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英文财经 |
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Lessons For Today's Market From Sir John Templeton |
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星期三, 七月 16, 2008 09:57:21 |
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by
Nicholas Vardy |
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Sir John Templeton, who passed away last week at the age of 95, was the original Global Guru. He provided me with my own introduction to the world of global investments when I picked up a book on his investment approach many years ago in Amsterdam. Known for his investment-pithy aphorisms, Templeton's observation: "the words 'this time it's different' are the four most dangerous words in investment," has stuck with me since Day One of my investment career.
John Templeton: A Pioneer in Global Investing
In today's Internet-connected world where buying a foreign stock traded on a foreign exchange is just a mouse click away, it's difficult to appreciate what a pioneer Templeton was in the world of global investment. Born in 1912, Templeton hailed from the South (Winchester, Tenn.), graduated from Yale in 1934, and won a Rhodes Scholarship to Oxford. After studying law in England, Templeton embarked on a whirlwind journey that took him to 35 countries in seven months -- a watershed event that exposed him to the enormous investment opportunities outside of the United States. He returned to Wall Street in the depths of the Great Depression to start his investment career in 1937.
In his very first display of his famous contrarian streak, Templeton soon borrowed a then-princely sum of $10,000 as a 26-year-old investor and bought shares of 104 European companies trading at $1 a share or less. This was in 1939, even as the German tanks were rumbling into Poland. Though dozens of companies were already in bankruptcy, Templeton held on to each stock for an average of four years and made a small fortune. Only four companies out of the 104 turned out to be worthless.
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In 1940, he bought a small investment firm that became the early foundation of his empire. He went on to build an investment management business whose name became virtually synonymous with value-oriented global investing. He launched the Templeton Growth Fund in 1954 -- notable in Canada which then had no capital gains tax. He took his company public in 1959 when it only had five funds and $66 million under management, and eventually sold his funds to Franklin Resources for $913 million in 1992. Templeton's investment track record was impressive, though given the vagaries of global markets, inevitably quite volatile. A $10,000 investment in Templeton Growth Fund in 1954 grew to roughly $2 million, with dividends reinvested, by 1992. That works out to a 14.5% annualized return since its inception.
Templeton focused his later years largely on philanthropy, endowing a Centre for Management Studies at Oxford and establishing the Templeton Prize in 1972, which recognizes achievement in work related to science, philosophy and spirituality. His Templeton Foundation, which today boasts an endowment of $1.5 billion, distributes $70 million annually in grants to study "what scientists and philosophers call the Big Questions."
John Templeton: Contrarian to the Core
Templeton was perhaps best known for investing in Japan in the 1950s when "Made in Japan" was synonymous with free toy trinkets hidden in cereal boxes. Central to his investment philosophy was to buy superior stocks at cheap prices at points of "maximum pessimism." He diligently applied this approach across a range of countries, industries and companies. As Templeton noted in an interview in Forbes in 1988: "People are always asking me where the outlook is good, but that's the wrong question. The right question is: 'Where is the outlook most miserable?' " I still find it astonishing how often focusing on this question is the key to making a fortune in the markets -- and how difficult it is to put in practice. Consider that the Russian market is up 60x since its market bottomed in October 1998 -- even as everyone from Jim Rogers to Warren Buffett refused to invest in it. Brazil has soared five-fold during the last five years even as George Soros predicted that a vote for its current president would be a vote to bankrupt the country. On the flipside, as a U.S. investor, you'd have made almost 50% more investing in slow-growth Germany than betting on the Shanghai stock exchange, had that part of the "China Miracle" been open to U.S. investors.
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And like all great investors, Templeton was not afraid of big bets. At one point in the 1960s, Templeton held more than 60% of the Templeton Growth Fund's assets in Japan. That kind of a concentrated position in a global fund would be impossible on Wall Street today -- which explains why Templeton decamped to the Bahamas early in his career. At the same time, Templeton also had the savvy to exit markets when they were overvalued. He had no problem selling out of Japan -- the market in which he made his first fortune -- well before it collapsed in 1989. My favorite Templeton anecdote was his bet against the U.S. tech bubble in 1999. Templeton famously predicted that 90% of the new Internet companies would be bankrupt within five years and he very publicly shorted the U.S. tech sector. I think it's a terrific irony that John Templeton -- a value investor knowing for sussing out little known global opportunities -- made his quickest -- and possibly biggest fortune by shorting U.S. stocks.
John Templeton: Lessons for Today' Market
As most global markets drop into bear-market territory, you may find some comfort in John Templeton's most famous piece of advice: "To buy when others are despondently selling and to sell when others are greedily buying requires the greatest fortitude and pays the greatest reward." This advice is simple -- but not easy to implement, as bottom fishers in U.S. financial stocks know too well. But Templeton added this small refinement: always take a small position in your investment ideas before rushing in. If it's a truly great bargain, there's no need to hurry. What I found most sympathetic about John Templeton is his relentless yet realistic optimism. A few years ago, he asked a journalist to write about why the Dow Jones Industrial Average might rise to one million by the year 2100. On its face, that sounds absurd. Yet it turns out that thanks to the miracle of compound interest, the Dow would only need to rise about 5% per year to hit that level in 92 years.
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文章来源：MoneyshowAsia |
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