Beating the Street
by Peter Lynch
November 27, 2020 — December 13, 2020
Los Angeles, CA • Austin, Texas
Read with Michael Hana
I’ve always loved the idea of investing; to me its all about reading stories and trying to understand this world, then placing faith in the form of capital in what you believe is going to generate profit and/or placing bets on your predictions for the future. Recently, I’ve been more aggressive with investing, especially in the stock market, with an increase of 150% within 2 weeks. I wanted to take a step back and read more about the art of investing in the stock market, rather than just reading about which stocks to invest in. I picked up this book and found that @michael_hana was interested in the stock market, investing, and growing his assets as well so we read it together while discussing stocks, modern and historical developments in Egypt, and different initiatives after each chapter.
To begin with, this book is very outdated. There were times were I felt that this book was useless due to the fact that the world has changed since 1993, especially since we’ve experienced two significant shifts: the crash in 2008 and the dip in 2020. We decided that we’d focus on the principles behind Lynch’s investment strategies rather than the stocks or industries themselves, however, this too is slightly outdated since people’s mentality and culture has also been evolved and transformed. The world does things differently these days. Furthermore, this book holds a lot of stories about Lynch’s life and journey, it’s not a straight-forward manual-style “here’s how to invest and make money in the stock market,” but more of a “this is what I’ve been doing and what I learned in life” book of experiences and stories. While I’ve always been a fan of biographies, Michael and I wanted a book that was more like a manual than a man’s stories. So I do not recommend this book if that’s what you’re looking for as well.
No doubt, it was interesting to discuss how the stocks he favored so much have changed significantly. Some of his discussions/predictions, especially related to the auto industry, turned out to be true. If someone had read this back then, they’d believe that Tesla would be a success and make a lot of money if they decided to invest in it. However, a lot of the business have either evolved due to being acquired, non-existent due to being shut down or no longer being popular, or have changed dramatically since the market crashes (his favorite stock is Fannie Mae, popular for it’s time, was was around $20 at the time this book was written ($36 today (inflation), and it rose to around $80 after 8 years in 2001 ($117 today), but it plummeted due to the market crash and is around $2 these days).
Furthemore, the book can be summarized in 25 principles that are mentioned at the end of the book. We circled what we found relevant and useful, then proceeded to think about how we could apply those specific principles to our current investing strategies.