Apr 29, 2026

Tenbagger: Hunting X10 Stocks The Peter Lynch Way

2026-04-29Đọc bản tiếng Việt →

Investing · Stock Picking · Equity Research 2026-04-29

Peter Lynch · Magellan Fund · 1977–1990

Tenbagger: Hunting X10 Stocks The Peter Lynch Way

While Buffett hoards cash and waits for the perfect swing, Peter Lynch ran the opposite play: he managed 1,400 stocks at once, bought whatever his wife raved about from the supermarket, and ate tacos to scout the competition. In 13 years at the Magellan Fund, he turned $18 million into roughly $14 billion and averaged 29.2%/year - one of the greatest long-run track records in mutual fund history. He gave the investing world a single word: tenbagger - a stock that rises tenfold. And an uncomfortable argument: the individual investor, walking the supermarket aisles every week, has a real edge over Wall Street analysts - if they're willing to open their eyes.

1×

×1

Break-even
"Single"

2×

×2

Double (Two-bagger)
+100%

5×

×5

Five-bagger
+400%

Tenbagger

×10

Lynch's
target

50×

×50

Rare
("Fifty-bagger")

100×

×100

Once in
a lifetime

Note: This article draws on One Up on Wall Street (Lynch & Rothchild, 1989), Beating the Street (Lynch, 1993), Learn to Earn (Lynch, 1995), Lynch's PBS Frontline interview (1996), Wikipedia, Investopedia, Motley Fool, AAII Journal, The Washington Post, and public data from Fidelity and fund reports.

"Tenbagger" is not a promise. Most stocks never go 10x. Lynch wrote that across Magellan's entire 1,400-stock portfolio, only a few dozen names became tenbaggers during his tenure - but it was precisely those few dozen that pulled the average return up to 29.2%. This is the math of a right-skewed distribution in stock investing, not a get-rich formula.

I. The Caddy Boy - And The First Tenbagger

Peter Lynch was born in 1944 in Newton, Massachusetts. When he was seven, his father was diagnosed with brain cancer and died three years later. To help support the family, 11-year-old Lynch went to work as a caddy - carrying golf bags - at an upscale club outside Boston. There, he didn't learn golf; he learned something few universities teach: what rich people talk about when they think no one is listening.

They talked about stocks. Specifically, about companies the caddy had never heard of - and those companies were rising. Lynch's first idea didn't come from a textbook but from a bag slung over his shoulder: the stock market isn't a casino; it's a list of real businesses whose share prices move with whatever happens to the business.

"A stock isn't a lottery ticket. Behind every stock is a company. There's a real reason why that company performs well or poorly. Investing is finding that reason before everyone else does."

- Peter Lynch, paraphrased from One Up on Wall Street, 1989. The core line of Lynch's philosophy: the market is the sum of businesses, not pure randomness.

In his sophomore year at Boston College, Lynch used his caddying savings to buy 100 shares of Flying Tiger Airlines at $7 - an air cargo carrier. He had no elaborate formula; he simply guessed that air freight would grow. The stock rose to $80. He sold it off gradually to pay for his Wharton MBA. That was the first tenbagger of his life - and the one that would define his entire career. One stock, one decision, bought at 19, was enough to fund the world's top business school.

In 1966, he was hired as an intern at Fidelity Investments - not for his academic record, but because he had once caddied for D. George Sullivan, Fidelity's chairman. After military service, he returned full-time in 1969, became director of research in 1974, and in 1977 - at age 33 - was handed a small fund called the Magellan Fund with $18 million in assets. Thirteen years later, when he retired at 46 to spend more time with his family, Magellan held roughly $14 billion in assets and was the largest mutual fund in the world.

Average return

29.2%/year

Over 13 years - 1977 to 1990. Beat the S&P 500 in 11 of 13 years.

$1,000 became

~$28,000

Invested in Magellan the day Lynch took over the fund → the day he retired. Thirteen years of compounding at 29.2%.

Fund assets

$18M → $14B

A ~770× increase - most of it not from pure investment returns but from new cash flowing in on the strength of the track record.

II. Tenbagger - Coining A New Word

In baseball English, a "bag" is a base - the four corners of the diamond: first, second, third, home. A hit that gets the runner to first is a "single" (one-bagger), to second a "double" (two-bagger), to third a "triple" (three-bagger), and home is a "home run" (four-bagger). It's the number of bases that hit is worth.

Lynch took the word, lifted it off the diamond, and pasted it onto a portfolio. A tenbagger is a stock whose market value rises tenfold from what you paid for it. Buy at 100,000 đồng and sell at 1,000,000 đồng - that's a tenbagger. A twenty-bagger is 20x. A hundred-bagger is 100x - Lynch said in One Up on Wall Street that he'd seen a few hundred-baggers over his career, but that's a once-in-a-lifetime event.

"Across the whole Magellan Fund, I believe I owned more tenbagger stocks than anyone else. The secret isn't buying exactly at the bottom - it's not selling too soon. Most people take profits at 50% and miss the other 900%." - Peter Lynch, One Up on Wall Street, 1989, paraphrase

The math of the tenbagger explains why Lynch wasn't afraid to hold 1,400 stocks. If one name goes 10x while nine others go to zero, the portfolio still breaks even. If one name goes 10x while nine others go sideways, the portfolio doubles. Returns from a stock portfolio are not normally distributed - they're heavily right-skewed. One winner can offset many losers; but no number of losers can offset the one winner you missed.

Why is "don't sell too soon" harder than it sounds?

When your stock doubles, there's an intense psychological pull to sell. You've won. You don't want to let that gain slip away. This is an expression of loss aversion - Daniel Kahneman measured that people hate losing $100 about twice as much as they enjoy gaining $100. The feeling of "I sold and it kept climbing" also hurts, but it hurts less than "I didn't sell and it went to zero."

Lynch argued that most individual investors take profits at 50%–100% - exactly when a fast grower is just getting started. Walmart, in his 1996 PBS interview: "Someone who bought Walmart 10 years after its 1970 IPO still had a chance to make 30 times their money." In other words, someone entering in 1980 - when Walmart already looked like a stock that had "run up" at double its IPO price - still had a 30-bagger ahead of them. Whoever sold in 1980 because "it's already risen too much" missed the next 30x.

Lynch's practical rule: if the reason you bought the stock still holds (the business is still expanding, the competitive edge is intact, valuation is still reasonable relative to growth), then the price having risen is not a reason to sell. If the reason you bought has changed (growth is slowing, a competitor has entered, margins are shrinking) - that's when you sell.

III. Six Types Of Stocks - Lynch's Bestiary

Lynch didn't believe "stock" was one single noun. He divided every public company into six types, each with its own rhythm, its own return expectations, and its own risks. This is a classification framework still used today - and perhaps Lynch's most practical contribution to the individual investor.

Slow Grower

The old oak tree

2–4%/year growth · GDP tracker

Large, old, stable companies. Upside: steady dividends. Downside: nearly impossible to 10x - the growth is already spent. Lynch put it bluntly: "don't buy a slow grower and expect a tenbagger." Buy it for the dividend check.

e.g. utilities, mature telecoms, aging FMCG

Stalwart

The giant still growing

10–12%/year growth · sturdy

The Coca-Cola, Procter & Gamble, Johnson & Johnson type. Too big to 10x, healthy enough to double or triple over 5–7 years. Buy on dips from temporary crises, sell when expensive; don't hold forever because you won't get a tenbagger here.

e.g. Coca-Cola, Procter & Gamble, Johnson & Johnson

Fast Grower

Tenbagger hunting ground

20–25%+/year growth · small and strong

This is where tenbaggers live. Lynch's favorite category. Traits: explosive revenue, a model already proven in a handful of locations, now scaling nationwide. Walmart, Hanes, Taco Bell, La Quinta - all were fast growers before becoming stalwarts or getting acquired.

e.g. Starbucks 1995–2005, Chipotle 2006–2015, Netflix 2010–2018

Cyclical

The carousel horse

Rises and falls with the economic cycle

Airlines, autos, steel, chemicals, real estate, banks. Profits swing with the macro cycle. Strategy: buy when P/E is high (earnings at cycle trough), sell when P/E is low (earnings at cycle peak) - counterintuitive for beginners. Get the timing wrong, and losses are severe.

e.g. Ford, U.S. Steel, airlines, banks

Turnaround

The corpse that revives

Near-bankrupt or in crisis

A company that's losing money, has lost money for several quarters, and whose stock has already collapsed. If it revives - 5x to 20x is achievable; if not - it goes to zero. Lynch noted: true turnarounds are rare; most "collapsing companies" keep collapsing. Requires analyzing debt structure, cash flow, and new management.

e.g. Apple 1997 (Jobs returns), Chrysler 1980 (Iacocca)

Asset Play

The hidden treasure

Asset value > market cap

A company holding assets (land, mines, real estate, patents) on the books at low historical cost, worth far more in reality. When the market catches on, or when the assets are sold, the stock re-rates. Requires digging into the financial statements.

e.g. real estate firms holding land at old cost basis, cable TV companies with broadcast rights

Most individual investor mistakes, according to Lynch, come from not recognizing which type you're holding. Buy a stalwart and expect a tenbagger → disappointment. Buy a cyclical at the peak of the cycle thinking it's a fast grower → lose 60%. Buy a turnaround without reading the financials → lose everything. First identify the type; only then pick the individual name.

A stock can change type over time. Walmart in 1972 was a fast grower (a few dozen stores in Arkansas, expanding rapidly). Walmart in 2000 was a stalwart (already 4,000 stores, steady 10% growth). Walmart in 2025 is a slow grower (the U.S. market is saturated). Buy Walmart in 1972 and hold to 2000 → a genuine tenbagger. Buy Walmart in 2010 and expect a tenbagger → you're fighting the math of scale.

IV. My Wife Discovered Hanes - Lynch's Tenbaggers

Lynch's "invest in what you know" concept wasn't some vague philosophy. He had a concrete process, repeated throughout his career, in stories that became Wall Street legend. A four-step process: observe → verify → analyze → buy.

Hanes / L'eggs

Supermarket · Early 1970s

~6×

Observe: Lynch's wife, Carolyn, came home from the supermarket raving about a new pantyhose brand - "L'eggs" - sold in plastic egg-shaped containers at the checkout counter. Until then, pantyhose was only sold at clothing stores; Carolyn had, for the first time, bought a high-quality item without a dedicated store trip.
Verify: Lynch traced L'eggs back to Hanes. He didn't jump in right away - he read the financial statements, calculated L'eggs's share of revenue, and assessed whether the in-supermarket model could scale. He asked other women - all said L'eggs was better than the old brands.
Analyze: A product selling millions of units in supermarkets, higher margins than traditional apparel because it needed no dedicated store, and competitors had not yet copied it. The distribution edge could last 2–3 years - enough for revenue to multiply several times over. P/E was reasonable relative to growth.
Result: Hanes became one of Magellan's first big winning positions in Lynch's early years running the fund. The stock rose several-fold before Hanes was acquired by Consolidated Foods. The lesson: Wall Street had never set foot in a supermarket.

Taco Bell

Lunch · Late 1970s

Bought before Pepsi

Observe: Lynch tried a taco for the first time, surprised by the good flavor and low price. He discovered Taco Bell was present in only about 10% of U.S. territory. The natural question: if this was appealing in 10% of the country, why wouldn't it appeal in the other 90%?
Verify: Lynch visited Taco Bell headquarters. He recounted in his book: "The headquarters looked like a neighbor's garage" - no lavish furnishings, no CEO flying private. This was a signal about management culture: money was being reinvested into opening stores, not spent on status symbols.
Analyze: A solid franchise model, stable unit economics at each store, a product distinct enough from McDonald's and Burger King, and 90% of the geography still untapped.
Result: Magellan got into Taco Bell early. PepsiCo bought Taco Bell in 1978 at a good price for shareholders; Magellan exited with a large gain. The lesson: look at the geography still left to conquer, not current revenue.

La Quinta Motor Inns

Business trip · 1980s

11×

Observe: Lynch stayed at La Quinta - a mid-tier motel chain in the American South - several times on business trips, and noted: clean rooms, good service, reasonable prices. Wall Street at the time only paid attention to Hilton and Marriott.
Verify: Lynch spoke with La Quinta's CFO. He learned the company was designed to place motels next to Holiday Inn restaurant chains - Holiday Inn paid for the marketing that drew customers in, and La Quinta captured cheaper guests simply by being adjacent, without having to build its own restaurants.
Analyze: A "smart parasite" model with per-room build cost roughly 30% lower than competitors. A healthy balance sheet, low P/E relative to growth, and a company still small - plenty of room to expand.
Result: La Quinta rose roughly 11-fold. Lynch used it as an example of the principle "big companies don't have big swings" - he always favored small-to-mid fast growers over already-large businesses.

Dunkin' Donuts

Morning coffee cup · 1980s

Spotted before Wall Street

Observe: Lynch noticed Dunkin's coffee tasted better than similarly priced chains, and Dunkin' stores were always crowded in the early morning - not at the lunch rush, but at the habit hour: 7–9 a.m., day after day. Customers weren't returning because of promotions.
Verify: He compared Dunkin's unit economics against similarly priced coffee chains. Revenue per store was high, real estate costs were low (no need for customers to linger), and customers returned weekly.
Analyze: The golden trait for a fast-growing retailer: repeat, habitual customers. A 99-cent cup of coffee isn't compelling on its own, but multiply it by 5 times a week × 50 weeks × millions of customers, and you get enormous, very stable revenue.
Result: Dunkin' was one of the "boring tenbaggers" Lynch loved because it taught him: a tenbagger doesn't need to be a technological breakthrough; it just needs to be a daily habit multiplied across geography.

The common pattern: Hanes, Taco Bell, La Quinta, Dunkin' - none of them had new technology, no scientific breakthrough, no "next big thing" hyped up by Wall Street. All of them were simple businesses, products you use every week, that still had geography or customers left to multiply into. Lynch said in his 1996 PBS interview: "If you can't explain to an 11-year-old in two minutes why you own a stock, you shouldn't own it."

V. PEG - The Valuation Tool Lynch Popularized

Spotting a new fast grower is only half the job. The other half: is it cheap? Lynch wasn't the first to use PEG, but he was the one who turned it into a simple test any individual investor could run in 30 seconds.

PEG Ratio - Lynch's One-Line Filter

PEG = P/E ratio ÷ EPS growth rate (%)

PEG < 1

Attractive

Priced below its growth rate. Lynch: "A P/E of 6 for a company growing 12%/year is very attractive."

PEG ≈ 1

Fair

Priced correctly relative to growth. You need another reason to buy beyond valuation - such as remaining geographic runway.

PEG > 2

Expensive

The market has already priced in the growth and then some. Risk: one quarter of slowing growth → the stock collapses.

Concretely: Coca-Cola at a P/E of 15, growing 15%/year → PEG = 1.0. Lynch's ideal fast grower has a PEG around 0.5: for example, a business growing 25%/year with a P/E of 12. That's a signal the market has not yet recognized the true growth rate - meaning you're buying a fast grower at the price of a stalwart. When the market catches on, the P/E climbs to 25–30, and you get both legs of the trade: rising earnings and multiple expansion. This is the mechanism that creates tenbaggers in Lynch's mind.

Where do you get the EPS growth rate? Lynch recommended using the trailing 3–5 year average growth rate, not analyst forecasts (which tend to be optimistic and copy each other). If a company recently went public, be careful: past growth may not be sustainable. PEG is a quick screen, not a substitute for reading the full financial statements.

VI. The Two Lists Lynch Lived By

In One Up on Wall Street, Lynch wrote two lists - one of traits that made him hungry to buy a stock, and one of traits that made him run without looking back. Both lists, translated and still holding up 35 years later.

Signals Lynch loved - "Buy it"

A boring or ridiculous-sounding company name. Lynch argued: a sexy, catchy name draws Wall Street's attention and investors bid the price up too soon. A name like "Automatic Data Processing" draws little notice - and that's the opportunity.
A business in a boring industry. Warehouse management, plastic bottle manufacturing, sanitation services, slaughterhouses. Nobody brags at a cocktail party about holding stock in a waste-processing company. But these businesses generate steady cash flow and face little competition from "hot money."
A company that does something faintly disgusting. Crematoriums, debt-collection firms, animal-carcass disposal. The more people avoid it, the fewer competitors jump in - margins can be excellent.
Insiders buying their own stock. A CEO selling company stock could have many reasons (buying a house, diversifying, divorce). But a CEO buying has only one reason: he thinks it's cheap. Insider buying is one of the strongest signals in Lynch's book.
A company buying back its own stock. Buybacks at a low price = higher EPS for remaining shareholders + a signal management believes in the future. Caveat: buybacks at peak prices are a bad sign (wasted capital).
Low institutional ownership. If the big funds haven't gotten in yet, that's the opportunity - because once they do, their inflows push the price up. Lynch favored stocks with institutional ownership below 20%.
A clear market niche. The company is #1 or #2 in a market small enough to not attract giants, but large enough for the company to earn real profits. Pricing power comes from the niche, not from absolute scale.

Signals Lynch avoided - "Run"

"This is the hottest stock in the hottest industry." Once every newspaper is writing about an industry (AI in 2024, cannabis in 2018, the Internet in 1999), the price has already run. Lynch: "A hot stock can go up very fast, and come down just as fast - usually landing lower than where you got in."
"This is the next Walmart / the next Amazon." Almost every "next" is never actually "the next." Buy a company for itself, not for the comparison. Lynch mocked: "The next thing usually isn't."
Diversification → Diworsification. A successful fast grower buys an unrelated company in another industry to "diversify." This is almost always a sign management doesn't know how to reinvest in its core business. Coca-Cola bought Columbia Pictures. Sears bought Allstate, Dean Witter, Coldwell Banker. All of it destroyed value.
Dependence on one large customer. A single Apple supplier, a single Samsung supplier. Revenue looks steadily rising - until the day that customer switches to a competitor, and the company loses 60% of revenue in a single quarter. Lynch's rule: no single customer should exceed 25–30% of revenue.
IPO rumors about a "promising" subsidiary. "The parent company will spin off its AI division, IPO valued at $10 billion…" These rumors are common at cycle peaks. By the time the rumor hits the press, it's already too late to buy.
"It's already so cheap, it can't fall any further." The deadliest sentence in investing. A stock that fell from $50 to $10 can still go to $1. "The price has already dropped 80%" is not a valuation; only analyzing the business is.

VII. Lynch vs Buffett - Same School, Different Speed

On the surface, Peter Lynch and Warren Buffett are both "value investors" - the same school as Benjamin Graham, both reading financial statements, both avoiding speculation. But their practical styles are entirely different. Placing them side by side clarifies Lynch:

Peter Lynch · Magellan

Hunt broadly, hold moderately

Held 1,400 stocks at once at the fund's peak. Bought aggressively, ready to cut quickly if the buy thesis proved wrong. Visited dozens of companies every week, called CEOs/CFOs directly. Trading rhythm: high - large portfolio turnover.

Focus: the fast grower. Goal: find the 10x before Wall Street catches on. Accepted that roughly 60–70% of positions wouldn't rise much, as long as a few dozen names won big.

Capital scale: $14B (peak) - large enough to be difficult, but spread across 1,400 names so each position averaged only ~$10M, keeping the flexibility to move in and out of small fast growers.

Warren Buffett · Berkshire

Hunt rarely, hold forever

Holds a few dozen names at any given time, with the top 5 making up >75% of the portfolio. Buys heavily then holds for decades - Coca-Cola since 1988, American Express since 1964. Rarely sells.

Focus: a world-class stalwart with a deep "moat." Goal: get one decision right, then compound for 30 years. The tenbagger isn't the direct objective - it's a side effect of holding long enough.

Capital scale: currently ~$700B - too large to buy small-caps. Must buy companies with a market cap of at least $50B to move the needle. Style is forced by scale.

The lesson: there's no single "correct" style. Buffett operates at a scale that forces him to choose few and hold long. Lynch operated at a small-to-mid scale that let him hunt broadly and stay flexible. The individual investor has an even bigger edge than Lynch himself did - because $10,000 or $100,000 can be invested in companies too small for even Magellan, let alone Berkshire.

"My biggest edge over Wall Street wasn't a higher IQ. It was that I was willing to say 'I don't know.' Wall Street never says 'I don't know.' If a fund manager says 'I don't know,' he gets fired. So they invent a story for every stock - even when there shouldn't be a story." - Peter Lynch, paraphrased from One Up on Wall Street

VIII. The Individual Edge - Why You Can Beat The Funds

This is Lynch's most controversial argument - and also the reason One Up on Wall Street sold more than a million copies. In the book, he lists the structural advantages individual investors have that large funds don't:

You go to the supermarket, eat at restaurants, sit in coffee shops every week. Wall Street analysts sit in offices reading reports. You see the new phở shop packed before it shows up in an industry report. You use Shopee, TikTok, Grab before an American fund even knows the name.
You don't have to report quarterly. Funds must report performance to shareholders every quarter. A stock down 30% in a quarter can force a fund manager to sell even when it's the best opportunity around - because clients don't understand. You only answer to yourself.
You have no market-cap constraint. A $10 billion fund can't buy a $50 million company - regulation and liquidity won't allow it. You can. And tenbaggers often live in the small-cap zone.
You don't face "career risk." A fund manager gets fired for being different from the crowd and wrong. He does not get fired for being like the crowd and wrong - because "everyone was wrong." The result: funds cluster around the same few dozen names. You have no such incentive; you can hold a name no one else holds.
You can wait. Lynch said the average tenbagger takes 5–7 years to become one. A fund under quarterly pressure can't wait that long. You can.

A warning Lynch repeated often: The "individual edge" does not mean "buy a stock because you like the product." The full process is still four steps: observe → verify → analyze → buy. Skip the last three and keep only the first, and you have the fastest way to blow up an account. Lynch wrote: "Investing without research is like playing stud poker without looking at the cards." Hanes was attractive because of L'eggs and healthy financials and a reasonable P/E and competitors hadn't entered yet. Any one of the four alone isn't enough.

IX. The Dark Side - What Lynch's Books Don't Mention

To be fair to Lynch - and to the reader - it's worth addressing a few dark corners that enthusiastic summaries usually skip:

Magellan after Lynch

Average

After Lynch retired in 1990, Magellan's performance under successor fund managers declined noticeably - trailing the S&P 500 in several stretches. No one replicated Lynch's edge at the very fund he built.

The average investor

~13%/year

Lynch earned 29.2%/year. Fidelity research showed that investors in Magellan earned far less on average - because they entered after the fund had won and pulled out when it dipped. Their mistake, not the fund's.

Survivorship bias

Always ~3,000 funds

Over 13 years, some fund manager will hit 29%/year purely by luck. The hard question: was Lynch skill, or was Magellan a statistical survivor? The answer is at least partly skill - but not 100%.

More importantly - Lynch wrote his books about how he achieved 29%/year; he never promised readers they would achieve 29%/year. Most people who read One Up on Wall Street don't beat the market. Some buy the wrong stocks by applying "invest in what you know" while skipping the research. Some take profits too soon. Some hold a turnaround all the way to zero.

A Lynch principle rarely quoted: In Beating the Street, he wrote - if you don't have time to research individual stocks, don't buy individual stocks. Buy an index fund. This advice, from one of the most successful stock pickers in history, deserves more attention than "go hunt tenbaggers." Individual investing is a craft; anyone without the time or interest to practice that craft should hire someone else - through a low-cost index fund like VOO/VWRA.

X. Four Questions To Ask Before Buying Any Stock

To sum up, whether or not you agree with Lynch, the following four questions deserve to be pinned to your screen every time you consider buying a stock:

#	Question	Why it matters
1	Which of Lynch's 6 types is this stock?	Getting this right determines everything else: return expectations, holding period, acceptable P/E. Buying a slow grower expecting a tenbagger is nonsensical.
2	Can I explain in 2 minutes, in a way an 11-year-old would understand, why I'm buying?	If you have to use words like "synergy," "moat," "network effect," "AI-powered" - you don't understand it well enough. A good business has a simple reason: what it sells, to whom, where the profit comes from, and how much runway remains.
3	What's the PEG? P/E versus the trailing 3–5 year EPS growth?	PEG isn't a law, but it's a quick check against overpaying. PEG > 2 is a yellow flag no matter how compelling the story.
4	What reason would make me sell?	Answer this before buying, not after the price has fallen 30%. If you don't know when you'd sell, you'll sell on emotion - and emotion is almost always wrong.

Lynch doesn't promise anything grand. He doesn't promise you'll hit 29%/year. He doesn't promise you'll find a tenbagger. What he promises is far more modest: if you use your eyes when you go to the supermarket, ask a few right questions when reading financial statements, buy businesses you understand at a price reasonable relative to growth, and don't sell too soon while the story still holds - you have a genuine chance, not a theoretical one, to beat the market over the long run. That's the open invitation from an 11-year-old caddy to everyone who has ever gone out for phở, walked the supermarket aisles, gotten coffee - and assumed investing was something other people did.

"You don't need to do extraordinary things to get extraordinary results. You just need to stop doing stupid things - and one of the biggest stupid things is buying a stock without understanding how that company makes money." - Peter Lynch, composite paraphrase from One Up on Wall Street & Beating the Street

From Flying Tiger Airlines at $7 in 1963 to a $14 billion Magellan in 1990, from a golf bag outside Boston to the largest fund in the world - Lynch's career is a 27-year proof of something simple: a stock is a business, a business is run by people, those people work for customers, and you are a customer. The distance between you and a tenbagger isn't an MBA or a secret algorithm - it's the willingness to look around you, ask questions, read the filings, and wait.

Primary sources

Peter Lynch & John Rothchild (1989), One Up on Wall Street: How to Use What You Already Know to Make Money in the Market, Simon & Schuster.
Peter Lynch & John Rothchild (1993), Beating the Street, Simon & Schuster.
Peter Lynch & John Rothchild (1995), Learn to Earn, Simon & Schuster.
PBS Frontline (1996), Betting on the Market - Interview with Peter Lynch.
Wikipedia, Peter Lynch; One Up on Wall Street; Magellan Fund.
Investopedia, Tenbagger; Peter Lynch's Eyeballing; PEG Ratio.
The Washington Post (Mar 1990), Magellan's Manager to Retire.
The Motley Fool, How Peter Lynch Destroyed the Market; Finding Lynch's 10-Baggers.
AAII Journal, Peter Lynch and "Investing in What You Know".
Yahoo Finance, 6 Types of Companies According to Peter Lynch.
BookGrill, Managing Magellan: How Peter Lynch Started the Greatest Fund Run.