Peter Lynch on Bubbles & Crashes

Lynch's experience of the October 1987 crash is one of the most retold episodes in his public commentary, in part because he was on a golf course in Ireland when the market lost twenty-two percent in a single session. By the time he could reach a phone and understand what had happened to his portfolio, Magellan had dropped from roughly twelve billion dollars to roughly eight billion. The episode is often cited as a lesson in the futility of attempting to time the market — Lynch, despite being one of the most plugged-in investors in the world, did not see the crash coming and could not have acted on it if he had. Lynch's retrospective on the crash emphasised two lessons. First, the volatility of an equity portfolio is the cost of capturing the equity premium; the investor who cannot tolerate the cost cannot capture the premium. Magellan recovered from the 1987 crash within two years and went on to compound substantially through 1990. The investors who sold on October 19 or 20 of 1987 locked in their losses and missed the recovery. Second, the crash exposed which positions had been bought on leverage or on margin — those were the positions that had to be liquidated into the falling market, while the unleveraged positions could be held and ultimately recovered. The deeper methodological lesson Lynch drew was that the holder of unleveraged equity in fundamentally sound businesses does not need to forecast crashes. The investor whose positions are sized so that no single drawdown forces a sale, and whose businesses are sound enough to recover their earnings power after a macro shock, can sit through crashes by default. The 1987 crash was, in Lynch's framing, less a forecastable event than a stress test of portfolio construction. The portfolios that survived were the ones whose position sizes and balance sheets allowed them to do nothing — and doing nothing was, in 1987, the action that produced the best outcome.

Where were you when the Crash of '87 came? Well, I was very well prepared for the Crash of 1987. -- my wife and I took our first vacation in eight years and we left on Thursday in October and I think that day the market went down 55 points and we went to Ireland, the first trip we'd ever been there. And then on Friday, because of the time difference, we'd almost completed the day and I called and the market was down 115. I said to Carolyn, "If the market goes down on Monday, we'd better go home." And "We're already here for the weekend. So we'll spend the weekend." So it went down 508 on Monday, so I went home. So in two business days I had lost a third of my fund. So I figured at that rate, the week would have been a rough week. So I went home. Like I could do something about it. I mean it's like, you know, if there was something I could do. I mean there I was -- but I think if people called up and they said, "What's Lynch doing," and they said, "Well, he's on the eighth hole and he's every par so far, but he's in a trap, this could be a triple bogey," I mean I think that's not what they wanted to hear. I think they wanted to hear I'd be there lookin' over -- I mean there's not a lot you can do when the market's in a cascade but I got home quick as I could.

Why did the Crash of '87 happen? Well, I think people had not analyzed '87 very well. I think you really have to put it in perspective. 1982, the market's 777. It's all the way to '86. You have the move to 1700. In four years -- the market moves from 777 to 1700 in four years. Then in none months it puts on a thousand points. So it puts on a thousand points in four years, then puts on another thousand points in the next nine months. So in August of 1987 it's 2700. It's gone up a thousand points in nine months. Then it falls a thousand points in two months, 500 points the last day. So if the market got sideways at 1700, no one would have worried, but it went up a thousand in nine-ten months and then a thousand in two months, and half of it in one day, you would have said.... "The world's over." It was the same price. So it was really a question of the market just kept going up and up and it just went to such an incredible high price by historic, price earnings multiple load, dividend yields, all the other statistics, but people forget that basically it was unchanged in 12 months. If you looked at September, 1986 to October '87, the market was unchanged. It had a thousand point up and a thousand points down and they only remember the down. They thought, "Oh, my goodness, this is the crash. It's all over. It's going to go to 200 and I'm going to selling apples and pencils," you know. But it wasn't. It was a very unique phenomenon because companies were doing fine.