Lynch, 59, hasn’t run a fund since 1990, when he retired from Magellan’s helm after a 13-year spell that produced market-stomping 29.2 percent annualized returns. Yet he remains one of the most revered names in the fund world, serving as a vice chairman and spokesmodel for the company. He also invests tens of millions of dollars for his family and his charitable foundation.

This is where Lynch tosses me — and you — a gold nugget: I have increased dramatically all year long the percentage of my Fidelity holdings that are in stocks in general and growth stocks in particular.

He’s even bought Internet stocks in the past year.

Not something you’d normally tell the world during a horrendous bear market. This has not been a good year so far, Lynch concedes. But time should be on his side soon enough.

I’ve found that when the market’s going down and you buy funds wisely, at some point in the future you will be happy. You won’t get there by reading ‘Now is the time to buy.’ These things never go off that way. But this is the third straight year of market declines, and we haven’t had many periods like that. I’m not a timer, but I thought I should increase my percentage in stocks. I’ve bought more as the year’s gone on, moving cash from my money-market funds and increasing my equity bet by about a third.

But what if it’s still too early for a rebound? With threats of war and recession all around us, what if stocks decline for a fourth year — or longer? Don’t the risks of being wrong outweigh the potential rewards of being right?

Lynch has one word for you: history.

We’ve been through this before

Look back to 1990, just before the bull really started snorting in 1991. War with Iraq loomed, recession raged, investors yanked money from stock funds. State and local governments faced huge deficits. Big banks reported frightening loan losses. Junk bonds were a mess.

By the fall of 1990, the U.S. stock market had tumbled nearly 20 percent. A pretty ugly combination, Lynch recalls. Much uglier than the 1987 crash. Much uglier than the 1973 and 1974 bear market. Much uglier than the 1981 and 1982 recession. America was considered washed-up in 1990 — remember how we couldn’t compete with the Japanese? — and we were a hopeless country in a lot of people’s eyes. It was a very similar environment in many ways to what we’ve had in the past year. All the pessimism about the future turned out to be misguided.

Lynch had left Magellan a few months earlier and was managing his personal portfolios at the time. In the summer of 1990, I was buying stocks and I was probably three or four months early there. But we had a great rally in 1991. Some people had said, ‘I want to get out of the market,’ and they missed it, OK? But the people who stayed are congratulating themselves even today, saying, ‘It’s hard to stay in there, but I get rewarded by staying.’ So I certainly look upon this latest correction as an opportunity to make some money.

Opportunities are everywhere

One surprising opportunity, apparently, was those Internet stocks. This time last year, Lynch’s screens showed some 600 technology companies with stock market capitalizations that were smaller than the total cash recorded on their books.