Sir John Templeton
John Templeton was born Nov. 29, 1912, in the small town of Winchester, Tenn. Forced to live thriftily by supporting himself while studying at Yale University during the Great Depression, Templeton graduated in 1934 as a top scholar in his class. He was named a Rhodes Scholar to Balliol College at Oxford and graduated with a law degree.
Beginning a Wall Street career in 1937, Templeton went on to create some of the world's largest and most successful international investment funds. With standard stock-buying advice being "buy low, sell high," Templeton took that strategy to an extreme — picking nations, industries and companies hitting rock-bottom "points of maximum pessimism," as he put it. "Bull markets are born on pessimism, grow on skepticism, mature on optimism, and die on euphoria. The time of maximum pessimism is the best time to buy, and the time of maximum optimism is the best time to sell," he once stated.
When war began in Europe in 1939, he borrowed money to buy 100 shares in each of 104 companies selling at $1 a share or less, including 34 companies that were in bankruptcy. Only four turned out to be worthless, and he turned large profits on the others after holding each for an average of four years. Templeton launched his flagship fund, Templeton Growth, Ltd. in 1954. Taking a less-traveled route in investing, he also sold advice on how to invest worldwide when Americans rarely considered foreign investment.
In 1987, he was knighted Sir John by Queen Elizabeth II for his many accomplishments, and was later heralded as "arguably the greatest global stock picker of the century" by Money magazine. He sold his various Templeton funds in 1992 to the Franklin Group for $440 million. Now 94, he is a naturalized British citizen living in Nassau, the Bahamas.
