Peter Lynch identified and invested in numerous tenbaggers when he was manager of the Fidelity Magellan Fund from 1977 to 1990. As a result, the Magellan Fund grew from $18 million in assets when Lynch took it over to $19 billion when he left in 1990. Over this period, Lynch achieved a 29.2% average annual rate of return, which meant that $1,000 invested when Lynch started managing the fund in 1977 would have grown to $28,000 by the time he left it in 1990.

Lynch used certain criteria for picking a stock; for example, that it should have a Price/Earnings (P/E) ratio below the industry mean and less than its five-year average. He also looked for stocks where the five-year growth rate in operating earnings per share (EPS) was high but below 50%. His reasoning was that such earnings growth rates were not only unsustainable, but companies growing at this pace would attract competition.