By Kate Burgess
Published: July 8 2008 16:48 | Last updated: July 8 2008 16:48
Sir John Templeton, the renowned investor and philanthropist who is credited with some of the best-known investment adages, has died aged 95 from pneumonia.
John Marks Templeton grew up as a presbyterian in small farming town in Tennessee, graduated from Yale in 1934 and started his career on Wall Street in 1937.
He established his reputation as an investment guru when he formed Templeton Growth Fund in 1954. He was a contrarian value investor who picked out Japan before anyone else thought it offered value.
Sir John’s fund, which formed the basis of the eponymous fund management group with about $20bn under management, posted an average gain of 15 per cent a year from 1954 until his retirement in 1992.
That year he sold Templeton fund management to Franklin Group for more than $440m. That business is still known as Franklin Templeton.
Sir John was billed as a visionary, who understood the true character of stock markets when he said: ”Bull markets are born on pessimism, grow on scepticism, mature on optimism and die on euphoria.”
His warning, that “it’s different this time” are the most expensive words in the English language, has become a maxim for investors.
He is also credited with saying: ”To buy when others are despondently selling and to sell when others are greedily buying requires the greatest fortitude and pays the greatest reward”.
Sir John, who was still managing money and his own $700m fortune well into his 90s, was a pioneer of both investment and philanthropy. He established the Templeton prize in 1972 to recognise achievements in work related to life’s spiritual dimension.
He also set up the John Templeton Foundation in 1987, which gives out about $70m in annual grants to study links between science and religion.
Sir John became a British citizen in 1962 and was knighted in 1987 for his philanthropic efforts, but moved to live in the Bahamas in his fifties. It is said Sir John chose to become a British subject so that he could give money away in the Bahamas, and in the UK and the US. It was a practicality, not a tax issue as was often suggested, his friends said. |
发表于 2008-7-9 07:31:52
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谨致以最深切的哀悼！