The Great Investors

CHAPTER 4

John Templeton

John Templeton is widely regarded as the leading light of the global value investing approach. For seven decades he searched for bargains the world over. While the majority of his contemporaries refused to look at shares beyond their own back yard Templeton hunted down companies selling at, say, three times earnings in contemptuously neglected Japan in the late 1950s or in underrated South Korea in the 1990s. In the search for bargains you are going to come across more if you study a wide variety of countries and their companies rather than just your own; you also gain the additional safety that comes with greater diversification.

To take but one example of the advantages of a global value focus: in the six-year ...