Ed Perks
The Guardian
What holds, and what fails, under pressure, standards and accountability.
Ed Perks embodies The Guardian by putting protection before growth at every layer of the Franklin Income Fund. A handwritten letter from a Tennessee retiree stayed with him, evidence of a CIO who internalises individual consequences rather than flattening them into benchmarks.
“Absolutely. And that's something that we've really seen over the last five years, certainly when longer term rates were a lot lower. Really across the board, there were companies where we saw equities trading in mid-teens multiples with 3% dividend yields and the same benchmark longer-term debt from those companies yielding 1.5 to 2%.”
“Yeah, it certainly wasn't finance. And, you know, at Yale, I really kind of certainly had a broad cross-section of studies like many of my classmates. I think if it wasn't med school, it was either law school or going into government.”
“Oh, it's such a good question. I mean, a lot of ways, you know, you almost wouldn't want things to be entirely different. I was fortunate in that. I found that role relatively early on that really solidified the kind of investor I think I am. What is that inherent DNA that I have as an investor?”
“Risk. So sometimes in our strategy, we do think the biggest lever that we have, moving from one asset class to another, is the most appropriate. We certainly had that in 2021 and 2023.”
Masters in Business: “Franklin Templeton's Ed Perks on Fixed Income Investing”
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