John Templeton

John Templeton graduated from Yale University in 1934 and later studied at Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. In 1939, at the outbreak of the Second World War, he borrowed $10,000 and bought 100 shares of every stock trading below $1 on the New York and American Stock Exchanges — 104 companies in total. Four years later he had turned that investment into more than $40,000, establishing his contrarian, maximum-pessimism philosophy from the outset. He founded the Templeton Growth Fund in 1954 as one of the first global equity mutual funds available to American investors. Templeton's willingness to invest in overlooked international markets — particularly Japan in the 1950s and 1960s, when most Western investors ignored it — gave his fund enormous advantages over domestically-focused competitors. He correctly identified Japan's post-war economic growth potential long before it was widely recognized. The Templeton Growth Fund delivered approximately 15% annualised returns over five decades, a performance that earned him recognition as perhaps the greatest global stock picker of the 20th century by Money magazine. Templeton sold his mutual fund group to Franklin Resources in 1992 for $913 million. He received a knighthood from Queen Elizabeth II in 1987 for services to his adopted country of the Bahamas and to philanthropy. His Templeton Prize, awarded annually to individuals who have made exceptional contributions to life's spiritual dimension, has been awarded since 1972 and is the largest annual monetary prize given to an individual. Templeton passed away in 2008.