born January 19, 1944, in Newton, Massachusetts. His father, an accountant, died of brain cancer when Lynch was a boy, and Lynch worked as a golf caddie from his early teens to help support the family — a job that, by his own account, gave him his first informal exposure to investors and executives. He attended Boston College partly on savings that included profits from an early stock purchase, studying history, psychology, and philosophy rather than finance, and later credited that broader background, especially training in logic, as better investing preparation than his business coursework. He earned an MBA from Wharton in 1968.

Lynch joined Fidelity Investments as an intern in 1966 through a connection made while caddying, became a permanent research analyst in 1969 after an Army stint, and served as Fidelity's director of research from 1974 to 1977. In 1977 he was named manager of the then-obscure Magellan Fund, holding about $18 million in assets. Over the thirteen years he ran it, until retiring in 1990, Magellan averaged a 29.2% annual return — consistently beating the S&P 500 — and grew to roughly $14 billion, a record widely cited as among the best in mutual fund history.

Lynch's investing philosophy, distilled in One Up on Wall Street and his later books, holds that individual investors can spot promising companies in everyday life before professional analysts do, provided they follow up with real research into fundamentals rather than acting on familiarity alone. He popularized the phrase "invest in what you know," coined the term "tenbagger" for a stock that returns tenfold, and helped popularize the growth-at-a-reasonable-price (GARP) approach. Since retiring from day-to-day management, he has remained part-time vice chairman of Fidelity Management & Research and devoted much of his time to philanthropy through the Lynch Foundation.