One Up On Wall Street: How To Use What You Already Know To Make Money In

by Peter Lynch

FAST GROWERS • Investigate whether the product that’s supposed to enrich the company is a major part of the company’s business. It was with L’eggs, but not with Lexan. • What the growth rate in earnings has been in recent years. (My favorites are the ones in the 20 to 25 percent range. I’m wary of companies that seem to be growing faster than 25 percent. Those 50 percenters usually are found in hot industries, and you know what that means.) • That the company has duplicated its successes in more than one city or town, to prove that expansion will work. • That the company still has room to grow. When I first visited Pic ’N’ Save, they were established in southern California and were just beginning to talk about expanding into northern California. There were forty-nine other states to go. Sears, on the other hand, is everywhere. • Whether the stock is selling at a p/e ratio at or near the growth rate. • Whether the expansion is speeding up (three new motels last year and five new motels this year) or slowing down (five last year and three this year). For stocks of companies such as Sensormatic Electronics, whose sales are primarily “one-shot” deals—as opposed to razor blades, which customers have to keep on buying—a slowdown in growth can be devastating. Sensormatic’s growth rate was spectacular in the late seventies and early eighties, but to increase earnings they had to sell more new systems each year than they had sold the year before. The revenue from the basic electron...