Peter Lynch is one of the greatest mutual fund managers of all time. He ran the Magellan Mutual Fund of Fidelity Investments, it is now the most successful mutual fund in history. When he took over the fund he averaged a 29.3% annual increase rate and expanded the fund from 18 million dollars to an enormous 14 billion.
Philip Fisher was an investor who began his career in the early 1930s. He is remembered as being one of the greatest investors of all time and he helped teach a young Warren Buffett. He is famous for his fifteen points to finding stocks. He is one of the founders of value investing, finding undervalued stocks and holding them for long periods of time.
One of his most famous quotes came about when he was approached and questioned on when the right time to sell a stock was. His simple reply was "almost never."
Warren Buffett is arguably the greatest investor of all time. He is often dubbed “The Oracle of Omaha” because of his incredible ability to seemingly predict winning stocks. In 2009, Forbes magazine ranked him as the second richest man in America at an estimated net worth of 40 billion dollars. His company, Berkshire Hathaway has been incredibly successful. If you had invested 1,000 dollars in Berkshire Hathaway when he first took it over, your investment would have grown to 3 million dollars 40 years later.
Benjamin Graham is most famous for being the teacher of investment legend Warren Buffett. Graham is widely recognized as being the father of value investing. He transformed the investment world from speculators gambling on the market into investors profiting off investments. Graham wrote two books that are now famous in the finance world the first was “Security Analysis” (1934) and the second is “The Intelligent Investor” (1949). The Intelligent Investor is still a must in any investor’s library.
If investing seems like an unpredictable gamble to you, mutual funds are your next best option. The problem with mutual funds is that, sadly, most will not beat the market’s average. They often charge fees as well, which can eat away at your profits. Many are also hyperactively managed. There is a solution to this unfortunate problem. The simple index fund.