1989 · Simon & Schuster
One Up on Wall Street: How To Use What You Already Know To Make Money in the Market
Lynch was famously suspicious of complex stories. The 'one-megabit SRAM CMOS bipolar RISC floating point' description — his mocking shorthand for technology investors who buy businesses they cannot parse — was the negative space around his positive claim that simple, observable businesses make better investments. A company that makes a single product, sells it through identifiable channels, and competes in an industry a layperson can describe in two sentences is easier to monitor than a conglomerate whose segment-level economics arrive six months late and heavily footnoted. The simple-business preference also makes the sell decision easier. Lynch wanted to know why he owned a stock — the 'story' — and to check periodically that the story was still intact. When the story breaks (the fast grower slows, the cyclical rolls over, the turnaround runs out of cash) the sell is mechanical. Complexity obscures the moment the story breaks. Lynch believed most investors who held losing positions too long did so because the original thesis had been wrapped in enough jargon that they could not tell whether it was still alive. This is also why Lynch spent so much time on the management-quality question without reducing it to personality. He cared about whether the insiders were buying the stock with their own money, whether the company was repurchasing shares rather than diluting them, and whether management's commentary in the annual report addressed the actual business rather than the macroeconomic weather. Insider buying with personal funds is, in Lynch's phrase, the single most reliable signal that the people closest to the numbers think those numbers are about to improve. He treated it as primary research, not a sentiment indicator.