I heard about Peter Lynch and his book more than two years ago; I ordered his book from Amazon last week because I wanted to learn more about stocks and investing. I just got to Chapter 5 now, but I found his book to be educational and interesting: his humor can be felt in many places of the book. This is a much fun book than Ben Graham’s Intelligent Investing. By the way, both Ben and Peter are considered as the gurus of investment, Ben is the mentor of Warren Buffett, Peter managed Fidelity fund and had a sterling record. Peter is not a big fan of Business School although he graduate from Wharton, here is what said about B-school: Some Wharton courses were not rewarding, but even if they’d all been worthless, the experience would have been worth it, because I met Carolyn (his wife) on the campus.

Seriously, he proposed the three questions “mirror test” for investing in stocks:

1) Do I own a house? (Buy the house first)

2) Do I need the money in the near future? (don’t put the money for wedding, education, house downpayment etc into stocks)

3) Do I have the personal qualities that will bring me success in stocks? This is most important, some qualities include “patience, self-reliance, common sense, tolerance for pain, open-mindness, detachment, persistence, humility, flexibility, willingness to do independent research, willingness to admit mistakes, ability to ignore general public”.

I think this is a really good mirror for me  

By the way, I used this OCEF charity site when ordering books from Amazon. This way OCEF will get a little commission from Amazon. I will put a link for OCEF under “links” shortly.