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Sir John Marks Templeton has been a contrarian from the start. In 1939, when he still lived in a grungy Manhattan walkup with mismatched furniture, Templeton borrowed $10,000 and used it to buy $100 worth of every stock valued at less than a dollar on the New York exchange. The timing hardly seemed opportune: Hitler had just invaded Poland. But Templeton believed that the impending world war would drive up the market -- and he was right. He went on to become one of Wall Street's most successful celebrity stockpickers and then to pioneer the first global-investing mutual funds, ultimately selling his Templeton family of funds to Franklin Resources for $913 million in 1992. His stake: about $440 million.
http://www.templetonpress.org/sirjohn/articles_details.asp
Interview with Sir John Templeton
by Eleanor Laise
1 April 2004 SmartMoney
Sir John Speaks --- He bought low during the Depression, sold high during the Internet boom and made more than a few good calls in between; Sir John Templeton, dean of contrarians, tells us where to invest now
Spend five minutes in Sir John Templeton's offices and you'll learn a
lot about the legendary value investor. It's not the imposing portrait,
the honorary degrees or even the certificate of knighthood. It's the
books. Crisis Investing shares shelf space with Eat Right for Your
Type. The Hand of God sits near Invest for Retirement and Natural
Capitalism. Several thick volumes occupy substantial real estate on the
top shelf. An investing bible? No -- it's the 1991 edition of the
London Central Yellow Pages.
A 1934 Yale graduate and Rhodes scholar, Templeton has a voracious
appetite for information. The small-town Tennessee native became known
as the Marco Polo of his Oxford class, thanks to a round-the-world
postgraduation jaunt. In his late 20s he opened his own
money-management firm and began to put international investing on the
map. His flagship Templeton Growth fund has posted a 13.8 percent
annualized return over 50 years, well ahead of the Standard & Poor's
500's 11.1 percent.
Templeton's track record is full of prescient moves. In 1978, when Ford
was near bankruptcy, he was a buyer. When everyone else piled into tech
in 2000, he was a seller.
Though he now lives in Lyford Cay, a decidedly well-heeled corner of
the Bahamas, Templeton maintains a surprisingly modest lifestyle. He
tools around at the wheel of a Lincoln Town Car. Orchids and
bougainvillea upstage his whitewashed home. It's the ideal setting for
a quiet retirement, but that's not Templeton's cup of tea. Since
Franklin Resources bought his funds in 1992 for $440 million, he has
devoted most of his time to philanthropy. The John Templeton Foundation
gives $40 million a year to projects that explore the intersection of
science and religion. Templeton's longtime philanthropic efforts earned
the naturalized British citizen a knighthood in 1987. In his spare
time, he hunts for global bargains, and at 91, he's clearly as curious
as ever. As SmartMoney sat down in his cluttered conference room, it
was Templeton who fired off the first question: "Have you written any
books I can read?" Well, no. But enough about us.
---
SmartMoney: How did a kid from rural Tennessee become a pioneer of
global value investing?
John Templeton: In Tennessee I didn't meet anybody who owned a share of
anything. At Yale there were hundreds of boys from wealthy families,
but not a single one who was investing outside one nation. I thought
that was just not sensible. Surely they'd get better results if they
searched everywhere rather than limiting their search to one country.
Then I investigated the investment counsel profession and couldn't find
any investment counselor who specialized in helping people invest
outside America. So I saw a wide-open opportunity.
---
Q: In 1939 you bought $100 worth of every New York Stock Exchange
listed stock that was trading under $1 per share. There were 104 names,
and 37 were already in bankruptcy. Why did you do it?
John Templeton: I was sitting in my office at 30 Rockefeller Plaza in Manhattan when
the news came out that Hitler had invaded Poland. It was obvious within
a few days that it was going to lead to the Second World War. During
war, everything that was in surplus, and therefore unprofitable,
becomes scarce and profitable. Three years later I had a profit on 100
out of the 104.
---
Q: What signs helped you see that the U.S. technology bubble was about
to burst back in 2000?
John Templeton: If you want to have a better performance than the crowd, you must do
things differently from the crowd. Four years ago the crowd was piling
into tech stocks. The prices went sky-high. I sold my clients'
technology stocks, and sold a lot of them short. I have put these
philosophies into a simple statement: Help people. When people are
desperately trying to sell, help them and buy. When people are
enthusiastically trying to buy, help them and sell.
---
Q: That's a good way to look at it.
John Templeton: That's mainly a joke.
---
Q: In 1992 you predicted that "the next 10 years will be the happiest
period, and the most progressive," with "rapidly increasing prosperity
for both Europe and America." Are you as optimistic about the next
decade?
John Templeton: Very few people realize how fortunate we are to live in the most
glorious period in world history. There has been more progress in
prosperity than in any previous century. The Dow Jones Industrial
Average never went above 100 until a century ago. Now it's up to 10700,
a hundredfold increase in one century. Probably in the next century,
the increase will be equally great, if not greater. But I have to say
that we are starting from an unusually high price for shares, not just
in one industry, but in practically all industries and all nations.
---
Q: What is your view of current U.S. stock valuations?
John Templeton: Over the next five years, the chances are about 50/50 that the stock
market will be lower. There is a risk that stock indexes will go down
by over 30 percent or they'll go up 30 percent. Share prices are
remarkably high right now. The Nasdaq Composite index is trading at 36
times next year's earnings and 95 times last year's earnings. That's
high. For most of my lifetime I found bargains one place or another
below 12 times earnings.
---
Q: How does this environment compare with the market of 1972, when the
Dow regained its late '60s highs of around 1000 but didn't break
through that level again until 1982?
John Templeton: That was a period of stock market optimism, which goes in cycles.
There are at least five of these cycles every century. The one in those
years you mentioned was a normal cycle. This one seems to be more
exaggerated. Prices in those years never went as high as they are now.
---
Q: Are there any sectors in the U.S. that look cheap?
John Templeton: No. I wish there were, but I can't find them. The answer is to play
safe. And playing safe means diversifying among nations, industries and
types of securities. At present I don't think anybody should have over
half their assets in common stock.
---
Q: And you believe that no one should have more than 50 percent of his
or her portfolio in a single country?
John Templeton: Yes. And no more than 25 percent in one industry.
---
Q: Do you think there is a real estate bubble in the U.S.?
John Templeton: Yes. Real estate is very different from the stock market because
it's so local and separate in terms of type. But in many locations and
many types of real estate, prices are dangerously high right now. And
in real estate it's easier to say what's dangerously high. You just
look at what it costs to rebuild. Right here in the Bahamas, I have
recently seen people pay four or five times for a house what it would
cost to rebuild.
---
Q: Do U.S. bonds look more attractive than equities?
John Templeton: Compared to the cost of living [measured by inflation], you can
still buy American bonds. But at present there are bonds of other
nations that seem safer. It's wise to invest in nations that do not
have an unfavorable balance of trade or a government deficit.
---
Q: Which countries seem the safest?
John Templeton: There are not many. There are almost 200 nations on earth and about
150 different currencies, and most of them have problems even greater
than America's. But Singapore, Hong Kong, South Korea, New Zealand,
Australia and Russia don't have big problems.
---
Q: A few years ago you were buying STRIPs, or Treasury bonds with the
coupons cut off. Do you still like them?
John Templeton: I bought STRIPs because the yield to maturity was about 10 percent
better than what you could get on Treasury bonds. But I found I did
better by changing from U.S. Treasury STRIPs to STRIPs of nations with
stronger currencies, like the ones we just talked about.
---
Q: Where do you think the U.S. dollar will go from here?
John Templeton: The chances of the U.S. dollar going down in relation to the euro
are no more than 50/50. The euro has already gone up 47 percent in the
last two years. But the yen is up only 25 percent. Japan has put
hundreds of billions of dollars into buying American money. The
quantities are so great that that can't continue much longer. Japanese
money is likely to go up in the future.
---
Q: Are you concerned about inflation?
John Templeton: Long term, because we have more and more democracies in the world,
we're going to have more and more inflation. Politicians who are
willing to spend too much are the ones who get reelected. Look back at
history. Inflation has averaged about 2 percent a year. Probably, it
will average somewhat more than that in the next century. But from a
short-range standpoint, there does not yet seem to be a shortage of
almost any product. Until there's a shortage, you're not likely to see
higher prices.
---
Q: What do you see as the biggest threat to economic recovery in the
U.S.?
John Templeton: We don't need an economic recovery because we're already operating
at a very high level. The greatest threat to maintaining this level of
economic activity is debt. There's never been a time when people
worldwide, and especially in America, had such a high proportion of
debt. I think 20 percent of people who have mortgages on their homes
are likely to lose them in foreclosures. When a home goes into
bankruptcy, it's sold at auction. That pushes the price down and
affects the prices of other homes.
---
Q: Does the U.S. government's debt level worry you?
John Templeton: Oh, yes. There has never been any government anywhere in the world
that has such a big deficit in the federal budget. And there's never
been a nation in history that had such an adverse balance of trade.
However, if you look at those debts and balance of trade as a
percentage of gross national product, they're bad, but not
unprecedented.
---
Q: What does that mean for investors?
John Templeton: It's one more reason why this is a dangerous time to own stocks.
---
Q: Even foreign equities?
John Templeton: Yes. In my long history I could always find some nation where people
were desperately trying to sell. Now I can't find a place where people
are trying desperately to get out of equities.
---
Q: So what do you think about the rush to invest in China?
(MORE)
John Templeton: The cycles will be much wider and more frequent in China because of
the lack of information. Having said that, if you're investing, you
should put a fairly large part of your total assets in China because
within as short a period as 30 years, China is likely to have the
largest gross national product any nation has ever had.
Q: Is India as great an opportunity as China?
John Templeton: Yes. You could say almost the same thing about India, except in
terms of speed. The improvement in India is wonderful but not as fast.
But the Indian market is up more than 80 percent in 12 months. That's a
danger signal. It means you're going to take a lot of risk that you
wouldn't have taken a year before.
---
Q: What's the world's best stock market now?
John Templeton: The best answer is none. There are so many securities analysts
working on that question that the prices in different markets are less
out of line than normal.
---
Q: So an influx of information has made life difficult for global value
investors?
John Templeton: When I became an investment counselor, there were only 17 security
analysts on earth. Now, in America alone, there are more than 32,000,
and they do have an effect on prices by doing research on where to find
bargains.
---
Q: If you were starting out in the investing world today, what would
you do?
John Templeton: Play safe. If you don't have your money in equities, it's very
difficult to find a place to put it. Gold has already gone up. . . .
People also tend to think it's safe to put your money in the bank. When
I was studying in the U.K., people swore that it was safe to put your
money in pounds sterling. But within a few years, sterling went down
from $5 a pound to $1.50 a pound because of the war. If gold and bank
accounts are no longer safe, where can you put it? Diversify. Don't put
too much in any one thing.
---
Q: What have you been buying lately?
John Templeton: I believe there are fewer opportunities than I've ever seen in 91
years. In the last year I've been using market-neutral hedge funds,
whose policy is to have always the same quantity of longs and shorts. I
have invested lately in two funds that are managed by people who worked
for me when I was in the investment business: Jane Siebels-Kilnes'
Siebels Multi-Fund and Mark Holowesko's Holowesko Global fund. They
aren't registered with the SEC, however, so American stockbrokers can't
sell them.
---
Q: After the corporate scandals of recent years, how can we restore
trust in the markets?
John Templeton: The answer is comparison. When you're worried about those scandals,
stop and think, what nation would you feel safer in? At what time in
world history could you feel safer? I don't think you'll find any time
when the degree of information, the degree of honesty, is higher than
it is today.
---
Q: You don't think there's anything the government should do to restore
trust?
John Templeton: Yes. Keep their hands off. It has been proven over and over that the
best regulation is free competition. Those that are not doing a good
job for the public get squeezed out. I can't think of any nation where
the quantity of regulation is already not too high.
---
Q: A couple of days ago, Franklin Resources, the firm that bought your
funds, was accused of participating in market-timing arrangements.
What's your take on the fund scandal?
John Templeton: Everything I've just said applies double to that. Can you think of
any industry or any nation where there are fewer questionable practices
than there are in American mutual funds? I can't. If all the claims in
the news were added up, what would it cost a mutual fund owner? One
cent.
---
Q: You've lived here in the Bahamas for 31 years . . .
John Templeton: Yes. I've found my results for investment clients were far better
here than when I had my office in 30 Rockefeller Plaza. When you're in
Manhattan, it's much more difficult to go opposite to the crowd.
http://chinese-school.netfirms.c ... eton-interview.html
SIR JOHN TEMPLETON’S INTERVIEW
and Our Comments
Please also see previous Sir John Templeton Interview
This interview was recently published by NewsMas and Financial Intelligence Report. Please see below for our comments.
Recently, NewsMax and Financial Intelligence Report publisher Christopher Ruddy visited with Sir John Templeton in Lyford Cay in the Bahamas - the place Sir John has called home for the past 32 years. His interview with Sir John follows:
At 92 years of age, Sir John Templeton is one of the world's most successful investors, a legend in his own time.
Money magazine calls him "arguably the greatest global stock picker of the century."
Templeton's pioneering concept was to take the old adage "buy low, sell high" and apply it to global investing.
Templeton sought out the best opportunities anywhere in the world he could find them. When he began investing globally in the 1930s, Templeton was truly a pioneer. Many Americans thought it unwise to invest outside the United States and therefore forfeited a world of opportunities. John Templeton's results, however, are the stuff of legend.
When he sold his Templeton Funds in the early 1990s, they were worth an incredible $800 million. Templeton personally walked away with over $900 million.
Sir John's all-consuming goal was to never just make money for himself, but to earn for others. As he told Philanthropy magazine:
"At Yale I was investigating what talents God gave me, and where I thought I could be most beneficial to people was to help them make fewer stupid mistakes in selecting their investments."
"At age 27, I formed my own investment firm, working with just five wealthy people. Eventually, when I sold out, we were helping over a million people with some part of their investments. And I felt that was a ministry, that I was doing a useful job, that I was not wasting the life God gave me. But all during that time, over 50 years, I felt that my benefit to people was not as great as if I were trying to help them get spiritual wealth."
Sir John now works full-time as a philanthropist. His John Templeton Foundation in Radnor, Pa., and his two offshore trusts have a total of $800 million dedicated to philanthropy.
The foundation - run by his son Dr. John Templeton, a retired medical doctor - is one of the few dedicated to discovering how religion can influence the physical world. Though he spends most of his time on his philanthropy, Sir John remains dedicated to his first vocation: the study of investments.
He cannot even utter the "R" word…retirement. In fact, he has thought of writing a book called "Never Retire."
"I have observed in 92 years that the people who are most diligent in working do live many years longer than those who are lazy," Sir John says.
A few years back, he told me he was exercising by walking against the ocean current every day for almost an hour. Today he has cut back his exercise, he says, to just 25 minutes a day.
He is not only physically active, but his mental examinations of the market are sharp.
And his timing has been impeccable. He sold short the dot-com and NASDAQ tech stocks at the very height of the '90s boom, making another small fortune.
During the past few years, Sir John has been very concerned about the lack of quality investments available in the market, and he has repeatedly warned of the possibility of a major collapse in housing prices - and even a '30s-style run on the stock markets.
Here are some of Sir John Templeton's current insights:
Do the Opposite of the Crowd
My job was being paid by wealthy families to help them choose stocks and bonds. And my results were much better when I was working from here than from Manhattan, Radio City and Rockefeller Center. I had good results in New York. But when I came here, I had better results. The secret, I think, is that in order to buy stocks at a bargain price, you have to do the opposite of the crowd. When you're going to the same meetings with the other people in Manhattan, it's hard to be different.
Finding a Spiritual Way
About 12 years ago, I sold out. I had been helping a few thousand wealthy families and I did a lot of thinking that if I could tell you the rest of my life, I might help a few thousand wealthy families to become somewhat wealthier. But by selling out to my strongest competitor [Franklin Resources], I can now devote 100% of my time to trying to help people grow in a spiritual way. And that's a wide-open field - very few people who have any substantial amount of money contribute to helping people grow spiritually.
The Study of Religion
We are tying to persuade people that no human has yet grasped 1% of what can be known about spiritual realities. So we are encouraging people to start using the same methods of science that have been so productive in other areas, in order to discover spiritual realities.
For example, to clarify, my grandfather was a medical doctor. But he had never heard of a germ. That was only 140 years ago. The medical doctors began to use that as a science, and now we know a thousand times as much about your body as my grandfather new as a medical doctor.
Or take the field of communications. As recently as when Abraham Lincoln was assassinated only 140 years ago, nobody in Europe heard about it for 17 days, because communications was so inadequate. Now we have this enormous communication system around us all the time. There's 1,000 times as much communication as there was 140 years ago.
Again, this is due to applying methods of science to discover new modes of communication. So what my foundation is focused on more than anything else is to encourage people to donate to scientific research to help discover aspects of spiritual reality.
Managing My Own Money
I've spent 45 years inviting wealthy families to pay me a fee to help them pick the right investments. We didn't have any salesmen, so it was a slow process to grow.
But we got up to the stage where we were helping with about $23 billion worth of other people's money. Twelve years ago, I sold that entire operation - including this building - to a strong competitor in California called Franklin Resources, which was on the NYSE. Now they're helping with $88 billion in assets.
I don't have any connection with that forever. So my main activity now is just managing my own money. Because I think I'm going to do more good by using my wealth to encourage others to use scientific methods to find the answers to spiritual questions.
Finding Stock Bargains Never More Difficult
I do think it's interesting that in all my 92 years, I've never seen a time when it was so hard to find a bargain. I aided wealthy families by helping them find stocks that were selling at a small fraction of what the company was worth. But now, it's very difficult to find companies where you can buy the stock at a fraction of its value.
In all my experience, I don't remember a time when you had to search so diligently to find anything that was a bargain.
Bargain Stock Pick: KIA Is a Future GM
You always find some bargains, but just less than usual.
The last one I bought for myself is a company called Kia Motors. I bought one of their automobiles and it gives me better value than any other car I have ever owned.
They are now growing better than any other major automobile company, selling a great majority of cars outside South Korea in America and Europe and so forth, but they manufacture them in India, China and South Korea.
And yet I bought that stock recently at less than five times earnings. I think there's a chance - maybe not a probability, but a chance - that KIA Motors will be larger than General Motors 30 years from now.
Assess the Risks
In judging the value of the company, you have to consider: What is the risk that somebody might do something stupid? I think there's less risk in South Korea than there would be in China. There are some stocks selling at bargain prices - but the risk is greater.
Are Any American Stocks Undervalued?
I haven't bought any recently. I'd like to. I just buy where the bargains are.
Another Bargain in China
I guess the second one I would suggest is something that I invested in a few months ago. It's called Value Partners and is managed by a Chinese man in Hong Kong. It's a large organization - I have about $100 million in it. It's about five times that big all together.
They specialize in finding ways to buy stocks that are not well known in China and the region, and they invest in about 100 different companies in that area. They invest mainly in things I've never heard of.
Problems with China
It's difficult. The best Chinese companies don't have a public market and are not listed in America. Those that are listed in America are no longer cheap.
All that's true. But still, the rate of growth is so strong in China that I recently guessed that within a short period of 20 years, the gross national product of China will be larger than America's.
With four times the U.S. population, that is definitely achievable within 20 years.
The Dot-Com Crash and the Crash of '29
In 1929, the Dow Jones Industrial went down to 1/9 of where it had been. In this recent decline, it only went down 30%. The NASDAQ went down by 50%.
I am worried about exuberance. Like you just said - you'd like to have a house at Lyford Cay, but you have to pay four times what it costs to build. It's not the values - the prices are high.
Will There Be Another Crash?
Yes, but I've never been able to tell you when. If you find a way, let me know.
Well, I wouldn't use the word "crash." There will be cycles. I do think economics has developed a lot since 1932, so you shouldn't ever expect American prices to go down almost 90%, but I do believe there will be cycles where American prices go down 50%.
Factors Undermining the Market:
American Debt Is Highest Ever
American debt is the highest the nation's ever had. The federal deficit, the federal debt are the largest in history. But that's just the beginning.
Also, the unfavorable trade balance is the largest the nation's ever had.
And the national deficit - the shortage of taxes collected over what's spent - is the largest in the nation's history.
Americans were famous 30 years ago for being so thrifty. They were saving over 20 cents out of every dollar they earned. Last year, Americans saved less than 2 cents on every dollar.
All those things add up to the fact that there is almost sure to be a period of pessimism - a bear market. Not a crash, but a bear market.
The old rule of thumb for brokers was: The bear is about half as long as the bull. If I had to say when this bull market started, I would say 1990. So it's 14 years old.
The immediate future is that there are more dangers than I've ever known before. It's just more dangerous.
More Factors: The Weakening Dollar and What Are Good Currencies?
Let's not use the word "good." Let's say "less risky" currency. The less risky currencies are probably South Korea, Singapore, India and New Zealand.
A couple of years ago, I bought Canadian strip bonds.
I haven't sold them yet, but I've stopped buying them, because they are up 25% from when I first got them.
And just within the last week, I made what is called a "straddle" - I sold short $25 million worth of Japanese money and bought long $25 million worth of South Korean money.
Why Currencies Are In Danger
The psychology all over the world is that people will not re-elect leaders who want them to be thrifty. The voters will elect the government that spends more money. And consequently, all money is risky. So I'm just taking the currency I think is especially risky and putting it into one that's less of a gamble.
In the United States, President Bush was the better of the two choices. Offhand, I can't say that there's a single nation where you can depend on the voters to want to be thrifty.
There is tremendous risk in Russia. But inflation is not a problem in Russia so much as it is elsewhere.
One emerging country is Singapore, which doesn't have a real democracy. So the government can afford to have a balanced budget.
The nation of Brazil has share prices that are quite low in relation to earnings. So I wouldn't rule out investing in Brazil. Although there's a lot of risk that goes with it, it always pays to buy bargains. Brazil is at bargain prices.
Bearish on Gold
Gold is too popular, and prices have already gone up. I remember when a British pound would buy an ounce of gold.
There's been a tremendous inflation in gold prices.
On Warren Buffett
I'm a great admirer of Warren Buffett. But he has been focused primarily on U.S investments. That is strange. To that extent, I think he's short-sighted - or small-sighted. Small-sighted, I think. If he had spent more time in foreign nations, he would be better off.
Housing Prices
Now the U.S. has this extraordinary thing - I think in some places we see 50% to 100% gains on the housing market. Other places across the country might be up 25% to 30% in just a matter of three to four years. Incredible gains.
When you invest in stocks, you get the same value all over. The same stock sells at the same value, no matter what nation you're in. But that's impossible in real estate. Real estate value depends on locality. If you're going to be a real estate investor, focus on location, location, location.
So when you're trying to invest in real estate, you have to do a lot of serious research on whether this location is likely to be popular in the long run.
That's why I wound up believing beachfront property is a good investment. I don't think there's ever going to be any more beachfront than there is now. Now people are getting bigger and the amount of money is getting bigger. So beachfront is pretty sure to go up in value.
Owning a home on the ocean is better than owning one that's not on the water.
But there are large tracts of oceanfront property still available in South and Central America in countries where there is a rule of law. You used to be able to buy land at very low prices. But still there are some good deals.
A 50% drop off in prices is quite possible.
I've never, never ever had a mortgage on any house. I learned that long before you were born. When I was a child in Tennessee, I watched so many people lose their farms because they had tiny mortgages, but they got to the end of their years, when it was impossible to earn a profit on the farm. They couldn't meet their payments and their mortgage was sold at auction in the courthouse.
I don't rule out borrowing money. But I think it's risky.
Positive Mental Attitude
Positive mental attitude helps in every way. It helps you physically, mentally, financially - in every way. In fact, I think you ought to focus on that, write articles on it.
As I said - when Abraham Lincoln was assassinated, nobody in Europe heard about it for 17 days. So there were more bad things happening 140 years ago than there are now. But today, communication is so enormous that we're flooded with news and there's a fault in human nature, even with you. If you're passing a newsstand and a stack of newspapers, one of which says 100,000 airplanes landed safely today and one that says one airplane crashed, you'll buy the newspaper that says the one airplane crashed.
Terrorism warps your thinking. It makes people think that there are a lot more troubles than there are. But there are less troubles than ever, and we don't realize, because we read about all the problems.
Pharmaceutical Stocks
I think they will continue to grow, but they're not cheap. They're one of the highest groups of stock.
Baby Boomers Retiring
This is enormous. But the adjustment is so easy. You just don't start pensions until 10 years later. That solves it all. It will happen. Nation after nation - not only America, but other countries - will just have to declare that pensions are going to start 10 years later.
I think it's inevitable. I don't know when, but within the next 20 years, almost every nation will have to change the law to say you can't get your pension as soon as you retire.
The Coming Health Crisis
I don't have answers to everything. I have thought about your big question here. And I think the answer is to say that no health insurance should cover the total cost of insurance. Health insurance should cover maybe 2/3, but not all. That would give people an incentive not to use health insurance excessively.
XXXXX
OUR COMMENTS ON THIS SIR JOHN TEMPLETON INTERVIEW
On “Bargain Stock Pick: KIA Is a Future GM” Sir John Templeton’s comment did not inspire us to buy the shares of KIA, but rather its products. (Jim Rogers once stated that South Korea is one of the closed countries he has ever visited. He plays the South Korean market only when it’s dirt cheap). When the KIA hybrid model comes out next year, it will be a hit on the car market.
On “Another Bargain in China” When we researched insider-trading activities on Chinese domestic stocks, Value Partners’s name occurred frequently, especially on top 10 shareholders of B share stocks. Value Partners’ selection of stocks is very professional, however, due to its current size, it may be limited for future growth if it limits itself to domestic Chinese stocks.
On “Problems with China” We agree. Good and quality companies think that they don’t need finances, and they don’t want outsiders to have control of their companies. Poor quality companies are the ones that need finance, and they finance it through China’s domestic market with the government’s support.
Another reason is that quality companies, once become a public entity, would not be able to “semi-legally evade taxes”. However, this is likely to change in the future.
A few quality companies can be found in Hong Kong and Singapore. Those listed in the US are overvalued.
On “Bearish on Gold” We agree. Central banks around the world still have a lot of reserves on Gold. Once they sell them (in which they have been doing so lately), the market will suffer.
On “Housing Prices” Contact us if anyone is interested in purchasing beachfront houses in China. However, we believe beachfront houses in Thailand are equally attractive, especially after the Tsunami of last year.
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