John Templeton Quotes

Our mandate is to find the 200 best companies in the world and invest in them, and find the 200 worst companies in the world and go short on them. If the 200 best don't do better than the 200 worst, you should probably be in another business.

Making an investment decision is like formulating a scientific hypothesis and submitting it to a practical test.

Zeroing in on the best sectors or the best regions of the world is great, but zeroing in on the very best individual stocks is the key to making truly impressive profits.

The ability to select stocks, manage them over time and know when to sell them is incredibly difficult, even for professional fund managers.

The real key to making money in stocks is not to get scared out of them.

You'll get nowhere buying stocks just because they have a great story.

It's easy to buy. Prove that you bought at the right time and the right price.

As a professional, you can afford to pick some stocks and be wrong about a few of them. To keep your job, you cannot take the risk of being seen to be wrong about the 'big picture' for very long.

I've always loved to play games, and face it: investing is one big game. You need to be decisive, open-minded, flexible and competitive.

I grade my stocks. I'm what they call a quant, one of the geeks of the stock market.

I don't think anybody ever makes any money buying and selling stock. They have to make money by keeping the stock.

When the man who ought to want a stock doesn't want it, why should I want it?

In my business investing, you are buying a stock, and someone else is selling the stock. Right there, that's like a debate. Is the stock going up, or is it going to go down?

Because everybody else was investing in the consumer Internet, I did, too.

I love the Knicks and Rangers, right, but you still have a responsibility to your shareholders. They're not there because they're fans. You don't invest hundreds of millions of dollars in a stock because you're a fan. You do it because you think that the business is going to increase in value, that the stock price is going to go up.

If you buy all the stocks selling at or below two times earnings, you will lose money on half of them because instead of making profits they will actually lose money, but you will only lose a dollar or so a share at most. Then others will be mediocre performers. But the remaining big winners will go up and produce fabulous results and also ensure a good overall result.

I have always believed that a single talented analyst, working very hard, can cover an amazing amount of investment landscape, and this belief remains unchallenged in my mind.

Investing is not as tough as being a top-notch bridge player. All it takes is the ability to see things as they really are.

I think Stockman is an interesting sort of amalgam.

An investment decision in the common stock of a company frequently involves a whole lot of factors interacting ... the one thing that causes the most trouble is when you combine a bunch of these together, you get this lollapalooza effect.

The thing that I have been emphasizing in my own work for the last few years has been the group approach. To try to buy groups of stocks that meet some simple criterion for being undervalued-regardless of the industry and with very little attention to the individual company.

Even defensive portfolios should be changed from time to time, especially if the securities purchased have an apparently excessive advance and can be replaced by issues much more reasonable priced.

The most striking thing about Graham's discussion of how to allocate your assets between stocks and bonds is that he never mentions the word "age".

When people discover they are no good at baseball or hockey, they put away their bats and their skates and they take up amateur golf or stamp collecting or gardening. But when people discover they are no good at picking stocks, they are likely to continue to do it anyway.

You have to keep your priorities straight if you plan to do well in stocks.