Sir John Templeton Dies (Philanthropist and investment guru was 95)

Sir John Templeton agreed with the proverb that it's "easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God."

"There's a lot of truth in that," the billionaire philanthropist once said. "When people trust in something other than God, it's difficult to be truly spiritual. ... Don't fall in love with money."

Sir John, a pioneering mutual fund manager, global investor and founder of the Templeton Prize, died Tuesday of pneumonia in the Bahamas, a spokeswoman at his foundation said. He was 95.

Sir John was born in Tennessee, though he renounced his American citizenship nearly 40 years ago to live as a British subject in the Bahamas.

In 1972, he established the Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion, which was intended to honour people who advanced knowledge of spiritual realities. But before that he made a lot of money for himself, and for investors.

He graduated with top marks in economics from Yale in 1934, and went on to Oxford as a Rhodes scholar, from which he graduated with an master's degree in law. In 1940, he opened an investment counselling firm on Wall Street, and 14 years later started Templeton Growth Ltd., an investment fund that was one of the first to seek investment opportunities around the globe.

From the beginning, Sir John was a "value investor," looking for well-structured companies whose shares were undervalued.

A devout Presbyterian, Templeton was known for starting his mutual fund's annual meetings with a prayer. Some of those religious beliefs were reflected in the more than dozen books he wrote or edited. "Insights can come quickly and easily when we commit ourselves to the action of the spirit, when we have committed ourselves to the awakening of our soul faculties," he wrote in his book Wisdom from World Religions: Pathways Toward Heaven on Earth.

His religious commitments did not stop at the office door; for 42 years he was a board trustee of Princeton Theological Seminary, the largest seminary of the Presbyterian Church, and served as its chairman for 12.

In 1992, he sold his firm, the Templeton Group, to Franklin Resources for $913 million U.S. In 1999, Money magazine called him "arguably the greatest global stock picker of the century."

He remained deeply involved in his business until he was nearly 80. "People keep noticing that I'm 79 years old, and ask me what would happen if I would die," he said in 1992 while negotiating the sale of his firm. "I have to take that into account," he said.

In 1987 the Queen knighted him for his philanthropic ventures, and he established the Templeton Foundation, which now administers the Templeton Prize and encourages scientific work on natural law, creativity, consciousness, the origins of the universe and other large issues.

If this seemed to bring science, so long cast as a natural antagonist of religion, into a new posture of examining religion without preconceptions or bias, Sir John was all for this new posture.

"If even a 10th of world research funds were focused on the spiritual realm, I don't see why we couldn't vastly increase our knowledge of those realities - perhaps learning, in a few years, 100 times more than we know today," he said.

And he pointed to the vast increases in knowledge of medicine, physics, cosmology and other areas that the frontal assault of scientific investigation has achieved in the past two or three centuries.

There was no reason, he believed, that similar progress could not be made in areas of spiritual investigation, given equivalent support.

For Sir John, spiritual realities were every bit as important as those areas that science more conventionally investigates, and so he established a monetary award higher even than those that Nobel laureates receive. This prize, now worth almost $2 million, is the largest monetary prize of any kind given to an individual.

In 2001, the award was renamed the Templeton Prize for Progress Toward Research or Discoveries About Spiritual Realities.

Many famous people have won the prize. The first winner, in 1973, was Mother Teresa. In 1982 evangelist Billy Graham was chosen. The next year's prize went to dissident Soviet novelist Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. A surprising winner from 1993 was Charles Colson, convicted Watergate felon, who founded the Prison Fellowship, an organization that seeks to use the teachings of Christ to help the rehabilitation of prisoners.

The prize does not reflect a particular branch of religion. Christians have won the award and have also been on the judging committee, but so have Hindus, Jews, Buddhists and Muslims.

Not everyone has applauded his attempt to bring science and religion together. Noted atheist Richard Dawkins dismissed the Templeton Prize as "a very large sum of money given, usually to a scientist who is prepared to say something nice about religion."

"It's a good investment," he said. "Most other investments have risk factors, but in my judgment, this is a sure thing."

He died at 12:20 a.m. after being admitted about a week ago to Doctors Hospital in Nassau, said John Templeton Foundation spokeswoman Pamela Thompson.

16 Maxims of Investment Success

Sir John Templeton, founder of the Templeton organization, has distilled his years of experience and expertise into the 16 Rules for investment success.

1. If you begin with a prayer, you can think more clearly and make fewer mistakes.

2. Outperforming the market is a difficult task. The challenge is not simply making better investment decisions than the average investor. The real challenge is making investment decisions that are better than those of the professionals who manage the big institutions.

3. Invest - don’t trade or speculate. The stock market is not a casino, but if you move in or out of stocks every time they move a point or two, the market will be your casino. And you may lose eventually - or frequently.

4. Buy value, not market trends or the economic outlook. Ultimately, it is the individual stocks that determine the market, not vice versa. Individual stocks can rise in a bear market and fall in a bull market. So buy individual stocks, not the market trend or economic outlook.

5. When buying stocks, search for bargains among quality stocks. Determining quality in a stock is like reviewing a restaurant. You don’t expect it to be 100% perfect, but before it gets three or four stars you want it to be superior.

6. Buy low. So simple in concept. So difficult in execution. When prices are high, a lot of investors are buying a lot of stocks. Prices are low when demand is low. Investors have pulled back, people are discouraged and pessimistic. But if you buy the same securities everyone else is buying, you will have the same results as everyone else. By definition, you cannot outperform the market.

7. There’s no free lunch. Never invest on sentiment. Never invest solely on a tip. You would be surprised how many investors do exactly this. Unfortunately there is something compelling about a tip. Its very nature suggests inside information, a way to turn a fast profit.

8. Do your homework or hire wise experts to help you. People will tell you: Investigate before you invest. Listen to them. Study companies to learn what makes them successful.

9. Diversify - by company, by industry. In stocks and bonds, there is safety in numbers. No matter how careful you are, you can neither predict nor control the future. So you must diversify.

10. Invest for maximum total real return. This means the return after inflation. This is the only rational objective for most long-term investors.

11. Learn from your mistakes. The only way to avoid mistakes is not to invest - which is the biggest mistake of all. So forgive yourself for your errors and certainly don’t try to recoup your losses by taking bigger risks. Instead, turn each mistake into a learning experience.

12. Aggressively monitor your investments. Remember, no investment is forever. Expect and react to change. And there are no stocks that you can buy and forget. Being relaxed doesn’t mean being complacent.

13. An investor who has all the answers doesn’t even understand all the questions. A cocksure approach to investing will lead, probably sooner than later, to disappointment if not outright disaster. The wise investor recognizes that success is a process of continually seeking answers to new questions.

14. Remain flexible and open-minded about types of investment. There are times to buy blue-chip stocks, cyclical stocks, convertible bonds, and there are times to sit on cash. The fact is there is no one kind of investment that is always best.

15. Don’t panic Sometimes you won’t have sold when everyone else is selling, and you will be caught in a market crash. Don’t rush to sell the next day. Instead, study your portfolio. If you cannot find more attractive stocks, hold on to what you have.

16. Don’t be fearful or negative too often. There will, of course, be corrections, perhaps even crashes. But over time our studies indicate, stocks do go up?and up. In this century or the next, it’s “Buy low, sell high.”

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