We Study Billionaires - The Investor’s Podcast Network - TIP460: Investing the Sir John Templeton Way w/ Lauren Templeton
Episode Date: June 26, 2022IN THIS EPISODE, YOU'LL LEARN: 10:14 - How he pioneered the idea of behavioral finance by living it. 12:32 - The highlights of Sir John Templeton’s career. 35:00 - What led John to become Sir J...ohn. 38:20 - How Lauren’s fund has evolved since it was first funded by Sir John. 52:42 - Lauren’s thoughts on nature vs nurture, having grown up in a family of famous investors. 1:01:00 - How to invest at the time of optimum pessimism and if we are there today. And a whole lot more! *Disclaimer: Slight timestamp discrepancies may occur due to podcast platform differences. BOOKS AND RESOURCES Join the exclusive TIP Mastermind Community to engage in meaningful stock investing discussions with Stig, Clay, and the other community members. Templeton & Phillips Website. Templeton Newsletter. Lauren Templeton's Twitter. Check out our favorite Apps and Services. New to the show? Check out our We Study Billionaires Starter Packs. Our tool for picking stock winners and managing our portfolios: TIP Finance Tool. SPONSORS Support our free podcast by supporting our sponsors: Hardblock AnchorWatch Cape Intuit Shopify Vanta reMarkable Abundant Mines HELP US OUT! Help us reach new listeners by leaving us a rating and review on Apple Podcasts! It takes less than 30 seconds and really helps our show grow, which allows us to bring on even better guests for you all! Thank you – we really appreciate it! Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://theinvestorspodcastnetwork.supportingcast.fm
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You're listening to TIP.
Today we have a very special guest, and that is Lauren Templeton.
Lauren is the founder and president of Templeton and Phillips Capital Management.
Lauren's great uncle was Sir John Templeton, one of the best stock pickers of all time,
and she's based her own approach using the influence of his philosophies and strategies.
In this episode, you will learn the highlights of Sir John Templeton's career,
how he pioneered the idea of behavioral finance by living it, what led John to become Sir John,
How Lauren's fund has evolved since it was first funded by Sir John?
Lauren's thoughts on nature versus nurture having grown up in a family of famous investors,
how to invest at the time of optimum pessimism, and if we're there today.
That and a whole lot more.
It was an honor to speak with Lauren and learn more about how to invest the Templeton way.
There are a lot of actionable takeaways with this one, so I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.
So with that, here's my conversation with Lauren Templeton.
You are listening to The Investors Podcast, where we start.
the financial markets and read the books that influence self-made billionaires the most.
We keep you informed and prepared for the unexpected.
Welcome to the Investors podcast. I'm your host, Trey Lockerbie, and today I am so excited to have
on the show, Lauren Templeton. Welcome to the show. Thank you, Trey. I'm excited to be here.
Well, I'm really excited and honored for you to come on the show because you are essentially
investing royalty. I mean, your great uncle was Sir John Templeton. Your friend. You're
father was an amazing investor and you yourself are now running a very successful fund. And while I'd
like to discuss Sir John Templeton and his investing approach because we've really never discussed it at length
here on this show, but I actually want to start with Sir John's father, your great-grandfather.
What were some of the things that your great-grandfather did or said that made such a impact on Sir John
early on and made him into the man he became? Sir John Templeton was raised in a small town in Tennessee
called Winchester, Tennessee. Now, Trey, I know that you have lived in Nashville or you have some
familiarity. You did your research. A little bit. Anyway, Winchester, Tennessee is about an hour
southeast of Nashville. It's a really small town. Sir John was born and raised there. He was the
youngest child. My grandfather was his older brother. And I do think they had a very unique upbringing for
the rural south. First, his parents were both highly educated. And his father was a lawyer and had an
office that faced the town square in Winchester, Tennessee. So think country town with a courthouse
in the middle of the square and his office was across the street. So during the 1920s,
farming was not a very lucrative business. And I think on average, you maybe bring, it would
bring in about $200 per year. So farms often went bankrupt in the mid to late 1920s. And when they did go
bankrupt, they would be auctioned off on the town square. So Sir John's father, my great-grandfather,
would witness these auctions from his law office. And if he saw that the auction produced no bidders,
he would walk down the stairs, walk across the street, and buy the farm for cents on the dollar.
By the mid-1920s, he had accumulated about six farms and 20 other homes.
And I think it was Sir John witnessing his father doing this over and over again.
They really helped develop his investment philosophy.
You know, it's always been one of the biggest ironies in the stock market, and it still exists
today, that when stocks go on sale or become discounted in value,
it produces even fewer buyers.
But when stocks get more expensive, it brings in even more buyers.
So Sir John had a great way of phrasing this.
He said higher prices lead to higher prices, lower prices lead to still lower prices,
to buy when others are despondently selling, and to sell when others are avidly buying,
requires the greatest fortitude but yields the greatest investment returns or something like that.
So that really, I feel like shaped him as a child.
But not all the lessons learned from my great-grandfather were great lessons.
So he was very entrepreneurial and kind of a hit-it-rich guy.
He was involved in many businesses from his law practice.
He also sold insurance.
He owned a cotton gin.
He did a variety of things.
And one day, he had been trading cotton futures on the New York Mercantile Exchange or either
the New Orleans Cotton Exchange.
And he actually came home to Sir John and my grandfather and said that they had struck
it rich, that the boys would never work a day in their life, their children would never
work a day in their life.
And obviously, here I am working.
So something went wrong.
He came in several weeks later and said they had lost it all and gone bust.
Late in his life, his father borrowed from Sir John and my grandfather to support his habits.
And so I think witnessing this really taught John Templeton a lot about the ethereal nature of paper wealth created by the financial markets.
And both John Templeton and my grandfather were avid savers.
They were very, very thrifty.
And this is something they have passed down to everyone in our family.
And we take this to almost an art form.
It becomes a game in our family.
You can acquire an asset for the best price.
And there's some really wonderful stories about Sir John and his thriftiness over the years.
One of my favorites is he had gone into South Korea on the Hill
of the Asian financial crisis.
And he did so via a mutual fund offering run by Paul Matthews.
He invested in Paul Matthews Korea Fund, which had launched in 1997 and was the worst performing
mutual fund on record that year.
He invested then, and it was the top performing mutual fund on record by 1999, which says
a lot because it was beating even the high.
high-flying tech funds. So that was, I mean, I think he had like a 267% return in that fund over
two years. So he invested in South Korea doing that. But then he also invested in some individual
companies and one of which was Kia Motors. He made a fortune on Kia Motors stock. And he would not
go by himself a Kia automobile. He went to the dealership. He came back without the car.
And his assistant said, where's your car? And he said,
Those are too expensive for me.
So there he was a multi-billionaire who had made a fortune off of Kia Motors,
and he wasn't going to buy a Kia automobile when he really needed a new automobile
because he thought they were just too expensive.
So that is something that he has passed along in our family,
the propensity towards thrift, saving, finding a bargain being a pervasive quality.
that I think most Templetons have, whether you're buying a home, a stock, whatever.
It's a very Templetonian way to look for a bargain.
Now, this I actually find very fascinating.
And it's come up before in our show that the idea of thriftiness and the balance of that
because a lot of people save up their whole lives and then they don't enjoy it at the end
of their life kind of thing, right, what the money is truly for.
And I'm kind of curious about your philosophy around where thriftiness ends, meaning when it feels
okay to use the money for purposes, you know, beyond maybe investing perhaps.
Or I know people who are very wealthy but still take coupons to the grocery store.
There's a lot of energy and work that kind of goes into thriftiness.
At some point, I feel like is almost a negative return.
Yeah.
What do they call it penny wise and pound foolish, right?
And it is a constant debate in my family.
my parents are older. They're in their 70s. They are very much from Uncle John's school where they are
really tight. They save everything. They drive old automobiles and wear old clothes and they don't
like to spend anything. And I keep on encouraging both of my parents. You know, what are you saving it for?
You know, I'm financially independent. You should enjoy this. You know, don't worry about me. Go spend some money.
And they just don't want to do it.
So I don't know.
There definitely is a balance.
I think when I would talk to John Templeton about saving, he always said he saved 50% of
everything he made.
I really think he saved much more than that.
And I would say, why are you doing that?
And he said, I'm saving for the opportunities that I know will present themselves.
So that never stopped in his life.
So, I mean, I guess it's up to the individual, really, what they value most.
I think it's worth spending money on travel, right?
Because it expands your mind.
You learn so much about the world and experiences that no one can take away from you,
spending on education, things like that are areas where we definitely loosen the purse
strings in our family because I think travel and education are very important.
Do you think some of that philosophy comes through living through things like the Great Depression?
I mean, it seems like that generation perhaps even more so than others.
For sure.
I mean, people who live through the Great Depression, I think just have that built into their nature.
They can't let go of that.
And as that generation departs us, part of that thrifty nest does too.
And it will be a lesson that a new generation will learn, maybe this one, and become a nation of savers again.
Yeah, the pendulum will swing. Okay, so even though Sir John's success appears to be a direct result of his temperament, he was a highly educated and brilliant man. Through the time spent with him, what were some of your observations of how his brain worked?
Okay, well, how is brain worked? I'm not sure. I will tell you that he was the most disciplined person that I have ever met. And so he was very good at impulse.
control. And I do think there is a genetic component there. I don't know if you've ever looked at
the marshmallow tests coming out of Stanford University in the 1970s. I actually made my kids take
that test. The delayed gratification test, yes. Right. The ability to delay gratification,
and that's highly correlated with success and a lot of other positive things. I mean, that's all
about really impulse control. And he had a lot of impulse control. It's very disciplined.
But he also believed in mind control, positive thinking.
He was very careful in the way he structured his life, his day, the way he built his habits.
He would have loved the book, Atomic Habits.
I mean, I think that's something he would have responded to because he had built his life that way.
You know, he lived in a community in Nassau, Bahamas called Lifeord Key.
This is where he moved later in life.
And he was definitely within a mile of his office.
He had attended CD go in seven days a week.
He worked out at a certain hour every day.
He just built a lot of discipline into his life.
And he did believe in thought control.
So he once told me that when he encountered a negative thought,
he banished the thought into the nothingness that it was. And so I think he was very careful with
what he thought about, how he organized his day, because as an investor, it's very hard to control
your emotions. We are not hardwired to be good investors. And that comes from evolution. I mean,
we are all descendants of human beings with acutely tuned amygdalas. That is why we are here today.
And some of those traits don't translate very well into good investment return. So it's hard to
control your emotions and go against the crowd, even though he had, I think, a lot of impulse
control, a lot of future-mindedness, I would say. He still was careful to think about.
the way he structured his day and life so that he wouldn't be subject to his emotions.
And, you know, I one time asked him about managing the money in the Bahamas.
And this is interesting to note because Warren Buffett manages money in Omaha, Nebraska.
I asked him about the idea of managing money in the Bahamas, and he said, you know, my returns
actually improved when I moved here.
And I said, well, why do you think that is? And he said, well, I've thought about it. And I think it's because I get the Wall Street Journal a few days later than everyone else. And you're like, why would that be? It's because he was reading the Wall Street Journal for information. He was not picking it up and reacting to the news on the front page of the Wall Street Journal. So I think today with investors just really plagued with a ton of information, you have to be careful about,
what you read and also not to react to things. Read it for information. Don't read it to react.
I want to stick on this idea of habits and discipline a little bit longer. So I'm kind of curious if you
buy into this idea of decision fatigue or maybe your great uncle did as well where you hear
about a lot of successful people who wear the same clothes every day and they eat the same thing
every day. And it's almost because they feel like they have sort of a certain budget of brain
cells, let's say, per day to make decisions with, and they don't want to spend them on
trivial things like eating or wearing clothes or what to wear. So I'm curious if you buy into
that same kind of philosophy, or if it's something else, because I'm reminded of when your great
uncle went on a walk, as he apparently did every day, it would seem. I think this was during
the flash crash in the 1980s. And while the market was tanking, he was out on a walk like he did
every day. And his team was very flustered by that, making decisions in real time. So maybe how do we
rectify those two ideas? Do they go together in any way in your mind? I'd have to think about that.
I mean, just decision fatigue makes sense to me. We know that individuals have a limited amount of
willpower. Okay. And so for instance, I know that if I work out in the morning, I'm more likely to do
it. If I wait until later in the day, I'm less likely to do it. I think there. I think there,
There is a lot of good reason that you might want to structure your days that you're making
decisions earlier in the morning that are placing trades earlier in the morning than later
in the day.
The story that you're referring to actually was Black Monday, the 1987 crash when the market
crashed.
And Uncle John did.
He would go walk in the ocean for about an hour every day.
And on the day of the crash in 1987, he just got up and left off.
office and his analysts were like, what is he doing? I mean, I think there was plenty of warning that
Monday was probably going to be a really negative day in the market. The previous Friday had been a
very messy day. So people anticipated that there would be a big sell-off on Monday. Sir John had gone
into the office over the weekend and contacted brokers to make sure they would be open for business
and ready to take orders on Monday.
He was already working on his purchase list over the weekend.
When Black Monday came in 1987, he was already working on his orders.
He got up and went to exercise.
His analysts were very upset.
When he came back in, he was approached by a few of them.
He told them, boys, sit down.
I have good news and bad news.
The bad news is we're in a bear market.
The good news is it's almost over.
Make sure you have your stock recommendations on my desk by 4 p.m.
And I have had the privilege of speaking to one of the brokers that had an open line with him
on Black Monday.
And he kept a ledger of all of Uncle John's orders, went back and looked at the orders a few
years later, and, you know, the stocks were up 200%.
So, you know, I do think that human, the human brain has a limited
capacity for decisions that's worn down throughout the day. Your willpower reduces throughout the day.
And I think there's plenty of evidence to suggest that. So being careful about how you structure
your day, how many decisions you make, what time a day you make the decisions. If you have to
make a really hard decision, it's probably best to make that in the morning when you have more
willpower. There's a lot to that. I never heard Sir John discuss that specifically.
But he had a lot of techniques that he used to overcome behavioral biases.
So a great technique that we used here in our company that he always talked about using.
And it sounds so simple, but it is very powerful.
And it's just palpable in the office when you use it.
Is creating a wish list of securities that you would like to own that are not,
currently attractive, attractively priced that you would like to own if they ever fell in price.
Now, during a market sell-off, even seasoned investors get very nervous, and there are all sorts
of physiological reasons for that. I mean, when you look at your screen and see red, your amygdala
has already increased your heart rate. You probably already have shortness of breath. You may even
be perspiring and all of these things contribute to your fight or flight response taking over.
And this happens to even the most serious investors.
But during these times, if you can pull out a list of securities from your desk door
that you have researched in advance when you are thinking rationally and you start placing
orders, putting money to work during these really scary moments in the market, shifting
your focus from how much money you have lost to the unbelievable opportunities ahead of you,
it changes the vibe in your office immediately. It goes from negative and scary to positive and
future-minded. So I highly encourage that tool. And that's just one of that small tools that I saw
Sir John used throughout his career to combat some of these biases.
Another example would be he would place good to cancel orders under the market by,
let's say, 20%, and he would just let them sit.
And occasionally, you would get filled on an order.
We have used that here at the office a little bit, not much,
but we have gotten filled on an order using that methodology before.
It was years ago.
Let's take a quick break and hear from today's sponsors.
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Back to the show.
Okay, thinking about impulse control,
I know that some people, for that exact reason you're describing there,
actually place orders on the weekend or they place orders after hours.
just to help place one more guardrail for protecting their impulse control.
So is that something you have seen your family do or practice?
Or are you typically just, is it just so ingrained in your behavior at this point that
the reaction, you can control those reactions.
And it's more of a muscle that's been worked or refined over time.
I mean, first of all, we're typically always using limit orders.
I suppose plenty of people in my family have put in orders over the weekend or after
hours for sure. But I do think that's really ingrained in everything we do. We put in,
you know, limit orders below the market. If it gets filled, if it gets filled, if it doesn't,
it doesn't. That's our trading philosophy. So, but I'm sure Sir John would have done that.
I think it's a great practice. So going back to the story of him walking on the beach and coming back
and having this almost like this Oracle-esque foresight of what was about to happen next,
it's almost like he went to the crossroads and talked to somebody and came back and had this wisdom.
And I'm wondering if that's just a matter of having time alone with your own thoughts.
You know, we're constantly inundated with information, so much so that I've heard this
philosophy of an information diet, if you will.
So it's this idea of being very mindful and disciplined in what information you're bringing
in and at what time.
So to your point earlier about him reading the Wall Street Journal three days later, I mean,
that's a really interesting practice to do, even if you're not living in the Bahamas,
I would say.
And that's bringing me to this idea of your grand uncle being such an independent thinker to begin with and such a contrarian.
And I'm curious if you ever saw him be a contrarian in ways maybe outside of the market even, just while he was thinking about a certain subject or something.
Did you see him constantly taking other sides of an argument or just?
Oh, for sure.
And our family, that is, this isn't Sir John, but my grandfather, his brother, and they grew up in the same house, he had five children.
My father was one of them.
And during their dinners, they were expected to debate a topic and switch sides halfway
through the mill.
And that's how they grew up.
That was dinner every night.
And so there is some precedent for that in our family.
Sir John was contrarian.
It didn't just apply to his investment philosophy.
And his foundation, I think, is very contrarian.
He wanted to do something.
No one else was doing.
I can remember when I was pursuing the.
CFA designation, and he was one of the first charter holders. He asked me, how many CFA charter holders
are there now? And I don't remember the answer, but I gave him it at the time. And he said,
oh, well, why would you pursue that? So he was always looking to do things others weren't. And that
really led him to global markets and to be an international investor. So he attended Yale University.
graduated in 1934. He's well known for paying part of his tuition with poker proceeds. He lost a lot.
Well, his dad sent him a letter when he was at Yale University. And of course, this is during the Great Depression. And he said, I can no longer afford to put one more dollar to your education. And so Uncle John took to the poker tables. But one of his other observations from Yale were that his wealthier classmates,
and their families were only investing in U.S. securities.
And he thought, why wouldn't you look overseas where no one else is looking?
Because you'll be able to find more opportunities.
If no one else is looking there, it must be full of opportunities
and why wouldn't you want the largest universe of stocks available to choose from?
So he's very contrarian.
And people always say, would he advise your children to go into investing?
I mean, I would never push my kids into this industry at all.
And I think if they asked Uncle John about whether he recommended them to go into
an investment industry, I think he would say, no, it's too competitive.
So he was always looking to move into areas where there was low competition.
And that's a very contrarian mindset.
That global mindset or framework is, like you said, very contrarian.
I believe he was, as you mentioned earlier, early to invest in South Korea.
I believe he was one of the first to invest in Japan, you know, from the U.S. as well.
So a lot of people think that because he was investing globally, he would be this great macro thinker,
but that might not have been the case.
Yeah.
So he clearly was reading about the economy.
I mean, he read all the time.
He was very, very well read.
But he would often go on financial media like Wall Street Week with Lewis Ruekeiser
and he would make these very big predictions about markets, specifically his investments.
into Japan and then 1950s, 60s, and early 70s, his investments into the U.S. and the 80s.
And I think people could misconstrue that as being a macro investor.
But everything was very numbers driven for him.
So he would make list of ranking countries by PE ratio, ranking securities, all sorts of
different ways. And one of my favorite memories of him is going down to Nassau and him asking me to
go back to Atlanta with a list of stocks and rank them based on the peg ratio and come back to
meet with him in about a month. And I said, well, have Bloomberg in Excel. So I'll just do it right
here in 10 seconds and show it to you. And I think his mind was blown because he always did that
with pen and paper. He used value line a lot. But in the 1950s, in 1960s,
he was one of the very first investors to invest in Japan.
He saw, I should say, he graduated from Yale in 1934, and then he was the recipient of the
Rhodes Scholarship and went on to Baylio College.
And when he graduated from Balliow College in Oxford, he went on a world tour with a
college friend, and they visited 35 nations.
They even went to the 1936 Olympics in Berlin where they saw the building contingency of Nazi soldiers.
He really came back with this bedrock of geopolitical knowledge.
Now, he had been studying Japan and he started putting his capital to work in Japan in the 1950s
and an investor capital in the 1960s.
What he saw about the Japanese that he admired was that they were industrious, hardworking,
savers. And also, Japan was trading at about an 80% discount to the U.S. at the time. And they were
growing about 2.5 times faster than the U.S. So the growth rate was about 10%. And Sir John being a
great student that he was, he had identified an accounting anomaly. So the companies over in Japan
were not consolidating the earnings of their subsidiaries.
So although P.E.s were depressed in Japan,
Sir John knew that the actual PEs,
if they consolidated the earnings of the subsidiaries,
would be even lower.
So a good example of that would be Hattachi.
So Atachi would have presented as having a P.E. multiple of 16 times.
If you have consolidated the subsidiaries of Hitachi,
it would have really had a P.E.
multiple of six times. So he identified this, put capital there quickly, rode those returns
through the 1970s when the U.S. was really struggling in the 70s. Of course, he got out of Japan
into the U.S. in the late 70s, early 80s, coinciding with what I call the death of equities.
I always love that because Newsweek came out with a headline in 19.
1979 called the death of equities.
And that, anytime you see a headline like that, you should as a value investor be like,
yep, this is the best opportunity ever.
So he was moving capital in the U.S. in the late 70s and 80s.
But his contrarian spirit allowed him to look overseas.
The numbers showed him to invest in Japan.
It wasn't a macro call.
The numbers showed that.
the numbers showed him to invest in the U.S. in the late 70s, early 80s, right?
I mean, it was a really, the 70s were an interesting decade.
I mean, so they ended the same place they started, right?
And in the late 70s, early 80s, you had crazy inflation, interest rates were really high,
an unbridled enthusiasm for collectibles and all sorts of things.
Interestingly, in the great inflation in the 1970s, the only equity strategy that outperformed
was dividend growth stocks, which is what we're focused on right now.
But Sir John was very numbers driven.
He was not macro.
If he saw that there was a collection of low-priced companies in one country, it would
lead him to do further analysis on the country to make sure the country has.
property rights, et cetera. And if it passed the test there, he might be quoted in the financial
media saying, I like South Korea. But it would really be the discounts in the companies that he
was seeing. It was very quantitative. I love that you just used the word spirit as well.
So you said he had a contrarian spirit. He also had a very philanthropic spirit, it would seem.
So one thing that made him so admirable and honorable is all the philanthropy work he did.
So that kind of brings up the question of how John became Sir John.
Could you tell us how that happened?
He left the United States and moved to Nassau, Bahamas.
Nassau, Bahamas at the time, the Bahamas were not independent at the time.
So it was part of the British Commonwealth.
And he had created the Templeton Prize in 1972.
Mother Teresa was the first recipient in 1973.
The Templeton Prize was created to honor progress in religion, so to say.
So he was very spiritually minded.
He would often say, you know, when you go to the doctor, Lauren, they do not pull out a 2,000-year-old
textbook to diagnose you, but there has been no progress made on the spiritual front.
And he believed that research and advances in science would discover new, would shed light on
our reality.
So he had created the Timbledon Prize.
Mother Teresa was the first recipient.
Many people have gone on to win it.
Frank Wilczak was just announced as our 52nd noble.
I'm at 52nd Templeton Laureate. He is a Nobel Prize winning physicist. So a lot of different people
have won over the years. But in 1987, he was knighted for his philanthropic work by the Queen of England.
And that's how he became Sir John Templeton. He managed the Templeton Growth Fund until
1987. If you had invested $10,000 at its inception in 1954 and you had held that to
1987, you would have had over $2.2 million. It was an unbelievable track record. He sold the
business in 1992, and then he spent the rest of his life dedicated to his three philanthropies,
which are the John Templeton Foundation, Templeton World Charity Foundation.
and Templeton Religion Trust.
Those three entities fund the Templeton Prize every year,
but he was very philanthropic.
And again, that goes back to his childhood and his early days in Tennessee.
His mother was a devout Presbyterian.
There was a unity movement that came through Tennessee that highly influenced him.
She was always funding a missionary over in China.
So I think he is quoted as saying that he looked at his life and he figured he would be on earth just one time for a very short period of time.
And he wanted to figure out what he could do to create a permanent impact.
And he looked around, nobody else was doing anything in religion and spirituality.
And so I think his foundations are very contrarian as well.
Fantastic. So now I want to transition a little bit and talk about you and how you followed in his footsteps and why that was and what led you to investing. And as I understand it, Sir John actually helped fund your first fund. So what were some of the parameters of the fund and how did the initial structure work? I grew up investing. You know, I started investing when I was eight years old. My dad let me pick one stock per month. When I was a child, the walls in my room were wallpaper.
Bruton Stock Certificates. He told me bedtime stories about the magic of compounding. Every decision
was a lesson in opportunity cost. Of course, I was born in the 1970s. I won't tell you what year,
but a lot of my childhood was spent in the 1980s. This is really when Sir John's career was
hitting his stride, you know, who's on Forbes and Wall Street Week and Simbledon Growth Fund
and had this crazy track record. So it's really hitting his stride there. And,
And, you know, I knew him as a great uncle living in the Bahamas that would come home once a
year and the town would throw a big parade and my parents would have a big party and my dad would
walk around the house and ask, wait patiently for his opportunity to pull John Templeton aside
and ask for investment advice. And that's kind of how I grew up. And then when I was in high
school, Sir John tried to get me to launch a mutual fund. And I really thought,
But you're crazy.
This old crazy guy wants me to launch a mutual fund.
I mean, I was really engaged in investing as a child more so than any other child that I knew in my small town.
But, I mean, there might have been many others.
He wrote to me in 2001.
Actually, he corresponded with people via facts.
And so I received a fax saying that he was ceding a fund for me to the tune of 30.
million dollars and I should go visit him in the Bahamas and we should discuss it. And wow,
what a fax to receive. I was employed with another hedge fund manager. So that was really interesting
conversation because it was like, I think I may have just lost my job here, but I have this great
opportunity. So I went to meet with him and he said, look, you need to start your track record early.
You should start many products. You should go with the one that has the best track record. We're going to
start here. And so my fund was seated with $30 million. Its mandate was to be dollar neutral,
25 longs, 25 shorts, just in the U.S. And it was the stocks were selected based on quantitative
basis, low valuation stocks on the long side, high valuation stocks on the short side.
they would be very systematically and routinely the portfolio would be turned over. I really didn't
have much discretion on the portfolio. So he basically said, this is the strategy executed for me.
Let's see what the results are. And then over time, we started tinkering with that strategy.
And by the time he passed, you know, the guard rails were off. We were running a global fund.
Things had changed a lot. I think he knew that a young person would have a very hard time
controlling their emotions when it came to managing institutional capital.
And I think he would have been right.
I mean, I can't remember leaving work in my early 20s to go home and go to bed because
I was so sick about a bad day in the market.
I mean, now I would, it doesn't influence me at all, but it did as a young person.
I launched that product in June of 2001 because it was.
dollar neutral, it ended up with a huge beta bias on the short side. And September 11th happened.
And it ended up being a very profitable time for us because of the beta bias on the short side.
We did learn a lot over that time period working together that shorting stocks on a valuation
basis only is really hard to do. You typically need some type of catalyst. Also,
Also, 25 positions short book is pretty concentrated.
And so now our short book, we have many more positions.
We do not have a highly concentrated short book.
And we don't short based on valuation alone.
It is a component of our short strategy.
But we really look for situations where you have high valuations and also
perhaps some aggressive accounting policies mixed with that. So we focus on accruals, right,
working capital. And we think that usually those accruals have to adjust over 12 to 18 months.
And so that's a pretty good catalyst when it comes to a stock, right? So if you, you know,
if you build inventory, you've either got to sell it or write it down. I mean, these are just some
examples of things that we look at that we've improved our short strategy over the years working
with him. But we are also still very quantitative. So we start with quantitative ranking
screens. I mean, using all the plain old valuation metrics that everybody else uses. Uncle John
was well known for saying there are over 100 measuring sticks of value. You should constantly
reevaluate the metrics you are using. So in the past few years,
Free cash flow yield has been a metric that has worked really well.
It's outperformed PE ratios.
Going forward, we're very focused on dividend growth, dividend yield, because we've gone back
and we've studied the 1970s.
And again, that's the only equity strategy that produced real returns during the inflationary
environment of the 1970s.
At least early on in the fund, were all the positions equally weighted?
And has that also changed over time?
they were equally weighted in the early days. So you're asking these questions. I'm remembering
they were equally weighted. That has changed a bit over the years. A lot of things have. But again,
I think letting the numbers show you where to invest is a very good place to start. I mean,
numbers can also mislead you. But if you're just looking for a place to start, focusing on the
numbers will do a pretty good job. And also, focusing on the numbers, if you're a value investor,
is very rational and it's going to put you in contrarian situations, right, that you might not
have sought out yourself. So that is our philosophy. Now, we start with the quantitative
metrics. We, like most value managers, are using a discount and cash flow model on top of that
or dividend discount model, depending on the industry, et cetera.
And then we'll do fundamental analysis on top of that.
So, yeah, I mean, it's part art, part science, as you know.
The more you do it, the easier it gets.
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There's lots of different measures and things can change over time. I do think that it's natural
for investors, at least maybe early on, to seek the perfect calculation or the perfect way
to structure portfolio or the perfect XYZ. These models you build, like you got to kind of accept
that maybe they're only 60% accurate and that's the best you're going to do. And just accepting that.
And I've heard you say that Sir John himself thought while he was one of the best stock figures of all
time, he probably only had an edge of maybe 50 to 60% ultimately. So that's as good as we're going
to get, it seems. Yeah. I mean, he had actually given it a lot of thought. And he said,
you know, I have, he said, I've given it a lot of thought. And I think that my decisions are correct
60% of the time. And he was known as one of the world's greatest stock pickers. So I do think you have to
get comfortable with that, that a good majority of your decisions are not going to work out.
They're going to be bad decisions. And that's okay. And that's also, I'm glad you brought that up
because I do think this is very unique to John Templeton. He was never phased by losing money.
So, for instance, he was constantly starting new strategies.
And there was one strategy that we started together based off of a report that was put out,
I think it was by Merrill Lynch analysts.
And I think the report still exists.
It's called contenders and defenders.
And he sent me the report and he said, this is a really great strategy, you know.
I think we should run it.
He had sent me an article on a strategy, I think by an analyst at Merrill Lynch called
Contenders and Defenders.
And he wanted to put some capital in the strategy and wanted me to execute the strategy
for him.
And it was a great strategy on paper.
It didn't work out because to short all the securities that you needed to short,
you had to do it synthetically and the cost just ate up your returns.
So I launched this strategy for him.
It did not produce good returns.
I went to meet with him.
And it was very much like, okay, here are the numbers.
It's not producing good returns.
Okay, let's close it down and move on to the next strategy.
He was never hung up on the fact that he had made a poor decision or that he had lost some money executing that decision.
That experience happened to me.
If it happened to me once, it happened to me 20 times.
He just wasn't impacted by that.
He took it that, you know, a large part of his decisions were going to be wrong and he would lose
money some in the time. He was okay with that. So I think not all investors have that mentality,
but it's important to not strive for perfection because I don't know a perfect investor out there.
So your childhood was very atypical. And what a blessing, by the way, to have your father
teaching you or giving that education so early on. But I've heard Munger and Buffett say that there's
this element of you either have it or you don't when it comes to what it takes to be a great investor.
I think what they're speaking to is you can read every book under the sun.
But when the stock market turns red, as you put it earlier, that behavioral change is what
I think people can either manage or they can't.
And given your upbringing, have you developed a similar temperament as your father and
great uncle over time?
Meaning, is this something that can be learned and refined over time?
Or do you think there's something maybe genetic or something else that just inherently you had
that gives you sort of the fortitude to manage what or to have what it takes to be a great investor?
I think both.
I do really do think there's a genetic component to delay gratification, impulse control.
I mean, you know, you're a dad.
Your kids kind of come out, how they come out.
And I can remember before I had children, my husband and I have this big nature versus nurture debate.
And then we have kids and he's like, oh, it's nature.
But I do think there is, you know, there's definitely a component of nurture there.
But people are born the way they are born.
And if you are not good at controlling your impulses, that would certainly be a challenge to becoming an investor.
I mean, it's a hard question for me to answer because I will have spent my life in this bubble of men predominantly that I was model.
my behavior after, and they already had the correct behavior. So I don't know if it is nature,
nurture. I think it's a little bit of both. I do think that Buffett and Mungers, you're either
born with it or you're not. Yeah, if you're going to be the top investor in the world, I think
you're either born with it or not. But I think people can improve and learn. I mean, we know
that our brain is constantly reshaping through the process of plastic.
And that if you reap the returns of putting money to work at these moments of maximum pessimism,
as Sir John called it, that your brain will rewire itself.
And it will become easier and easier over time.
And you will become where you anticipate these market sell-offs and you see them as great
opportunities.
And it will get easier.
I think things like structuring your day and you're building your habits around investing,
I think are very important.
So I think it's a bit of both,
but I do think investors can definitely improve.
You're not kind of stuck with a lot you're born with.
You can improve and become a better investor
by being very thoughtful about it.
And I often tell investors that they have proven
that just reading about your behavioral biases
will improve your investment results.
So I always say,
pick up one of James Monti,
A's books. I love his books. The little book on behavioral investing, start there. It's like this big.
You can read it in the carpool line. And he has many other books as well, but it's fascinating to read
about behavioral finance and how your emotions play a part. And everybody can get better at controlling
them. Given what I know about you, I think there is some nature here involved because, and you brought up
kids earlier, as I understand it, you were trading stocks while giving birth to your first kid.
So not everyone would be doing that, I don't think. Maybe explain to us what was going on there.
Okay. So my first born was born on March 10th. The lows, March 10th, 2009, I should say. The lows of the great financial crisis were reached on March 9th, 2009. So it's a funny story. We were in the labor delivery room and we were buying stocks. My husband and I worked together. And the computers were out. We were trying to get these orders.
executed and the nurse came in and she got really irritated. And she looked at my husband and she
was like, shut down your computer. And I looked at him and I was like, just get the orders filled.
But the reason it's an important story is because people always ask, how do you know when you're
at the low of the market? What is the point of maximum pessimism? How will we know? And the answer is
no one knows. So we had been buying.
stocks every day since the fall of 2008, forcing ourselves to methodically go in and purchase securities.
We did not know that March 9th was the low, but we knew that things were so inexpensive
that we wanted to put every dollar we could get our hands on into the market.
And that's where we were. And she was born on March 10th. I can't remember going on CNBC after
that and saying she's ushering in the next big bull market and the people on power lunch were like,
right. And she was. So you don't know when the bottom of the market will occur, but it's a very
rational behavior to buy more stock if you have cash available to do that as the market continues
to sell off. You mentioned you and your husband work together. You also write together.
You've written this amazing book called Investing the Templeton Way. I'm kind of curious,
even though you were brought up in all of this, writing a book is a beast of a project.
It requires a lot of research.
So I'm kind of curious if there was something that came up through that research that you
didn't know before.
There were lots of stories that we heard from people that we interviewed that I didn't know,
like anecdotes about John Templeton.
And that was a blessing to hear those from other people.
Lots of cute stories.
One of the things that really struck me in writing the book is how similar John
Timbleton is to my own father. I mean, just very similar. So that struck me. But all the anecdotes,
it was fun. I mean, actually, the story of writing the book is a really interesting one. I was at an
investing conference out in California, and I was sitting by a fire pit next to a guy I didn't know.
And so I started talking to him, and it was Jack Schwager. He's the author of Market Wizards.
And Jack and I became friends. And so I had been talking to him a few years.
years later and I was like, you know, I think somebody should write a book on John Templeton. He said,
well, that's a great idea. Let me introduce you to my agent. So he introduced me to his agent,
and I pitched the book and he was like, I think it's an awful idea. I don't want to work with you.
And I was like, gosh, that's depressing. But then a while later, Jack contacted me again. He said,
whatever happened with that book? And I said, your agent didn't like it. And he said, well,
let me just introduce you to my publisher. So he introduced me to his publisher. And they,
bought the book right away, like right after that phone call and gave us something crazy. It was like
six weeks to write it. And my husband and I, we weren't married yet. We were about to get married.
And so he wrote the book on our honeymoon. We would write in the mornings and then we would swim
in the afternoons and we produced the book really quickly. We ended up going back to Jack's
agent to help us negotiate the contract with the publisher. This is a funny story.
But writing the book, you know, investing the Templeton Way is about all of Sir John's
most profitable trades over his career.
But what we wanted to do is really put those trades into historical context so that, because,
you know, you hear about somebody making a great trade and you're like, oh, yeah, that's so obvious.
But if you really understand the historical context, you can also understand how difficult it was
to make the decision.
That's what we wanted to show investors, is how he made the decision and what was going on
in the world that led him to make the decision so that investors could replicate that
or recognize the patterns that John Templeton recognized.
Well, one of my favorite quotes by Sir John is about investing when there is maximum
pessimism, as you put it.
So I'm kind of curious, given what the market is doing today,
day, what industries, let's just say, would, as Sir John would put it, are the worst at the moment?
Well, there is maximum pessimism in tech right now for sure. So, I mean, we've just seen
absolute carnage in tech. But I was just on a panel in Virginia and, you know, I'm a value
investor. And typically that does not lead you to tech stocks. But if you're a value.
very discerning investor, I think there is maximum pessimism in the tech sector right now. So the baby is
clearly, in some cases, being thrown out with the bathwater. And if you know what you're doing,
you can find some really good opportunities in technology right now. You know, China also, there's
maximum pessimism in China. We have not allocated any capital to China. We exited China in early,
I think it was early 2020 over regulatory concerns before some of the regulatory moves in the
nonprofit education sector. But, you know, clearly there's pessimism there. So I think, you know,
these, whether it's an industry, a stock, a country, there are always these opportunities for
maximum pessimism. Of course, the best opportunities are when the entire market goes on sale,
which, you know, we are here and we have been covering our short portfolio. I think the market
might very well fall from here. I don't know, but I'm more interested in buying stocks now
than selling stocks is what I could say. I was really curious about your short position,
you know, given where we think the market may or may not go from here. And I'm kind of curious
just in general, given that you said, you're a value investor, how do you reconcile being
a value investor and shorting positions. Sometimes that kind of seems like they don't go together,
even though I know a lot of value investors that do short and practice that. How has the short side
of your portfolio changed over time? And how can investors think through shorting positions
rather than just buying at lows? To me, it makes so much sense to be long and short as a value
investor. As I stated earlier, you know, our short strategy has evolved tremendously since that
initial strategy I ran with John Templeton, which was just quantitative, just shorting based on
valuation and highly concentrated. So our strategy has evolved. We run many short positions. We do not
short based on valuation alone. We look for some sort of catalyst, whether that be aggressive
accounting techniques. We will go in and look at the SEC filings, in particular.
early. In particular, we look for the S3 filings, which of course, a company will issue when they're
typically considering doing a secondary issuance of shares. You know, insiders know when their
companies are fairly valued or overvalued and have a tendency to issue shares at those times.
So we use that as a fertile hunting ground for short ideas. Yeah. So over the past since early,
probably April, 2021. We also started shorting the ARC Innovation Fund. That was a pretty good proxy for
everything we were seeing in the market. In early 2021, we could identify well over, well over 700
stocks in the U.S. trading for a price to sales at over 20 times. And that was just mind-boggling for us.
remember where it was at its height, maybe like 787 stocks or something like that, and then it fell to
718. I'm not sure where it is today. But 20 times sales, that is shocking. During the dot-com
bubble of late 90s, early 2000s, there were about 200 companies trading at a price to sales
ratio of over 10 times. So you have over 700 in the U.S. trading.
A price to sales multiples of over 700 times in early 2021.
And, you know, that was really eye-opening for us.
We thought there's no way that these businesses can sustain these valuations.
So we really got very aggressive with our short portfolio.
Then, and of course, you know, with the change in monetary policy that has worked out very well for us.
But yeah, so the short strategy has.
changed a lot over the years. I think that's where we really put our mark on the strategy,
so to say. I mean, so many of the things we do are right out of Sir John Templeton's playbook.
But the modifications to the short strategy, I really credit my husband, Scott Phillips,
for coming up with. He's always studying it. Speaking of short strategies, there is a very
interesting short strategy that John Templeton ran during the dot-com bubble in late 90s, early 2000s.
that investors might want to be cognizant of in today's market, but he ran something called
the IPO lockup strategy where he was shorting shares about seven days prior to IPO lockups
expiration and covering 11 days later. Now, in today's market, companies have gotten very wise
about how they structure these share lockup expirations, right? They don't all occur at once.
they spread them out, right, to make sure that there's not that big of an impact on the stock.
But that's why one of our short techniques is to focus on those S3 filings.
The seven days before, 11 days after, that rule is, is that pulled out of thin air?
Is there something behind those numbers?
Or is it just say, hey, this is our format and we're sticking to it?
Well, knowing him, there was definitely something behind the numbers.
I don't recall at the moment what the magic was,
but he would have done analysis and calculation.
Definitely, there was a reason there.
But I think he shorted 84 companies during that time period.
He put $2.2 million in each position.
I mean, he did really well.
He recommended that strategy to my dad.
And my father is an exceptional investor too.
Dad's done really well.
he's not a billionaire, but he tried to execute the strategy. He covered the shorts. He said,
you know, it's just not for me. I'm not wired for this. And if you'll remember during that time
period, it would have been like standing in front of a train coming straight towards you on the tracks.
It's really, it would have been hard to stay in those positions. But it worked out really well for him.
He had strong conviction that the market would correct and he could stay solvent.
Well, in one of your most recent newsletters, you wrote, quote, it seems like that peak credit
conditions are behind us. Defaults will eventually rise and hopefully distress investment scenarios
will appear again after a long hiatus, end quote. Are we entering into a generational buying
opportunity, in your opinion? I don't know as the answer. We're not there yet, is what I would say.
If we do see rising defaults, and I think you will see a new investment regime take over more
of the Ben and Graham style of investing.
And of course, that will be very new for many of the entrants into the newer entrance into
the market.
That will be a different type of market for them to experience.
I think then you will say, you might be able to say, yes, this is a generational buying
opportunity.
I don't think we're there yet, but could be.
coming up soon.
Well, as you kind of in the newsletter, you say best to dust off your wish list.
So I think that's great advice to end up for everybody.
But Lauren, this has been a real pleasure.
I have really enjoyed our conversation, learning more about your great uncle and even
your father and you, yourself and all the success you've had.
It's just remarkable.
I mean, it's almost like a case study.
I feel like this should be studied in every university.
I don't know about that.
Well, anyway, I really appreciate the time.
And before I let you go, I want to give you an opportunity just to
to hand off to our audience where they can learn more about you and your books and your
newsletters and your funds and everything you want to share there.
Oh, thank you so much.
So we do have a website, templeton and Phillips.com.
It's not a great website, but it is there.
There's a section of the website called Commentary.
So you can go there and sign up to receive our commentaries for free.
It's called the Maximum Pessimism Report and it's produced periodically.
We only produce a report if we feel like we have valuable information and actionable information.
to share with shareholders. So we're pretty careful about that. You know, sometimes I'm active on
Twitter at LC Templeton. And yeah, so you can connect with me on LinkedIn. I'm always happy to
hear from investors and correspond with friends from around the world that have a shared interest
and value investing. I'd be happy to connect. I'm actually, to that point, a huge fan of non-fancy
websites, Berkshire Hathaway is my favorite. And so it can't be that.
But I personally love that.
Lauren, thank you so much again.
I'd love to do this again some other time, but appreciate the time you gave today.
Thank you, Trey.
I really appreciate it.
All right, everybody, that's all we had for you this week.
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