A Common Market -- The Public's Zeal to Invest --- Securities Blanket: How Joe Smith's Faith In the Market Mirrors The Passion of Millions --- He Proselytizes on the Virtues Of Long-Term Investing With Eye to Retirement --- Big Gains, but Big Risks, Too
[First in a Series]</br></br>MILLBURN, N.J. -- If there is an Everyman for the '90s, perhaps it is someone like Joe Smith, a mild-mannered marketing man who works for a big business that is owned by a bigger business. Mr. Smith is off-hours but pursuing his true calling, exhorting a rapt audience at the public library here. It is the sort of place -- with its folding chairs, cinder-block walls and mural of an 18th Century town meeting -- where the citizenry once might have gathered to debate a momentous public issue, like school busing or the atomic bomb.</br></br>Mr. Smith, in fact, is describing the wonders of a most fashionable civic endeavor -- investing in the stock market and, specifically, doing so through investment clubs. His own club has performed like a lion, and it is with no trace of irony that Mr. Smith tells a few dozen mostly neophytes, "You're going to be learning how to do what Peter Lynch did at Magellan."</br></br>Perhaps the listeners would recoil at the notion that they could imitate Michael Jordan or Luciano Pavarotti, but Mr. Lynch, who ran Fidelity Investments' Magellan Fund for 13 years, is apparently within their grasp. (Between 1977 and 1990, Mr. Lynch earned a cumulative return of 2,703%, compared with 574% for the Standard & Poor's 500 stock index.)</br></br>This belief, or something similar, is stirring ordinary investors across the land. Much as the 1980s were the decade of deal-making Henry Kravises, the '90s may go down as the time of Joe and Jane Smiths. Ordinary Americans have embraced the stock market -- it may be said that they are the stock market -- as never before. Roughly four of every 10 adults now, in at least a small way, are invested in the stock market. This is a seismic shift; in the 1960s, the figure was only two in 10.