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Remembering Legendary Investor Sir John Templeton

The brief video below is in appreciation of Sir John’s life and the influence he still has on Franklin Templeton Investments’ perspective and our employees.  Enjoy!

 The 29th of November marks the anniversary of what would have been Sir John Templeton’s 100th birthday, someone who helped shape my career as a portfolio manager, and who I admire greatly as a human being.  I first met the late Sir John more than three decades ago when I was working as an analyst for a broker based in Hong Kong. I traveled a few times to Nassau to make presentations to the Templeton portfolio teams, which is how he and I first became acquainted.

One day Sir John approached me to manage a new emerging markets group that he was starting and was very excited about. I jumped at the opportunity. This was a great chance to do things globally rather than just focus on Taiwan (where I was head of the country’s first investment management company at the time), and there weren’t many—if any—other portfolio managers focusing on global emerging markets. So, it was quite an opportunity!  This year is the 25th anniversary of what’s now the Templeton Emerging Markets Group. The markets certainly have changed a lot since then, but our core investment philosophy remains true to Sir John’s timeless approach. (more…)

The Secrets of The World’s Greatest Traders

Traders and investors have made and lost some of the world’s most significant pools of wealth.  It’s no coincidence that many of the wealthiest individuals in the world today (and through history) have been successful investors.  Names like Warren BuffetGeorge SorosJohn PaulsonDavid EinhornBill Gross and Sir John Templeton have become synonymous with strategies that have created astonishing success, in many case creating a groundswell of books and analysts who study their lives with a toothcomb to understand “what” the magic formula was…

Even outside these heavyweights of the trading world, hundreds of thousands of individuals around the world attest to have ‘the best‘ strategy to generate consistent positive returns (in fact, Google alone reveals over 10.4 million results when searching for best trading strategies). At a macro-level, the long-standing efficient market hypothesiswould make it notionally impossible for any trading strategy to be effective (as it asserts a level of information efficiency in the market).  The past quarter century however, has seen a gradual move away from the efficient hypothesis to greater considerations of information asymmetry and behavioral biases driving inefficiencies (opportunities) in the market.  So faced with this complexity, how do some traders generate such astonishing success?

To learn more, I spoke with Jack Schwager who is perhaps best known for his “Market Wizards” book series in which he has interviewed a cross section of the most successful traders and investors in the world.  In May 2012 Jack released the latest book in this best-selling series, “Hedge Fund Market Wizards” (a behind-the-scenes look at the world of hedge funds, from fifteen traders who’ve consistently beaten the markets).

Jack Schwager is a recognized industry expert in futures and hedge funds and the author of a number of widely acclaimed financial books. He is currently the co-portfolio manager for the ADM Investor Services Diversified Strategies Fund, a portfolio of futures and FX managed accounts. He is also an advisor to Marketopper, an India-based quantitative trading firm, supervising a major project that will adapt their trading technology to trade a global futures portfolio.  Previously, Mr. Schwager was a partner in the Fortune Group, a London-based hedge fund advisory firm, which specialized in creating customized hedge fund portfolios for institutional clients.  His previous experience includes 22 years as Director of Futures research for some of Wall Street’s leading firms and ten years as the co-principal of a CTA.

Q: Is there a strategy or style which is most effective at generating return?

 [Jack Schwager] The diversity of strategies people use is truly remarkable, I saw people using completely different strategies to the degree that if I had set out to invent 15 different strategies for a fictional work…. I couldn’t have made the strategies more different to the ones I saw in real life!  This illustrates a point I have made in all my works insofar as there really is no ‘holy grail‘ or single style that is most effective.  Those people looking for a single unified strategy are not asking the right question.

It’s a matter of finding an approach that works for the individual.  A person has to know whether they are comfortable with fundamental or technical, long term or short term, certain types of markets, wider risk or less risk… You can go through a whole checklist of things and find it’s different for each individual.

Even when looking at differences between asset classes we see that every market can be traded using different strategies be they fundamental, technical, or a mixture.  If we take equity markets we see that traders can use strategies including fundamental, value, extreme long term, and day.   If you want a microcosm that proves diversity, there it is! (more…)

Classic Wall Street Quotations

Soros, Buffett, Templeton, Livermore, Rothschild – This is the remix.  I’ve updated their classic quotations for the modern investment world.  Vote for your favorites below…Enjoy!

“We simply attempt to be greedy when others are fearful and to make others fearful when we do not have enough long positions on our sheets.” – Warren Buffett

“Capital goes to where it can escape taxation and be used to pay employees in sacks of rice.” – Walter Wriston

“Stock market bubbles don’t grow out of thin air. They have a solid basis in the creation and marketing of ETFs.” – George Soros

“It takes 150 years to build an investment bank and only five minutes to convince you to sell me preferred stock in it at a 10% interest rate.” – Warren Buffett

“The four most dangerous words in investing are ‘It’s the Lightning Round!'”. – Sir John Templeton

“Only buy something that you’d be perfectly happy to hold if the market had a Flash Crash.” – Warren Buffett

“Markets can remain irrational longer than you can pretend that Treasuries yielding a half a percent are a safe buy.” – John Maynard Keynes

“History has not dealt kindly with the aftermath of protracted periods of my policies” – Alan Greenspan

“Obviously the thing to do was to be bullish in a bull market and bearish in a bear market and a renter in the housing market and open-minded to exotic sh*t at Jean-Georges’ Spice Market.” – Jesse Livermore

“Give me control of a nation’s money and I care not how much it owes China.” – Mayer Amschel Rothschild

“Man looks in the abyss, there’s nothing staring back at him. At that moment, man gets a text message, an eFax and two Twitter DMs.  And by the time he’s updating his Facebook status and feeding his virtual farm animals, he has no idea what ‘abyss’ you’re talking about.” – Lou Mannheim, Wall Street

“How do we know when irrational exuberance has unduly escalated asset values?  How about around 2007 when I was walking around with a crown and a scepter, spraying Crystal on chicks in the VIP room. I was probably a little irrationally exuberant right around then, holmes.” – Alan Greenspan

“Money is like manure, you don’t have to spread it around, you can just sell it to Potash Corp as fertilizer.” – J. Paul Getty

“The time of maximum optimism is the time to sell and the time of maximum pessimism is the time to start a blog and write 20 posts a day about gold.” – Sir John Templeton

“Rule No. 1 – Never Lose Money.  Rule No. 2 – When you do lose money, call in Becky Quick and the camera crew for some folksy chit chat over root beer floats.” – Warren Buffett

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