Professor Glen Arnold

It is important that you do your own research, that you investigate before investing.  Understanding what makes a company successful is vital. How does the business work? What is its performance over time and how does that compare with competitors? What stimulates sales activity?  What pressures might prevent a growth in sales? In answering these […]

One of the greatest ever investors, John Templeton generally focused on what a company could earn two to five years down the line. Warren Buffett intends to hold most of his portfolio constituents “forever”. On the other hand, the great majority of share traders look to the short term – what is going to happen […]

Rule: Buy when others are selling and sell when others are buying One of John Templeton’s most famous mottos is ‘to buy when others are despondently selling and to sell when others are avidly buying’.  Such a policy requires a great deal of fortitude but it pays the greatest ultimate reward. Another is to ‘buy […]

First rule: Don’t follow the crowd: John Templeton developed a knack for looking at investments in a different way to other investors, whether in a different country, with a different time horizon, using a different valuation method, or with a different level of optimism or pessimism. He would say that share picking is the only activity […]

In examining John Templeton’s Korea story we learn the importance of patiently accruing knowledge while waiting for the right opportunity.   As far back as 1983 Templeton declared that he thought South Korea would be the next ‘Japan’, but he did not invest his client’s money there because of the restrictions on capital removal from the […]

As Templeton gradually withdrew from the over-hyped Japanese market of the 1980s, he scoured the globe for neglected, under-rated stocks; and these were not all in the emerging economies. He had already made a 15-fold return by buying General Public Utilities after the Three Mile Island nuclear disaster in the late 1970s and was becoming […]

In the 1950s and 1960s Japan was perceived by American and other investors as a loser of wars, an industrial backwater and a small market.  Clearly its reputation was low, making trivial low-cost products; made in Japan meant low quality.  People dismissed the Japanese as never having the potential to lead on research or quality. […]

In 1940 John Templeton bought for $5,000 an investment counselling firm with only eight clients owned by George Towne, an elderly man. With a name change to Towne, Templeton and Dobbrow and the purchase of second-hand typewriters and a second-hand library of research material and books (thrift at all times!), Templeton had arrived as an […]

As a first-year Yale student John Templeton became interested in investment and began to read books on the subject in addition to his normal studies. He eventually bought his first shares with some money he had made from working his way through college. He purchased seven dollars of preferred stock of Standard Gas and Electric Company […]

Sir John Templeton became a very wealthy investor.  He carried throughout his life sound principles formed in childhood and early adulthood Buying when others are ignoring the asset Around the Winchester, Tennessee (pop. 2,000), where John Templeton was born in 1912 and his father was a lawyer and entrepreneur, farms would occasionally fail, become subject […]