One Up on Wall Street by Peter Lynch

 One Up on Wall Street: By Peter Lynch

After I finished my last book “The Motley Fool Investment Guide for Teens”  I was filled with a need for more than just a surface level introduction. I searched many times with many different key words for more books but the one that kept getting recommended was “One up on Wall Street.” I researched the author Peter Lynch and he was a fund manager at a well known brokerage firm called Fidelity. He ended up succeeding massively during his time managing the fund. This is due to the fact that the fund reached an average annual return of nearly thirty percent! This is quite impressive when the average return of the stock market as a whole is only about ten percent.

With this impressive background I figured I should buy the book as soon as possible. The book was a far more in depth book about the stock market and how you can use what you already know whether it's through a job you have or a business that you spend a lot of money at. The idea is if you have a job in the future that you work forty hours a week you are certain to have a better understanding of that industry, the service that is provided, or the tools that are used than the average person. This is important because you can use this expertise to invest in what you know and what you are confident is a company with good fundamentals to make a profit in the stock market. This is definitely a better strategy than looking at a few numbers behind a dollar sign or a graph with scribbles on it to determine if you should be buying a stock.

The book is broken down into three sections, “Preparing to Invest”, “Picking Winners”, and “The Long-Term View.” With this knowledge I started the book furiously reading for a few days until I made it through the first section. Then I got into the middle section where the pages were longer, the content more bleak, and my enthusiasm was gone. I figured that if I had already made it through the first section it would have been a waste of time and money to give it to the book. With that being said you would have thought I did give up on it if you saw the embarrassing amount of progress I was making. Finally I decided to start reading seriously again and I am glad I did, because the final section went fast and the material was interesting again. 

Although a large section in the middle was incredibly slow, I still recommend this book to anyone wanting to learn how to choose stocks based on their previous knowledge and the company's merit. I doubt I will ever read this book in its entirety again, but I am glad I read it once and I hope I don't forget anything I learned in order to avoid battling through the book again. Thank you for reading.

-Alex Deschler