[15][16] He initially covered the paper, chemical, and publishing industries, and when he returned after a two-year Army stint he was hired permanently in 1969.
This time Lynch was charged with following the textiles, metals, mining, and chemicals industries, eventually becoming Fidelity's director of research from 1974 to 1977.
[4][20] Taking over when Magellan was a small fund, Lynch had no restrictions imposed by Fidelity on what types of stocks he could buy, and was only limited by laws or regulations.
One Up lays out Lynch's investment technique including chapters devoted to stock classifications, the two-minute drill, famous numbers, and designing a portfolio.
Lynch also wrote a series of investment articles for Worth magazine that expand on many of the concepts and companies mentioned in the books.I’ve found that when the market’s going down and you buy funds wisely, at some point in the future you will be happy.
[25] Since most people tend to become expert in certain fields, applying this basic "invest in what you know" principle helps individual investors find good undervalued stocks.
He has also often said that the individual investor is potentially more capable of making money from stocks than a fund manager, because they are able to spot good investments in their day-to-day lives before Wall Street.
For example, in One Up Lynch explains how he invested in Dunkin' Donuts not after reading about the company in The Wall Street Journal, but after being impressed by their coffee as a customer.
Lynch believes the individual investor is able to make similar smart investing choices noticing particular opportunities like Dunkin' Donuts or paying attention to business trends in their careers and hobbies.
Using examples from Magellan Fund, his books outline how a novice should read and interpret company paperwork for information on stock valuation, earnings, cash flow, and other data.
[33] This refers to an investment which is worth ten times its original purchase price, and comes from baseball where the number of "bags" or "bases" that a batter can run to is a measure of the success of that runner's hit.
As Lynch wrote in One Up on Wall Street, “In my business a fourbagger is nice, but a tenbagger is the fiscal equivalent of two home runs and a double.” [34] In Beating the Street, Lynch expounded with many-bagger, "For the most part, the NAIC (National Association of Investors Corp) groups buy stocks in well-managed growth companies with a history of prosperity, and in which earnings are on the rise.
[37] In 2006, Boston Magazine named Lynch in the top 50 wealthiest Bostonians ranking him 40th with an overall net worth of $352 million USD.
He said he prefers to give money to support ideas that he thinks can spread, such as First Night, the New Year's Eve festival that began in Boston in 1976 and has inspired similar events in more than 200 other communities, and City Year, a community service program founded in Boston in 1988 that now operates in 29 cities across the U.S.