“Diversification should be the corner stone of your investment program. If you have your wealth in one company, unexpected troubles may cause a serious loss; but if you own the stocks of 12 companies in different industries, the one which turns out badly will probably be offset by some other which turns out better than expected.” July 1949
“It seems to be common sense that if you are going to search for these unusually good bargains you wouldn’t just search in Canada. If you search just in Canada you will find some, or if you search just in the United States you will find some. But why not search everywhere? That’s what we’ve been doing for forty years. We search anywhere in the world.” November 1979
“The only investors who shouldn’t diversify are those who are right 100% of the time.” The Templeton Touch, 1983
“To avoid having all your eggs in the wrong basket at the wrong time, every investor should diversify. If you search worldwide, you will find more and better bargains than by studying only one nation. You will also gain diversification.” March 1994
“Research shows that a stock portfolio with investments around the world is likely to yield, in the long run, higher return at a lower level of volatility than a simple, diversified, single nation portfolio. This is what we have always done, as the results of the Templeton Growth Fund, Ltd. have shown.” July 1994
“If you are diversified among different forms of wealth, nations and industries, you’ll be safe in the long-run.” May 1995
As you can see from the selection of quotations above, Sir John Templeton was a proponent of diversification. Before the launch of the Templeton investment funds and persisting at least until a few decades ago, there was a sentiment in investing that the only stocks worth buying were in the United States. There were any number of reasons why this was the investing paradigm. Uncle John always remarked that he found that mindset both arrogant and shortsighted.
Over the many years some of that original arrogance among U.S. investors has become less outspoken, but biases against foreign investing have still lingered. Today you will often hear weak foreign accounting standards as justification for avoiding global diversification. Whatever the arguments against global diversification, this collective set of biased reasoning represented the majority wisdom for many decades over Uncle John’s career. Not that he minded too much. Trust me; he was unflinching when he saw the opportunity to take advantage of human ignorance or misconceptions in the stock market. To Uncle John, investing in bargain stocks from other nations was only common sense. Continue reading
It’s time to take another short break from our Templeton Plan posts to do another Link Roundup! Here’s another tour of who’s saying what about you-know-who from around the web:
We continue our exploration of John Templeton’s twenty-one steps detailed in 
The successful person learns to avoid wasting precious moments. It is helpful to carry with you reading material that is necessary in your career. Then, when you have a few minutes between appointments or while riding on a bus or train, you can absorb a page or two, or an entire article. Thus you’ve used your time fruitfully.
Those who learn the secret of hard work will find success; the winning of awards and scholarships will point you in the right direction. The awards needn’t be major; they can be ribbons awarded for winning a spelling bee or a swimming meet in school. But big or small, it pays to set yourself the task of winning an award because it trains you to work harder. Once you win something, you’re all the more motivated to win something else.
