YouSaid · the spoken record

Lauren Templeton

lines on the record: 65
first: 2022-06-26
most recent: 2022-06-26
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“Thank you so much. So, we do have a website templetonphillips.com. It's not a great website, but it is there. There's a section of the website called Commentary. So you can go there and sign up to receive our commentaries for free. It's called the Maximum Pessimism Report, and it's produced periodically. We only produce a report if we feel like we have valuable information and actionable information to share with shareholders. So we're pretty careful about that. You know, sometimes I'm active on Twitter at LC Templeton. And yeah, so you can connect with me on LinkedIn. I'm always happy to hear from investors. And correspond with friends from around the world that have a shared interest and value investing. I'd be happy to connect.”
2022-06-26 · We Study Billionaires · TIP460: Investing the Sir John Templeton Way w/ Lauren Templeton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Don't know as the answer. We're not there yet, is what I would say. If we do see rising defaults, and I think you will see a new investment regime take over more of the Ben and Graham style of investing. And of course, that will be very new for many of the entrants into the newer entrants into the market. That will be a different type of market for them to experience. I think then you will say you might be able to say, yes, this is a generational buying opportunity. I don't think we're there yet, but could be coming up soon.”
2022-06-26 · We Study Billionaires · TIP460: Investing the Sir John Templeton Way w/ Lauren Templeton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Knowing him, there was definitely something behind the numbers. I don't recall at the moment what the magic was, but he would have done an analysis and calculation. And definitely there was a reason there. But I think he shorted 84 companies during that time period. He put 2.2 million in each position. I mean, he did really well. He recommended that strategy to my dad. And my father is an exceptional investor too. Dad's done really well. He's not a billionaire, but he tried to execute the strategy. He covered the shorts. He said, you know, it's just not for me. I'm not wired for this. And if you'll remember during that time period, it would have been like standing in front of a train coming straight towards you on the tracks. It really would have been hard to stay in those positions. But it worked out really well for him.”
2022-06-26 · We Study Billionaires · TIP460: Investing the Sir John Templeton Way w/ Lauren Templeton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Strategy. I really credit my husband, Scott Phillips, for coming up with. He's always studying at, speaking of short strategies, there is a very interesting short strategy that John Templeton ran during the dot-com bubble in late 90s, early 2000s that investors might want to be cognizant of in today's market, but he ran something called the IPO lockup strategy where he was shorting shares about seven days prior to IPO lockup expiration and covering 11 days later. Now, in today's market, companies have gotten very wise about how they structure these share lockup expirations, right? They don't all occur at once. They spread them out to make sure that there's not that big of an impact on the stock. But that's why one of our short techniques is to focus on those S3 filings.”
2022-06-26 · We Study Billionaires · TIP460: Investing the Sir John Templeton Way w/ Lauren Templeton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There were about 200 companies trading at a price to sell ratio of over ten times. So you have over 700 in the U.S. trading at price to sell multiples of over 700 times in early 2021. And, you know, that was really eye-opening for us. We thought there's no way that these businesses can sustain these valuations. So we really got very aggressive with our short portfolio. Then, and of course, you know, with the change in monetary policy that has worked out very well for us. But yeah, so the short strategy has changed a lot over the years. I think that's where we really put our mark on the strategies, so to say. I mean, so many of the things we do are right out of Sir John Templeton's playbook, but the modifications to the short”
2022-06-26 · We Study Billionaires · TIP460: Investing the Sir John Templeton Way w/ Lauren Templeton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“When their companies are fairly valued or overvalued and have a tendency to issue shares at those times. So we use that as a fertile hunting ground for short ideas. Yeah. So over the past since early probably April 2021, we also started shorting the ARC Innovation Fund. That was a pretty good proxy for everything we were seeing in the market. In early 2021, we could identify well over 700 stocks in the US trading for a price to sells at over 20 times. And that was just mind-boggling for us. I don't remember where it was at its height, maybe like 787 stocks or something like that. And then it fell to 718. I'm not sure where it is today. But 20 times. Sales. That is shocking. During the dot com”
2022-06-26 · We Study Billionaires · TIP460: Investing the Sir John Templeton Way w/ Lauren Templeton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Me, it makes so much sense to be long and short as a value investor. As I stated earlier, you know, our short strategy has evolved tremendously since that initial strategy I ran with John Timbleton, which was just quantitative, just shorting based on valuation and highly concentrated. So our strategy has evolved. We run many short positions. We do not short based on valuation alone. We look for some sort of catalyst, whether that be aggressive accounting techniques. We will go in and look at the SEC filings in particular. We look for the S3 filings, which of course a company will issue when they're typically considering doing a secondary issuance of shares. You know, insiders know.”
2022-06-26 · We Study Billionaires · TIP460: Investing the Sir John Templeton Way w/ Lauren Templeton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Regulatory moves in the nonprofit education sector. But, you know, clearly there's pessimism there. So I think, you know, these, whether it's an industry, a stock, a country, there are always these opportunities for maximum pessimism. Of course, the best opportunities are when the entire market goes on sale, which, you know, we are here. And we have been covering our short portfolio. I think the market might very well fall from here. I don't know, but I'm more interested in buying stocks now than in selling stocks is what I could say.”
2022-06-26 · We Study Billionaires · TIP460: Investing the Sir John Templeton Way w/ Lauren Templeton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, there is maximum pessimism in tech right now, for sure. So, I mean, we've just seen absolute carnage in tech. But I was just on a panel in Virginia. And, you know, I'm a value investor. And typically that does not lead you to tech stocks. But if you're a very discerning investor, I think there is maximum pessimism in the tech sector right now. So the baby is clearly, in some cases, being thrown out with a bathwater. And if you know what you're doing, you can find some really good opportunities in technology right now. China also, there's maximum pessimism in China. We have not allocated any capital to China. We exited China in early, I think it was early 2020 over regulatory concerns before some of the”
2022-06-26 · We Study Billionaires · TIP460: Investing the Sir John Templeton Way w/ Lauren Templeton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“All of Sir John's most profitable trades over his career. But what we wanted to do is really put those trades into historical context so that because, you know, you hear about somebody making a great trade and you're like, oh, yeah, that's so obvious. But if you really understand the historical context, you can also understand how difficult it was to make the decision. That's what we wanted to show investors is how he made the decision and what was going on in the world that led him to make the decision so that investors could replicate that or recognize the patterns that John Templeton recognized.”
2022-06-26 · We Study Billionaires · TIP460: Investing the Sir John Templeton Way w/ Lauren Templeton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“You know, pitched the book and he was like, I think it's an awful idea. I don't want to work with you. And I was like, gosh, that's depressing. But then a while later, Jack contacted me again. He said, whatever happened with that book. And I said, your agent didn't like it. And he said, well, let me just introduce you to my publisher. So he introduced me to his publisher and they bought the book right away, like right after that phone call and gave us something crazy. It was like six weeks to write it. And my husband and I, we weren't married yet. We were about to get married. And so we wrote the book on our honeymoon. We would write in the mornings and then we would swim in the afternoons and we produced the book really quickly. We ended up going back to Jack's agent to help us negotiate the contract with the publisher. So it's a funny story. But writing the book, you know, investing the Templeton Way is about.”
2022-06-26 · We Study Billionaires · TIP460: Investing the Sir John Templeton Way w/ Lauren Templeton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“There were lots of stories that we heard from people that we interviewed that I didn't know, like anecdotes about John Timbleton, and that was a blessing to hear those from other people. Lots of cute stories. One of the things that really struck me in writing the book is how similar John Timbleton is to my own father. I mean, just very similar. So that struck me. But all the anecdotes, it was fun. I mean, actually, the story of writing the book is a really interesting one. I was at an investing conference out in California and I was sitting by a fire pit next to a guy I didn't know. And so I started talking to him and it was Jack Schwager. He's the author of Market Wizards. And Jack and I became friends. And so I had been talking to him a few years later and I was like, you know, I think somebody should write a book on John Templeton. He said, well, that's a great idea. Let me introduce you to my agent. So he introduced me to his agent and I.”
2022-06-26 · We Study Billionaires · TIP460: Investing the Sir John Templeton Way w/ Lauren Templeton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Since the fall of 2008, forcing ourselves to methodically go in and purchase securities. We did not know that March 9th was the low, but we knew that things were so inexpensive that we wanted to put every dollar we could get our hands on into the market. And that's where we were. And she was born on March 10th. I can't remember going on CNBC after that and saying she's ushering in the next big bull.”
2022-06-26 · We Study Billionaires · TIP460: Investing the Sir John Templeton Way w/ Lauren Templeton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Okay, so my first born was born on March 10th. The March 10th, 2009, I should say, the Lowe's of the great financial crisis were reached on March 9th, 2009. So it's a funny story. We were in the labor delivery room and we were buying stocks. My husband and I worked together and the computers were out and we were trying to get these orders executed and the nurse came in and she got really irritated. And she looked at my husband and she was like, shut down your computer. And I looked at him and I was like, just get the orders filled. But the reason it's an important story is because people always ask, how do you know when you're at the low of the market? What is the point of maximum pessimism? How will we know? And the answer is no one knows. So we had been buying stocks every day.”
2022-06-26 · We Study Billionaires · TIP460: Investing the Sir John Templeton Way w/ Lauren Templeton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“But I do think investors can definitely improve. You're not kind of stuck with a lot you're born with. You can improve and become a better investor by being very thoughtful about it. And I often tell investors that they have proven that just reading about your behavioral biases will improve your investment results. So I always say pick up one of James Montier's books. I love his books. The little book on behavioral investing. Start there. It's like this big. You can read it in the carpool line. And he has many other books as well, but it's fascinating to read about behavioral finance and how your emotions play a part. Everybody can get better at controlling them.”
2022-06-26 · We Study Billionaires · TIP460: Investing the Sir John Templeton Way w/ Lauren Templeton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Nature nurture. I think it's a little bit of both. I do think that Buffett and Munger's, you're either born with it or you're not. Yeah, if you're going to be the top investor in the world, I think you're either born with it or not. But I think people can improve and learn. I mean, we know that our brain is constantly reshaping through the process of plasticity. And that if you reap the returns of putting money to work at these moments of maximum pessimism, as Sir John called it, that your brain will rewire itself. And it will become easier and easier over time. And you will become where you anticipate these market sell-offs and you see them as great opportunities. And it will get easier. I think things like structuring your day and your building your habits around investing, I think are very important. So I think it's a bit of both.”
2022-06-26 · We Study Billionaires · TIP460: Investing the Sir John Templeton Way w/ Lauren Templeton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think both. I do really do think there's a genetic component to delay gratification, impulse control. I mean, you know, you're a dad. Your kid's kind of come out how they come out. And I can remember before I had children, my husband and I have this big nature versus nurture debate. And then we had kids and he's like, oh, it's nature. But I do think there is, you know, there's definitely a component of nurture there. But people are born the way they are born. And few are not good at controlling your impulses. That would certainly be a challenge to becoming an investor. I mean, it's a hard question for me to answer because I will have spent my life in this bubble of men predominantly that I was modeling my behavior after. And they already had the correct behavior. So I don't know if it is.”
2022-06-26 · We Study Billionaires · TIP460: Investing the Sir John Templeton Way w/ Lauren Templeton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Executing that decision. That experience happened to me if it happened to me once, it happened to me 20 times. He just wasn't impacted by that. He took it that, you know, a large part of his decisions were going to be wrong and he would lose money some of the time. He was okay with that. So I think not all investors have that mentality, but it's important to not strive for perfection because I don't know perfect an investor out there.”
2022-06-26 · We Study Billionaires · TIP460: Investing the Sir John Templeton Way w/ Lauren Templeton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Still exists. It's called contenders and defenders. And he sent me the report and he said, this is really great strategy, you know. I think we should run it. He had sent me an article on a strategy, I think, by an analyst at Merrill Lynch called Contenders and Defenders. And he wanted to put some capital in the strategy and wanted me to execute the strategy for him. And it was a great strategy on paper. It didn't work out because to short all the securities that you needed to short, you had to do it synthetically and the costs just ate up your returns. So I launched this strategy for him. It did not produce good returns. I went to meet with him. And it was very much like, okay, here are the numbers. It's not producing good returns. Okay, let's close it down and move on to the next strategy. He was never hung up on the fact that he had made a poor decision or that he had lost some money.”
2022-06-26 · We Study Billionaires · TIP460: Investing the Sir John Templeton Way w/ Lauren Templeton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Yeah, I mean, he had actually given it a lot of thought. And he said, you know, he said, I've given it a lot of thought. And I think that my decisions are correct 60% of the time. And he was known as one of the world's greatest stockpickers. So I do think you have to get comfortable with that, that a good majority of your decisions are not going to work out. They're going to be bad decisions. And that's okay. And that's also, I'm glad you brought that up because I do think this is very unique to John Templeton. He was never phased by losing money. So for instance, he was constantly starting new strategies. And there was one strategy that we started together based off of a report that was put out, I think it was by Merrill Lynch analyst. And I think the report.”
2022-06-26 · We Study Billionaires · TIP460: Investing the Sir John Templeton Way w/ Lauren Templeton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Then we'll do fundamental analysis on top of that. So, yeah, I mean, it's poor art, part science, as you know, the more you do it, the easier it gets.”
2022-06-26 · We Study Billionaires · TIP460: Investing the Sir John Templeton Way w/ Lauren Templeton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“They were equally weighted in the early days. So you're asking these questions and remembering they were equally weighted. That has changed a bit over the years. A lot of things have. But again, I think letting the numbers show you where to invest is a very good place to start. I mean, numbers can also mislead you, but if you're just looking for a place to start, focusing on the numbers will do a pretty good job. And also focusing on the numbers if you're a value investor's very rational and it's going to put you in contrarian situations, right? That you might not have sought out yourself. So that is our philosophy. Now, we start with a quantitative metrics. We like most value managers are using a discounted cash flow model on top of that or dividend discount model depending on the industry, et cetera.”
2022-06-26 · We Study Billionaires · TIP460: Investing the Sir John Templeton Way w/ Lauren Templeton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“It's outperformed PE ratios going forward. We're very focused on dividend growth, dividend yield, because we've gone back and we've studied the 1970s. And again, that's the only equity strategy that produced real returns during the inflationary environment of the 1970s.”
2022-06-26 · We Study Billionaires · TIP460: Investing the Sir John Templeton Way w/ Lauren Templeton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Accruals, right? Working capital. And we think that usually those accruals have to adjust over 12 to 18 months. And so that's a pretty good catalyst when it comes to a stock, right? So if you, you know, if you build inventory, you've either got to sell it or write it down. I mean, these are just some examples of things that we look at that we've improved our short strategy over the years working with him. But we are also still very quantitative. So we start with quantitative ranking screens. I mean, using all the plain old evaluation metrics that everybody else uses. Uncle John was well known for saying there are over 100 measuring sticks of value. You should constantly reevaluate the metrics you are using. So in the past few years, free cash flow yield has been a metric that has worked really well.”
2022-06-26 · We Study Billionaires · TIP460: Investing the Sir John Templeton Way w/ Lauren Templeton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Time for us because of the beta bias on the short side. We did learn a lot over that time period working together that shorting stocks on a valuation basis only is really hard to do. You typically need some type of catalyst. Also 25 position short book is pretty concentrated. And so now our short book, we have many more positions. We're not we do not have a highly concentrated short book and we don't short based on valuation alone. It is a component of our short strategy, but we really look for situations where you have high valuations and also perhaps some aggressive accounting policies mixed with that. So we focus on”
2022-06-26 · We Study Billionaires · TIP460: Investing the Sir John Templeton Way w/ Lauren Templeton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“And by the time he passed, you know, the guardrails were off. We were running a global fund. Things had changed a lot. But I think he knew that a young person would have a very hard time controlling their emotions when it came to managing institutional capital. And I think he would have been right. I mean, I can remember leaving work in my early 20s to go home and go to bed because I was so sick about a bad day in the market. I mean, now I would, it doesn't influence me at all, but it did as a young person. I launched that product in June of 2001 because it was dollar neutral. It ended up with a huge beta bias on the short side. And September 11th happened. And it ended up being a very profitable time.”
2022-06-26 · We Study Billionaires · TIP460: Investing the Sir John Templeton Way w/ Lauren Templeton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Have this great opportunity. So I went to meet with him and he said, Look, you need to start your track record early. You should start many products. You should go with the one that has the best track record. We're going to start here. And so my fund was seated with $30 million. Its mandate was to be dollar neutral, 25 longs, 25 shorts just in the US. And it was the stocks were selected based on quantitative basis, low valuation stocks on the long side, high valuation stocks on the short side. They would be very systematically and routinely, the portfolio would be turned over. I really didn't have much discretion on the portfolio. So he basically said, this is the strategy execute it for me. Let's see what the results are. And then over time, we started tinkering with that strategy.”
2022-06-26 · We Study Billionaires · TIP460: Investing the Sir John Templeton Way w/ Lauren Templeton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“For his opportunity to pull John Timbleton aside and ask for investment advice. And that's kind of how I grew up. And then when I was in high school, Sir John tried to get me to launch a mutual fund. And I really thought, you're crazy. This old crazy guy wants me to launch a mutual fund. I mean, I was really engaged in investing as a child, more so than any other child that”
2022-06-26 · We Study Billionaires · TIP460: Investing the Sir John Templeton Way w/ Lauren Templeton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I grew up investing. I started investing when I was eight years old. My dad let me pick one stock per month when I was a child. The walls in my room were wallpapered in stock certificates. He told me bedtime stories about the magic of compounding. Every decision was a lesson, an opportunity cost. Of course, I was born in the 1970s. I won't tell you what year. But a lot of my childhood was spent in the 1980s. This is really when Sir John's career was hitting his stride. He was on Forbes and Wall Street Week and Timbledon Growth Fund and had this crazy track record. So it's really hitting his stride there. And, you know, I knew him as a great uncle living in the Bahamas that would come home once a year and the town would throw a big parade and my parents would have a big party and my dad would walk around the house and ask wait patiently.”
2022-06-26 · We Study Billionaires · TIP460: Investing the Sir John Templeton Way w/ Lauren Templeton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“To figure out what he could do to create a permanent impact. And he looked around. Nobody else was doing anything in religion and spirituality. And so I think his foundations are very contrarian as well.”
2022-06-26 · We Study Billionaires · TIP460: Investing the Sir John Templeton Way w/ Lauren Templeton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Record. He sold the business in 1992, and then he spent the rest of his life dedicated to his three philanthropies, which are the John Templeton Foundation, Templeton World Charity Foundation, and Templeton Religion Trust. Those three entities fund the Timpleton Prize every year, but he was very philanthropic. And again, that goes back to his childhood and his early days in Tennessee. His mother was a devout Presbyterian. There was a unity movement that came through Tennessee that highly influenced him. She was always funding missionary over in China. So I think he is quoted as saying that, you know, he looked at his life and he figured he would be on earth just one time for a very short period of time. And he wanted.”
2022-06-26 · We Study Billionaires · TIP460: Investing the Sir John Templeton Way w/ Lauren Templeton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Knew, which shed light on our reality. So he had created the Templeton Prize. Mother of Teresa was the first recipient. Many people have gone on to win it. Frank Wilchak was just announced as our 52nd Templeton laureate. He is a Nobel Prize-winning physicist. So a lot of different people have won over the years. But in 1987, he was knighted for his philanthropic work by the Queen of England. And that's how he became Sir John Templeton. He managed the Templeton Growth Fund until 1987. If you had invested $10,000 at its inception in 1954 and you had held that to 1987, you would have had over 2.2 million dollars. I mean, it was an unbelievable trend.”
2022-06-26 · We Study Billionaires · TIP460: Investing the Sir John Templeton Way w/ Lauren Templeton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“He left the United States and moved to Nassau, Bahamas. Nassau Bahamas at the time, the Bahamas were not independent at the time. So it was part of the British Commonwealth. And he had created the Templeton Prize in 1972, Mother Teresa was the first recipient in 1973. The Templeton Prize was created to honor progress in religion, so to say. So he was very spiritually minded. He would often say, you know, when you go to the doctor, Lauren, they do not pull out a 2,000-year-old textbook to diagnose you, but there has been no progress made on the spiritual front. And he believed that research and advances in science would discover”
2022-06-26 · We Study Billionaires · TIP460: Investing the Sir John Templeton Way w/ Lauren Templeton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“In one country, it would lead him to do further analysis on the country to make sure the country had property rights, et cetera. And if it passed the test there, he might be quoted in the financial media as saying, I like South Korea, but it would really be the companies that the discounts and the companies that he was seeing. It was very quantitative.”
2022-06-26 · We Study Billionaires · TIP460: Investing the Sir John Templeton Way w/ Lauren Templeton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“The numbers show that the numbers showed him to invest in the US in the late 70s, early 80s, right? I mean, it was a really, the 70s were an interesting decade. I mean, so they ended the same place they started, right? And in the late 70s, early 80s, you had crazy inflation. Interest rates were really high, an unbridled enthusiasm for collectibles and all sorts of things. Interestingly, in the great inflation in the 1970s, the only equity strategy that outperformed was dividend growth stocks, which is what we're focused on right now. But Sir John was very numbers driven. He was not macro. If he saw that there was a collection of low-priced companies,”
2022-06-26 · We Study Billionaires · TIP460: Investing the Sir John Templeton Way w/ Lauren Templeton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So he identified this, put capital there quickly, rode those returns through the 1970s when the U.S. was really struggling in the 70s. Of course, he got out of Japan, into the US in the late 70s, early 80s, coinciding with what I call the death of equities. I always love that because Newsweek came out with a headline in 1979 called The Death of Equities. And that anytime you see a headline like that, you should, as a value investor, be like, yep, this is the best opportunity ever. So he was moving capital in the US in the late 70s and 80s, but his contrarian spirit allowed him to look overseas. The numbers showed him to invest in Japan. It wasn't a macro call.”
2022-06-26 · We Study Billionaires · TIP460: Investing the Sir John Templeton Way w/ Lauren Templeton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Back with this bedrock of geopolitical knowledge. Now, he had been studying Japan and he started putting his capital to work in Japan in the 1950s and then investor capital in the 1960s, what he saw about the Japanese that he admired was that they were industrious, hardworking savers. And also Japan was trading at about an 80% discount to the US at the time. And they were growing about 2.5 times faster than the US. So the growth rate was about 10%. And Sir John being a great student that he was, he had identified an accounting anomaly. The companies over in Japan were not consolidating the earnings of their subsidiaries. So although PE We were depressed in Japan. Sir John knew that the actual peas, if they consolidated the earnings of the subsidiaries, would be even lower. So a good example of that would be Hitachi.”
2022-06-26 · We Study Billionaires · TIP460: Investing the Sir John Templeton Way w/ Lauren Templeton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“With him in about a month, and I said, Well, have Bloomberg and Excel, so I'll just do it right here in 10 seconds and show it to you. And I think his mind was blown because he always did that with pen and paper. He used value line a lot. But in the 1950s and 1960s, he was one of the very first investors to invest in Japan. He saw, I should say, he graduated from Yale in 1934. And then he was the recipient of the Rhodes Scholarship and went on to Bailey College. And when he graduated from Bale College in Oxford, he went on a world tour with a college friend, and they visited 35 nations. They even went to the 1936 Olympics in Berlin where they saw the building contingency of Nazi soldiers.”
2022-06-26 · We Study Billionaires · TIP460: Investing the Sir John Templeton Way w/ Lauren Templeton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“So he clearly was reading about the economy. I mean, he read all the time. And he was very, very well read. But he would go off and go on financial media like Wall Street Week with Lewis Rukaiser and he would make these very big predictions about markets, specifically his investments into Japan in the 1950s, 60s, and early 70s, his investments into the US in the 80s. And I think people could misconstrue that as being a macro investor. But everything was very numbers driven for him. So he would make lists of ranking countries by PE ratio, ranking securities, all sorts of different ways. And one of my favorite memories of him is going down to Nassau and him asking me to go back to Atlanta with a list of stocks and rank them based on the peg ratio and come back to meet.”
2022-06-26 · We Study Billionaires · TIP460: Investing the Sir John Templeton Way w/ Lauren Templeton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“No one else is looking there. It must be full of opportunities. And why wouldn't you want the largest universe of stocks available to choose from? So he's very contrarian. And people always say, would he advise your children to go into investing? I mean, I would never push my kids into this industry at all. And I think if they asked Uncle John about whether he recommended them to go into an investment industry, I think he would say no, it's too competitive. So he was always looking to move into areas where there was low competition. And that's a very contrarian mindset.”
2022-06-26 · We Study Billionaires · TIP460: Investing the Sir John Templeton Way w/ Lauren Templeton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Always looking to do things others weren't. And that really led him to global markets and to be an international investor. So he attended Yale University. He graduated in 1934. He's well known for paying part of his tuition with poker proceeds. He lost a lot. Well, his dad sent him a letter when he was at Yale University. And of course, this is during the Great Depression, and he said, I can no longer afford to put one more dollar to your education. And so Uncle John took to the poker tables. But one of his other observations from Yale worried that his wealthier classmates and their families were only investing in U.S. securities. And he thought, why wouldn't you look overseas where nowhere else is looking? Because you'll be able to find more opportunities.”
2022-06-26 · We Study Billionaires · TIP460: Investing the Sir John Templeton Way w/ Lauren Templeton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Oh, for sure. And our family, that is, this isn't Sir John, but my grandfather, his brother, and they grew up in the same house. He had five children. My father was one of them. And during their dinners, they were expected to debate a topic and switch sides halfway through the meal. And that's how they grew up. That was dinner every night. And so there is some precedent for that in our family. Sir John was contrarian. It didn't just apply to his investment philosophy. His foundation, I think, is very contrarian. He wanted to do something. No one else was doing. I can remember when I was pursuing the CFA designation, and he was one of the first charter holders. He asked me, how many CFA charter holders are there now? And I don't remember the answer, but I gave him it at the time. And he said, oh, well, why would you pursue that? So he was.”
2022-06-26 · We Study Billionaires · TIP460: Investing the Sir John Templeton Way w/ Lauren Templeton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I mean, first of all, we're typically always using limit orders. I suppose plenty of people in my family have put in orders over the weekend or after hours for sure. But I do think that's really ingrained in everything we do. We put in limit orders below the market if it gets filled. If it gets filled, if it doesn't, it doesn't. That's our trading philosophy. But I'm sure Sir John would have done that”
2022-06-26 · We Study Billionaires · TIP460: Investing the Sir John Templeton Way w/ Lauren Templeton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Highly encourage that tool. And that's just one of the small tools that I saw Sir John use throughout his career to combat some of these biases. Another example would be he would place good to cancel orders under the market by, let's say, 20% and he would just let him sit. And occasionally, you would get filled on an order. We have used that here at the office a little bit, not much. But we have gotten filled on an order using that methodology before. It was years ago.”
2022-06-26 · We Study Billionaires · TIP460: Investing the Sir John Templeton Way w/ Lauren Templeton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Have shortness of breath. You may even be perspiring. And all of these things contribute to your fight or flight response taking over. And this happens to even the most serious investors. But during these times, if you can pull out a list of securities from your desk drawer that you have researched in advance when you are thinking rationally and you start placing orders, putting money to work during these really scary moments in the market, shifting your focus from how much money you have lost to the unbelievable opportunities ahead of you, it changes the vibe in your office immediately. It goes from negative and scary to positive and future-minded. So I”
2022-06-26 · We Study Billionaires · TIP460: Investing the Sir John Templeton Way w/ Lauren Templeton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Specifically, but he had a lot of techniques that he used to overcome behavioral biases. So a great technique that we use here in our company that he always talked about using, and it sounds so simple, but it is very powerful and it's just palpable in the office when you use it, is creating a wish list of securities that you would like to own that are not currently attractively priced, that you would like to own if they ever fell in price. Now, during a market sell-off, even seasoned investors get very nervous and there are all sorts of physiological reasons for that. I mean, when you look at your screen and see red, you're amygdala has already increased your heart rate. You probably already have”
2022-06-26 · We Study Billionaires · TIP460: Investing the Sir John Templeton Way w/ Lauren Templeton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“On my desk by 4 p.m. And I have had the privilege of speaking to one of the brokers that had an open line with him on Black Monday, and he kept a ledger of all of Uncle John's orders, went back and looked at the orders a few years later, and the stocks were up 200%. So, you know, I do think that the human brain has a limited capacity for decisions that's worn down throughout the day. Your willpower reduces throughout the day. And I think there's plenty of evidence to suggest that. How many decisions you make, what time of day you make the decisions, if you have to make a really hard decision, it's probably best to make that in the morning when you have more willpower. There's a lot to that. I never heard Sir John discuss that.”
2022-06-26 · We Study Billionaires · TIP460: Investing the Sir John Templeton Way w/ Lauren Templeton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I think there was plenty of warning that Monday was probably going to be a really negative day in the market. The previous Friday had been a very messy day. So people anticipated that there would be a big sell-off on Monday. Sir John had gone into the office over the weekend and contacted brokers to make sure they would be open for business and ready to take orders on Monday. He was already working on his purchase list over the weekend when Black Monday came on in 1987. He was already working on his orders. He got up and went to exercise his analysts were very upset. When he came back in, he was approached by a few of them. He told them, boys, sit down. I have good news and bad news. The bad news is we're in a bear market. The good news is it's almost over. Make sure you have your stock recommendations.”
2022-06-26 · We Study Billionaires · TIP460: Investing the Sir John Templeton Way w/ Lauren Templeton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“I'd have to think about that. I mean, decision fatigue makes sense to me. We know that individuals have a limited amount of willpower. And so, for instance, I know that if I work out in the morning, I'm more likely to do it. If I wait until later in the day, I'm less likely to do it. I think there is a lot of good reason that you might want to structure your days that you're making decisions earlier in the morning that are placing trades earlier in the morning than later in the day. The story that you're referring to actually was Black Monday, the 1987 crash when the market crashed. And Uncle John did. He would go walk in the ocean for about an hour every day. And on the day of the crash in 1987, he just got up and left the office. And his analysts were like, what is he doing? I mean,”
2022-06-26 · We Study Billionaires · TIP460: Investing the Sir John Templeton Way w/ Lauren Templeton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT
“Well, it's because he was reading the Wall Street Journal for Information. He was not picking it up and reacting to the news on the front page of the Wall Street Journal. So I think today with investors just really plagued with a ton of information, you have to be careful about what you read and also not to react to things. Read it for information. Don't read it to react.”
2022-06-26 · We Study Billionaires · TIP460: Investing the Sir John Templeton Way w/ Lauren Templeton · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT