23 July 2010
Posted in
Illustrations
John Templeton, who founded the Templeton Growth Fund, held his company's first annual business meeting forty years ago in the dining room of the home of a retired General Foods executive. The company had only one part-time employee and one shareholder.
Forty years later, the Templeton Funds have more than six hundred employees and thirty-six billion in assets. If you had invested ten thousand dollars in the company forty years ago, you would now have three million dollars.
What has been John Templeton's basic stock strategy? Gobble up stock market bargains. He buys the stock of good companies that for one reason or another other investors hate. In the 1930s he borrowed ten thousand dollars and bought the 104 stocks that traded for less than one dollar on the New York Stock Exchange. He made a killing.
Wherever you find success, you usually find someone who has discovered an effective principles or idea and worked it to perfection.
