The highly regarded financier expressed the statement duringan conversation with Josh Brown, co-founder and CEO of Ritholtz Wealth Management, which was published on Friday. Lynch began his career as an intern at Fidelity in the 1960s following his time spentcaddied for then-Fidelity president George Sullivanat a golf course located in the suburbs of Boston.

Regarding understanding what you own, Lynch recounted in his discussion with Brown a story from a long-ago phone call with singer and actress Barbra Streisand, who, he mentioned, expressed her worry about owning multiple stocks and not knowing how to handle them — and even being unaware of what the companies were involved in.

“Individuals are extremely cautious. They invest hours to save $50 on an airplane ticket. They examine everything thoroughly. Yet, they might put $10,000 into a bizarre stock they overheard about on the bus — you know? And they have no clue what they’re doing. Someone came up with this terrible phrase, before I entered the industry, called ‘play the market,’” he mentioned.

“Play,” he stated, is “a highly risky word” in this situation.

Playing the market isn’t what you should focus on. You need to invest in strong companies and understand their operations,” Lynch stated, emphasizing that an investor should be capable of “explaining to an 11-year-old in under a minute” why they own shares in a specific company — not just because “this stock is going up.

Lynch, continuing in a contemplative manner, discussed another statement he has been quoted as making: that investors have lost significantly more money by preparing for market corrections or attempting to predict them than they have during the actual corrections. Likewise, in the economy, everyone, including the experts, is frequently incorrect — for example, two years ago, in widelypredicting a downturn in 2024I believe,” Lynch quipped, “economists have forecasted 33 out of the last 11 recessions.

He mentioned that investors must be aware that they can and will experience financial losses in the markets. A person with three children about to begin college, he added, should avoid stocks and instead opt for safer money-market funds.

Lynch mentioned that rather than focusing on economic and market predictions, it’s crucial to examine savings rates, employment levels, oil prices, and sectors that have transitioned from poor to positive conditions. “I simply want to know the facts at this moment,” he stated.

I’d really like to obtain next year’s Wall Street Journal,” he said. “I’d love to find out what’s going to occur in the future. I’ve been attempting to get it for the last 81 years.

He mentioned that the core of investment hasn’t changed much over the years, despite the quick development of trading tools and the easy access to data and information. “It’s the same thing, the success of Amazon”

Costco Walmart – disregard the technology companies [such asbig 2025 winner”Oracle,” he said. These companies have performed well for typical investors, and Fidelity made significant investments in each of them “based solely on publicly available information,” Lynch stated.

A significant shift that Lynch expressed regret about was that, around fifteen years ago, there were 8,000 companies listed on public exchanges. “Now, it’s three or four [thousand].”

He indicated that this has been a significant loss.

His initial stock selection at Magellan: Taco Bell A stock he later expressed surprise at not having invested in: Starbucks

Regarding his own finances, Lynch stated that he is “the least tech-savvy person ever” and owns “no AI stocks.”

My wife is into mechanics, and my daughter is too. I can’t handle computers,” he said. “I just use yellow pads and a phone.

The renowned fund manager admitted he has “no idea” if the current artificial-intelligence surge is similar to the dot-com bubble of the late 1990s and early 2000, or whether investors may have pushed that trend too far.

Possibly, during his peak, the most renowned investor globally (although he mentioned to Josh Brown that Warren Buffett of Berkshire Hathaway is “the best” in his opinion), Lynch was asked by Brown if regular investors can, as Lynch previously stated, perform just as well as major Wall Street investors, and he maintained that they can, provided they seek opportunities in promising areas.

People often focus on the stocks in the new-high list,” he said, noting that these stocks can continue to rise, but he prefers to examine companies listed on the low list.

Still Lynch said he believesthe so-called Magnificent SevenThere are many strong companies. “Facebook, or Meta, is an amazing company, Microsoft is a great company, Google is a great company, and Amazon is an impressive company. I’m not entirely sure about Tesla, but BYD is producing a car in Hungary that’s a third of the cost [and] is a good vehicle,” he said, adding: “I can’t get this humanoid thing.”

Need to Know: The AI boom is 17 times larger than the dot-com craze — and four times the size of the subprime bubble, according to an analyst.

Also see: Market crashes only occur when central banks increase interest rates — and there’s no indication that is about to happen, according to B. of A. analyst Hartnett

But even if the act of investing, according to Lynch, has remained largely the same, the Wall Street environment has changed significantly, not just in terms of the number of companies available for investment. “The market bottom in ’82 was 777” for the Dow industrials, he said. “So we’ve had an incredible market since ’82, and we’ve experienced 10 or 12 declines — maybe a few more.”

Everyone I knew was raised with the warning, ‘The big one is coming,’ ” he stated. “We’ve experienced 11 recessions [but have] never faced a major one. Picture this, during the [Great] Depression — there was no Social Security. When people retired and aged, they moved in with their families. The family had to reduce their expenses, and there was no unemployment benefits. We didn’t have the SEC. Plus, the Federal Reserve was inactive at the time.

Lynch mentioned that for today’s investors, “there are numerous options that are superior,” supported by safeguards that weren’t available to previous generations, and with 63% of Americans owning their homes, accumulating wealth in this way, compared to significantly fewer homeowners in the 1920s.

He noted that only 1% of Americans held stocks in 1929, meaning the average worker wasn’t losing everything as the stock market collapsed, “but we experienced an incredible depression, with 30% unemployed, not enough food, a terrible agricultural situation — it was dreadful.”

Although there have been numerous economic downturns since then, none have come close to the intensity of the Great Depression, according to Lynch. “We faced many challenges. We had several chances for a major crisis. We’ve had poor presidents, ineffective Congresses, but we managed to get through.”

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