“To buy when others are despondently selling and to sell when others are avidly buying requires the greatest fortitude and pays the greatest ultimate rewards.”-Sir John Templeton Called the “greatest stock picker of the century” by Money magazine, legendary fund manager Sir John Templeton is revered as one of the world’s premiere value investors, widely known for pioneering global investing and out-performing the stock market over a five-decade span. Investing the Temp…
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I bought this book hoping to learn more about how to invest in foreign stocks since Templeton was known for that. Unfortunately other than a few simple things like checking to make sure a government’s debt is no more than 25% of GDP, there were very few specifics. The author presents a couple of examples where “Uncle John” took advantage of distrust in foreign markets (like investing in South Korea during the Asian financial crises) to make great investments, but doesn’t go enough into enough detail to be of any real benefit to anybody.
The book is more about the very basics of being a value investor and the attitudes needed to be successful in investing (ie, don’t follow the crowd, buy low P/E or low PEG stocks, diversification). But even that is presented in somewhat of a haphazard way compared to other books, such as Peter Lynch’s books or some of the books about Warren Buffet. Chapter 6, “No Trouble TO Short The Bubble”, is not much more than a recount of the tech wreck and an admonishment to people who bought tech stocks at high P/Es. The main points of the book could have been made in half the pages. Only the last chapter on China was interesting.
I gave three stars because this would be an ok book for a beginning investor, but for an intermediate or advanced investor this in not much more than a rah-rah book about value investing and is more like one or two stars.
My expectations out of this book got dashed. It has little to offer. I found it tough to take down even half a page of notings / learnings from this book. On an average the learnings for such a book run into multiple pages.
Narrative style is vague and book lacks continuity and core theme and details.
Templeton was truly one of the greatest investors of all time. This book does give you insight into his thinking and methodology. So it should be a great book since there are very few books about him. However be warned the writing is just horrendous. I never cared about the writing style of a how to book, but this one is just terrible. Extremely hard to keep you interested, as if a 11 year old wrote this. It repeats the small irrelevant points as if it was the greatest discovery ever. It is just very annoying to read. Still I did learn from it. It explained that Templeton used bottom up approach to pick countries, if he found many companies to buy in Japan then he picked that country (He did not look at Macro factors and then decide to pick stock in that country)It gave good examples about how not to follow the crowd into hot markets and simple pointers like look for low P/E’s, and use diversification unless you are right 100% of the time. But it was truly very hard to read.